Law Commons^™

Gen Y More Black Corporate Directors, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Corporate diversity has been in the spotlight for decades. Recent efforts have followed years of legal scholarship, arguments on the business rationale for greater diversity, and more recently, the racial unrest during the summer of 2020. Called by some, a “racial reckoning,” the summer of 2020 catalyzed many corporate declarations on the importance of diversity, and more to the point of this article, the necessity of righting the economic disadvantages of Black Americans. This article looks specifically at one intervention by a corporate player following summer 2020, Nasdaq’s volley to increase corporate diversity through required disclosure. This article reviews the …

Tort Liability For Physical Harm To Police Arising From Protest: Common-Law Principles For A Politicized World, Ellen M. Bublick, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

When police officers bring tort suits for physical harms suffered during protest, courts must navigate two critically important sets of values—on the one hand, protesters’ rights to free speech and assembly, and on the other, the value of officers’ lives, health, and rights of redress. This year courts, including the United States Supreme Court, must decide who, if anyone, can be held accountable for severe physical harms suffered by police called upon to respond to protest. Two highly visible cases well illustrate the trend. In one, United States Capitol Police officers were injured on January 6, 2021, during organized attempts …

First Amendment Protections For “Good Trouble”, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the classical era of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, activists and protestors sought to march, demonstrate, stage sit-ins, speak up, and denounce the system of racial oppression in our country. This was met not just by counterspeech—the preferred response within our constitutional framework—but also by efforts by the dominant power structure to censor and shut down those forms of public rebuke of our nation’s racist practices. Fast forward seventy years, and the tactics of the dominant power structure have essentially remained the same in response to today’s civil rights activists who seek to protest …

What Is Scholarly Legal Writing? An Introduction To Different Perspectives (On Us Qualified Immunity Doctrine), Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

How do you write a law article? It turns out there is no one ‘right way’. Legal problems can be analysed from different angles. Law journals are full of diverse perspectives on the law.

This document provides an introduction to the different types of legal scholarship that can be found in law journals. It illustrates using scholarship on the American judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields government officials from legal liability for ‘constitutional torts’. Qualified immunity can be analysed from the perspective of doctrine, policy, comparative law, history, economics, empirics, sociology, and philosophy. One issue; many perspectives.

The Everyday First Amendment, Leonard M. Niehoff, Thomas Sullivan

Articles

On June 26 and June 27, 2019, some twenty contenders for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States participated in two evenings of political debate. The outsized group included Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who was struggling to gain traction with voters. Shortly after the debate, while many viewers were conducting online searches to learn more about the candidates, Google temporarily suspended her campaign’s advertising account.

Google claimed that the interruption occurred because an automated system flagged unusual activity on the account. But Gabbard did not accept this explanation; she believed that Google deliberately had tried to undermine …

'Who' Or 'What' Is The Rule Of Law?, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

The standard account of the relation between democracy and the rule of law focuses on law’s liberty-enhancing role in constraining official action. This is a faint echo of the complex, constitutive relation between the two. The Greeks used one word – isonomia – to describe both. If democracy is the system in which people have an equal say in determining the rules that govern social life, then the rule of law is simultaneously before, after, concurrent and synonymous with democracy: It contributes to the formation of citizens with the capacity for self-governance, serves as the instrument through which democratic decisions …

Profiting From Our Pain: Privileged Access To Social Impact Investing, Cary Martin Shelby

Scholarly Articles

Social impacting investing has become the latest trend to permeate the financial markets. With massive anticipated funding gaps for sustainable development goals, and a millennial-driven thirst for doing good while doing well, this trend is likely to continue in the coming decades. This burgeoning industry is poised to experience yet an additional boost, since it provides an alternative mechanism for private actors to “profit from our pain,” particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

As to be expected, the law has not sufficiently adapted to this new wave of innovation. Scholars have thus …

Experimental Meets Intersectional: Visionary Black Feminist Pragmatism And Practicing Constitutional Democracy, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

That pragmatism can do-and already is doing-real work to repair and improve constitutional democracy in the United States is a conviction voiced in the academy, in social movements, and in social media. But what does pragmatism mean, as used in these contexts? Sometimes, pragmatism seems to connote simply being practical (rather than idealistic) and focusing on results. But sometimes, commentators are saying more: pragmatism as a distinctive political philosophy has the power to fuel meaningful democratic change. This Article focuses on the creative and productive melding of classical American pragmatism (as exemplified by John Dewey and others) with feminism. In …

