Law Commons^™

Cracking The Egg: Which Came First—Stigma Or Affirmative Action?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Emily Houh, Mary Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the strength of arguments concerning the causal connection between racial stigma and affirmative action. In so doing, this article reports and analyzes the results of a survey on internal stigma (feelings of dependency, inadequacy, or guilt) and external stigma (the burden of others' resentment or doubt about one's qualifications) for the Class of 2009 at seven public law schools, four of which employed race-based affirmative action policies when the Class of 2009 was admitted and three of which did not use such policies at that time. Specifically, this Article examines and presents survey findings of 1) minimal, …

Pushing Weight, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

The plight of the black athlete in United States professional and collegiate sports reflects a historical road burdened by strident discrimination, yielding assimilation and gleeful exploitation. As African American athletes began to be permitted to enter the lineups of storied professional sports clubs beginning in the 1950s, they did so only on the strict conditions placed upon them by the status quo white male dominated regime. Often the very terms of black athlete participation required a rigid commitment to - covering - racial identity and outright suppression of self. Once African American athletes burst onto the nation's consciousness in the …

Race In Ordinary Course: Utilizing The Racial Background In Antitrust And Corporate Law Courses, Alfred Dennis Mathewson

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the discourses in law school classes in which non-white students are in classes with white students. While I stake a position distinct from critical race theorists, I do not analyze critical race theory or the large body of scholarship pertaining thereto in this article. I limit my discussion to my use of race in teaching traditional law school subjects, specifically antitrust and corporate law. I present this article in two parts. In Part I, I describe the challenges of using critical race theory to introduce discussions of race in traditional law school subjects. Race is interjected …

Are Blue And Pink The New Brown? The Permissibility Of Sex-Segregated Education As Affirmative Action, Dawinder S. Sidhu

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines segregation and affirmative action in a different context-that of gender. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 ("Title IX") l° prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. The regulations implementing Title IX, however, explicitly permit recipients of federal funding to offer single-sex schools, classes, and extracurricular activities. The regulations also permit recipients to "take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.” This Article discusses whether and to what extent the affirmative action provision …

Brief For Respondent Iqubal As Amicus Curiae, Dawinder S. Sidhu, Brian E. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

Whether a conclusory allegation that a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official knew of, condoned, or agreed to subject a plaintiff to allegedly unconstitutional acts purportedly committed by subordinate officials is sufficient to state individual-capacity claims against those officials under Bivens.

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude—slavery in the mid-seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry—English; her …

Symposium On Pursuing Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Jeffrey Fagan, Mukul A. Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to …

Punishment, Deterrence And Social Control: The Paradox Of Punishment In Minority Communities, Jeffery Fagan, Tracey L. Meares

Faculty Scholarship

Since the early 1970s, the number of individuals in jails and state and federal prisons has grown exponentially. Today, nearly two million people are currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails. The growth of imprisonment has been borne disproportionately by. African-American and Hispanic men from poor communities in urban areas. Rising.incarceration should have greatly reduced the crime rate. After all, incapacitated offenders were no longer free to rob, assault, steal, or commit other crimes. However, no large-scale reduction in crime was detected until the mid-1990s. The failure of crime rates to decline commensurately with increases in the …

Uniendo Comunidades By Learning Lessons And Mobilizing For Change, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Building community, that is, sustaining our connections to family and our ancestry is often hampered by going to law school. Law schools are highly adept at assimilating you into a profession and a worldview that can be at odds with who you were and how you saw the world before you began law school. Unfortunately, in order to fit in, it can seem advantageous to forget tus ralces, your roots. I began by talking about unigndo comunidades as a progressive objective and have been talking about the second part of your conference theme, learning lessons and mobilizing for change, as …

Latinas/Os' And The Politics Of Knowledge Production: Latcrit Scholarship And Academic Activism As Social Justice Action, Margaret E. Montoya, Francisco Valdes

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professors Montoya and Valdes examine various ways of developing Latina/o legal studies in the United States. As background, they first outline and examine the three main models of knowledge-production established within legal academia during the past century or so: 1) the traditional or imperial model; 2) the safe-space or vanguard model, and; 3) the big-tent or democratic model. Using this historical template to contextualize current efforts in Latina/o legal studies both substantively and methodologically, they next review the record of LatCrit theorists over the past dozen years. With this analytical framework in place, they situate the LatCrit …

Leading Change In Legal Education - Educating Lawyers And Best Practices: Good News For Diversity, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Culturally Effective Legal Interviewing And Counseling For The Mexican Immigrant - A Case Study, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making And Breaking Habits: Teaching (And Learning) Cultural Context, Self-Awareness, And Intercultural Communication Through Case Supervision In A Client-Service Legal Clinic, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

This Article begins by offering teaching objectives that can be used to focus supervision and education on effective representation of clients from different cultures as issues arise in the course of representation. The Article then discusses the context of student supervision and explains how case supervision sessions can be extremely effective moments during which to pursue those teaching goals. The Article next examines vignettes that grew out of cases handled by the University of New Mexico's Clinical Law Program.

The Sikh Turban: Post-9/11 Challenges To This Article Of Faith, Dawinder S. Sidhu, Hena Singh Gohil

Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines how the turban has transformed from a sacred piece of attire for Sikhs to a target for discriminatory conduct and an object of marginalization after 9/11. Part I provides an introduction to Sikhism, which originated in 17th century South Asia, and discusses the religious significance of the Sikh turban. Part II examines incidents of discrimination in several contexts involving turbaned Sikhs in America. Part III analyzes the debate surrounding assimilation that has been taking place in the West, which implicates conspicuous articles of faith, including the Sikh turban. The essay also explores the legal remedies available to …

Longing For Loving, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Our task in this Symposium is to place Loving v. Virginia in a contemporary context: to interpret, if not reinterpret, its meaning in light of the settings in which race, sexuality, and intimacy are being negotiated and renegotiated today. So we might ask, in what way are Mildred and Richard Loving role models for us today? How, if at all, does the legal movement for marriage equality for interracial couples help us think through our arguments and strategies as we struggle today for marriage equality for same-sex couples?

One way to frame these questions is to ask whether there is …