Law Commons^™

Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The past 30 years have witnessed a dramatic divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. This article reviews the data on these trends, explores their significance, and assesses social scientists’ recent attempts to explain them. The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children’s life prospects for decades to …

The First (Black) Lady, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Part I examines the role of First Lady, which has been undertheorized in legal scholarship, and how it promotes privileged white femininity, and in so doing, upholds patriarchy. Part II builds upon that discussion, explaining that the gender and racial norms that contribute to the traditional First Lady trope exemplify the intertwined nature of racism and sexism, which have been used to justify Black subordination. This section also examines how African Americans have embraced gender conformance as a way of attaining acceptance and status within the existing social order, specifically through the "Black lady" construct, which the campaign invoked to …

The Heart Of The Game: Putting Race And Educational Equity At The Center Of Title Ix, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article examines how race and educational equity issues shape women's sports experiences.

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

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

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 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, if any, …

(E)Racing Jennifer Harris: Sexuality And Race, Law And Discourse In Harris V. Portland, Kristine E. Newhall, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

In 2007 Penn State basketball coach Rene Portland retired shortly after a confidential settlement ended a discrimination lawsuit brought by former player Jennifer Harris against Portland and Penn State. Because of Portland's infamous policy of not allowing lesbians on her team, her departure was celebrated as a victory against homophobia in sports. Yet although Harris's claims of sexual orientation discrimination were validated in the media, her allegations of racial discrimination were ignored or dismissed as implausible. In this Article, the authors examine the omission of race from the discourse surrounding this case and suggest that both legal and cultural factors …

A Prescription For Racial Equality In Medicine, Barbara A. Noah

Faculty Scholarship

A significant body of evidence suggests that minority race adversely affects the quantity and quality of health care provided to minority patients. Although no one has documented systemic overt racism among health care providers, persistent inequities in the delivery of health care services pose serious problems for patients of color. Ultimately, the medical establishment must confront the reality that African Americans and other racial minorities often do not receive equal treatment in the health care system.

The continued implementation of affirmative action programs as part of the medical school admissions process plays a key role in improving health care delivery …

To Kill A Mockingbird Perspectives, Sherrilyn A. Ifill

Faculty Scholarship

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history. It tells the story of a small-town white lawyer who is appointed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is one of the great legal heroes of American fiction. The story, told from the perspective of Atticus' daughter Scout, explores race, class, gender, family and law. Most of all it is a both critical and loving account of the white South. This article is a personal story about the influence of …

Capitalism And The Tax System: A Search For Social Justice, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

America is a country founded on ideas. The Enlightenment was one set of ideas that attended our birth and one Enlightenment belief as strong today as during the revolution is our faith in capitalism and the protection of private property. Yet, the United States tax system manages to violate fundamental capitalist principles as outlined in the extensive writings of Adam Smith - the father of capitalism. Comparing Smith's vision to the current United States tax system reveals many important inconsistencies, particularly the current penchant for simultaneously taxing wages while exempting (or delaying) taxes on wealth and wealth appreciation. The article …

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

Simply Put: How Diversity Benefits Whites And How Whites Can Simply Benefit Diversity, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Although there are surmountable legal barriers to racial integration in education, fuller integration is possible. But first, whites must see how they benefit from diversity, and, second, whites must take simple steps toward integration that may, in turn, reveal to whites their desire to become more fully integrated. These two steps may help remove the limiting point to true integration.

Book Review, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE is an excellently written, fictionalized account of the lives of several people set in the fifties as a rural Mississippi community reacts to impending school racial desegregation and the killing of a fifteen year old black boy who had the misfortune of speaking French in the direction of a white woman. I’ve used this book to facilitate discussion on issues of race, gender, the law, class, and politics in several of my law school classes such as Race and the Law, Gender and the Law, and Civil Rights.

The Heart Of The Game: Putting Race And Educational Equity At The Center Of Title Ix, Deborah L. Brake, Verna L. Williams

Articles

This article examines how race and educational equity issues shape women's sports experiences, building upon the narrative of Darnellia Russell, a high school basketball player profiled in the documentary The Heart of the Game. Darnellia is a star player who, because of an unintended pregnancy, has to fight to play the game she loves.

This girl's story provides a unique and underutilized lens through which to examine gender and athletics, as well as evaluate the legal framework for gender equality in sport. In focusing on this narrative, we seek to give voice to black female athletes and to express their …

The Meaning Of Race In The Dna Era: Science, History And The Law, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The meaning of “race” has changed dramatically over time. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, moral and physical values to perceived physical differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-white persons. Nazi Germany applied these understandings of race in a manner which shocked the world, and following World War II the concept of race increasingly came to be …

Tax Equity, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Simply put, this article stands the traditional concept of tax equity on its head. Challenging the notion that tax equity is an unequivocal good, this article deconstructs the concept of tax equity to reveal the subtle, yet pernicious ways in which it shapes tax policy debates and impinges upon contributions to those debates. The article describes how tax equity, with its narrow focus on income - as the sole relevant metric for judging tax fairness, presupposes a population that is homogeneous along all other lines. Through this insidious homogenization, tax equity performs both a sanitizing and a screening function in …

Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.

In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …

Beyond Analogy: Perez V. Sharp, Antimiscegenation Law, And The Fight For Same-Sex Marriage, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

Conversations about the constitutionality of prohibitions on marriage for same-sex couples invariably reduce to the question of whether a meaningful analogy can be drawn between restrictions on same-sex marriage and antimiscegenation laws. In an effort to refocus this debate, this article considers the California Supreme Court's 1948 decision in Perez v. Sharp and its use by advocates in recent litigation to secure marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. Opponents of marriage rights for members of the LGBT *840 community frequently assert that dispatching Perez in these cases distorts the meaning of that decision and other similar precedents by drawing …

Public Rights, Social Equality, And The Conceptual Roots Of The Plessy Challenge, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This Article argues that the test case that gave rise to the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson is best understood as part of a wellestablished, cosmopolitan tradition of anticaste activism in Louisiana rather than as a quixotic effort that contradicted nineteenth-century ideas of the boundaries of citizens' rights. By drawing a dividing line between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social rights, on the other, the Supreme Court construed challenges to segregation as claims to a "social equality" that was beyond the scope of judicially cognizable rights. The Louisiana constitutional convention of 1867-68, however, had defined …

Demise Of The Talented Tenth: Affirmative Action And The Increasing Underrepresentation Of Ascendant Blacks At Selective Educational Institutions, Kevin D. Brown, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Over the past 30 years America has experienced both a substantial increase in the percentage of blacks multiracial blacks and an unprecedented influx of voluntary immigration of blacks primarily from Africa and the Caribbean. The percentage of foreign-born black immigrants reached 8% of the black population in 2005, and no doubt is higher today. There is evidence that suggests not only that multiracial blacks and foreign-born black immigrants and their sons and daughters constitute a disproportionate percentage of black students in selective higher education programs, but their percentages are larger than most people realize. This article addresses the resulting change …