Toward A Law And Politics Of Racial Solidarity, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others have occurred under different factual circumstances, in different states, at the hands of both state and private actors, and have engendered different levels of outrage on the basis of their perceived egregiousness. Collectively and cumulatively, they have forced Americans to, once again, wrestle with the visible manifestation of racism and structural inequality. This confrontation is not simply a function of the inability to avert one’s eyes when faced with incontrovertible evidence of evident inhumanity and abject degradation, though it is in part that. After all, how to justify the …

Inclusivity In Admissions And Retention Of Diverse Students: Leadership Determines Dei Success, Danielle M. Conway, Bekah Saidman-Krauss, Rebecca Schreiber

Faculty Scholarly Works

Penn State Dickinson Law has been leading with an Antiracist admissions philosophy and corresponding plans for implementation before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Arguably, this approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)was not identified explicitly as a vision priority for the law school until July 2019, when Dickinson Law welcomed Danielle M. Conway as the first Black Dean and first woman Dean in the law school’s 186-year history. Dean Conway outlined four vision priorities to accomplish within her first five years at Dickinson Law. Vision priority number two calls upon the law school’s administrators to move the needle substantially on …

The Fourth Amendment’S Forgotten Free-Speech Dimensions, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Inequality, Covid-19, And International Human Rights: Whose Lives Matter?, Barbara J. Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Part 1 of the article shows that the poor, everywhere, are more likely to get sick and more likely to die when they do. In many countries, they are also more likely to starve.

Part II explains why this is a matter of human rights. The ongoing deprivation of basic rights to healthcare and an adequate standard of living are major factors. As this Part demonstrates, however, the extreme vulnerability of the poor is grounded in earlier violations of human rights, including state-sanctioned segregation in the American south in the 1950s and what one author has called “the darker side …

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Publications

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …

Undefeated - Era And Blm Fold-Out Circles Exhibit Panels, Sally Brown

Undefeated Exhibit Panels

undefeated - ERA and BLM Fold-out Circles posters

Equal RIghts Amendment and Black Lives Matter descriptions

How Law Libraries Can Help Tell The Black Lives Matter Movement’S Story, Ronald E. Wheeler, Phebe Huderson-Poydras

Faculty Scholarship

In Voices Across the Spectrum, our goal is to explore issues, perspectives, and resources that focus on promoting diversity, equality, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, multicultural outreach and recruitment into the profession, inclusive workplaces, and more. While the first installments of this new column will focus on systemic racism issues, each column will examine different diversity and inclusion issues to help prompt conversations and break down silos within the profession.

An Introduction To The Collection [Get In Good Trouble: A Collection Of Essays By Millennial Law Scholars], Verónica Gonzales-Zamora

Faculty Scholarship

Get in Good Trouble: A Collection of Essays by Millennial Law Scholars Introduction by Verónica C. Gonzales-Zamora with essays by Kinda Abdus-Saboor, Ernestine Chaco, Marcus Gadson, Verónica Gonzales-Zamora, Camilo Romero, Lysette Romero Córdova, Morenike Saula, Joseph Schremmer, and Hon. Roshanna Toya. Afterword by Marcus Gadson. In response to the global pandemic, legal education in the United States shifted almost immediately to new tools and methods of delivery. Unsure of the lasting impact of these shifts, law faculty and law students around the country remain in limbo preparing for different scenarios when instruction resumes. Millennial law professors and scholars, with decades …

Damnatio Memoriae And Black Lives Matter, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

Police brutality and killings of Black Americans have recently sparked nationwide protests. Among the many expressions of anger and indignation, one stands out as a unique feature of this wave of the social movement: public scrutiny of civic symbols. Protestors have defaced, torn down, and called for the removal of monuments that represent our country’s racist past, as well as structural racial injustice today. Protestors toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland and spray-painted on it the label “Genocidal Colonist,” while statues of Christopher Columbus were found beheaded in Boston, yanked from a pedestal in St. Paul, and tossed …

Race As A Carceral Terrain: Black Lives Matter Meets Reentry, Jason Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the United States, racialized people are disproportionately selected for punishment. Examining punishment discourses intersectionally unearths profound, unequal distinctions when controlling for the variety of victims’ identities within the punishment regime. For example, trans women of color are likely to face the harshest of realities when confronted with the prospect of punishment. However, missing from much of the academic carceral literature is a critical perspective situated in racialized epistemic frameworks. If racialized individuals are more likely to be affected by punishment systems, then, certainly, they are the foremost experts on what those realities are like. The Black Lives Matter hashtag …

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Innes, Bridget J. Crawford, Mehrsa Baradaran, Bennett Capers, Osamudia R. James, Keisha Lindsay

Articles

No abstract provided.

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Bridget J. Crawford, Mehrsa Baradaran, Noa Ben-Asher, I. Bennett Capers, Osamudia R. James, Keisha Lindsay

Publications

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, …

Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner

Scholarly Works

Counter narrative, a story that calls attention to and rebuts the presumptions of a dominant narrative framework, functions as an essential tool to reshape the bounds of the law. It has the potential to shape the collective notion of what constitutes legal authority. Black Lives Matter offers a counter narrative that challenges the characterization of the shared public space, among other aspects of contemporary society, as the space of law. Using the concept of necropower--the mobilization and prioritization of the state's power to kill--I analyze the contested physical and conceptual space of law exposed by the counter narrative of Black …

Critical Black Protectionism, Black Lives Matter, And Social Media: Building A Bridge To Social Justice, Katheryn Russell-Brown

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article provides a detailed, contemporary examination and critique of the practice of Black protectionism. The discussion focuses on how Black protectionism has evolved over the decades, and whether the changes make it a more useful tool for community empowerment than its applications in previous eras. Its latest iteration, herein labeled Critical Black Protectionism, is assessed and evaluated in light of the increasing use of social media.This Article is divided into five parts. Part I provides an overview of Black protectionism, its roots and evolution. As well, this Part examines how African Americans have used protectionism. Part II sets out …

Rules For Digital Radicals, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Ending-Life Decisions: Some Disability Perspectives, Mary Crossley

Articles

In the forty years since Quinlan, disability has been present in the conversation within medicine, bioethics, and law about the acceptability of death-hastening medical decisions, but it has at times been viewed as an interloper, an uninvited guest to the party, or perhaps the guest whom the host was obliged to invite, but whose presence was not entirely welcomed. Notwithstanding some short-term reversals and counter-currents, the steady arc of end-of-life law during the past four decades has been towards liberalization of ending-life choices by and for patients who are severely compromised or near the end of their lives. During …

Race And Reform In Twenty-First Century America: Foreword, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Trina Jones, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2015, approximately two hundred activists, academics, and students from across the United States convened at Duke University School of Law for a conference entitled The Present and Future of Civil Rights Movements: Race and Reform in 21st Century America. Planning for the conference had commenced a year earlier, in the fall of 2014. At that time, the nation was reeling from the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, and Michael Brown, among others. In addition to the killing of these unarmed Black men and women by law enforcement personnel, many people, particularly within the civil …

Black Contemporary Social Movements, Resource Mobilization, And Black Musical Activism, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

In the last few years a grassroots social movement has emerged from the Black community. This movement aims to eliminate police and vigilante violence against Blacks nationwide. Blacks in America have long been subjected to this violence, and the issue has recently captured the country’s attention. Multiple groups are pressing for change, including Ferguson Action, Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and the leaderless social media effort organized by DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, to name a few. These fledgling activist groups have already experienced some success, garnering public attention and government response. As it currently stands, this nascent civil-rights …

How The Black Lives Matter Movement Can Improve The Justice System, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This op-ed piece argues that because the criminal justice system's loss of moral credibility contributes to increased criminality and because blacks are disproportionately the victims of crimes, especially violent crimes, the most valuable contribution that the Black Lives Matter movement can make is not to tear down the system’s reputation but rather to propose and support reforms that will build it up, thereby improving its crime-control effectiveness and reducing black victimization.

Facing The Ghost Of Cruikshank In Constitutional Law, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

For a symposium on Teaching Ferguson, this essay considers how the standard introductory constitutional law course evades the history of legal struggle against institutionalized anti-black violence. The traditional course emphasizes the drama of anti-majoritarian judicial expansion of substantive rights. Looming over the doctrines of equal protection and due process, the ghost of Lochner warns of dangers of judicial leadership in substantive constitutional change. This standard narrative tends to lower expectations for constitutional justice, emphasizing the virtues of judicial modesty and formalism.

By supplementing the ghost of Lochner with the ghost of comparably infamous and influential case, United States v. Cruikshank …

Our Uneasiness With Police Unions: Power And Voice For The Powerful?, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

The police shooting of Michael Brown, and the other recent police shootings of black men and boys, gave rise to many important discussions about race, inequality, power, and policing. But one issue not as widely discussed was the the role and propriety of police unions. This Essay describes the history and uniqueness of public sector unions, such as police unions, and why they are both useful and problematic.

This Essay describes ways police unions might be used to help solve the current problems, such as helping to connect officers with the community. The Federal and State governments have provided recommendations …