Law Commons^™

Pov: Yes, Filling Out The Race Box On Forms Is Tiresome, But Here’S Why It Matters, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Neda Khoshkhoo

Shorter Faculty Works

Filling out your race and ethnicity on a form may feel tiresome, and even uncomfortable. You have been checking these boxes for years, as has everyone else, and the questions may seem irrelevant.

“What does race have to do with my doctor’s appointment?” you might ask. Or a form may be inaccurate: “I’m Middle Eastern, why don’t I get a box to check?” Perhaps it feels intrusive: “How is this information going to be used?” And you may wonder, “Why are we always talking about race?”

The truth is, we need to keep talking about race. Even more than we …

Prior Racist Acts And The Character Evidence Ban In Hate Crime Prosecutions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The killing of unarmed African-American Ahmaud Arbery and others ignited a wave of public outrage and re-focused attention on race and the criminal justice system. During the recent federal hate crimes proceedings for Arbery’s death, the prosecution introduced evidence relating to the alleged past racist acts of the defendants. This type of evidence may be seen as highly probative and desperately needed to do justice in hate crimes cases. On its face, however, such type of evidence appears to be inadmissible owing to the well-known—but little understood— evidentiary ban on character evidence prescribed in Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) and …

Property And Sovereignty In America: A History Of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article tells an untold history of the American title registry—a colonial bureaucratic innovation that, though overlooked and understudied, constitutes one of the most fundamental elements of the U.S. property system today. Prior scholars have focused exclusively on its role in catalyzing property markets, while mostly ignoring their main sources in the colonies -- expropriated lands and enslaved people. This analysis centers the institution’s work of organizing and “proving” claims that were not only individual but collective, to affirm encroachments on tribal nations’ lands and scaffold colonies’ tenuous but growing political, jurisdictional power. In other words, American property and property …

Law School News: Roger Williams University School Of Law Withdraws From Us News Rankings 1-17-2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Character Evidence As A Conduit For Implicit Bias, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Federal Rules of Evidence purport to prohibit character evidence, or evidence regarding a defendant’s past bad acts or propensities offered to suggest that the defendant acted in accordance with a certain character trait on the occasion in question. However, courts regularly admit character evidence through an expanding set of legislative and judicial exceptions that have all but swallowed the rule. In the usual narrative, character evidence is problematic because jurors place excessive weight on it or punish the defendant for past behavior. Lawmakers rely on this narrative when they create exceptions. However, this account arguably misses a highly troublesome …

Religious Convictions, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Anglo-American jury emerged at a time when legal and religious conceptions of justice were entwined. Today, however, though the American public remains comparatively religious, the country’s legal system draws a distinction between legal and religious modes of determining culpability and passing judgment. This Article examines the doctrine that governs the place of religious belief and practice in U.S. jury selection proceedings. It argues that the discretion afforded to judges with respect to applying the Batson antidiscrimination doctrine has given these beliefs and practices an ambiguous status. On the one hand, judges aim to protect prospective religious jurors from discrimination. …

Abandoning Animus, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay presents a preliminary set of arguments against the legal concept of animus grounded in actual practice. After considering the major reasons advanced in support of the animus approach as well as the main objections, I argue that the end of animus may come once we confront the limits of judicial capacity. First, judges have not been willing or able to resort to the animus rationale to call out bigotry where the evidence of hostility is robust. These failures suggest that projects founded upon judicial review to reduce hateful motivations may be overly optimistic. Second, on the occasions the …

Understanding An American Paradox: An Overview Of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Spearit

Articles

In The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Sahar Aziz unveils a mechanism that perpetuates the persecution of religion. While the book’s title suggests a problem that engulfs Muslims, it is not a new problem, but instead a recurring theme in American history. Aziz constructs a model that demonstrates how racialization of a religious group imposes racial characteristics on that group, imbuing it with racial stereotypes that effectively treat the group as a racial rather than religious group deserving of religious liberty.

In identifying a racialization process that effectively veils religious discrimination, Aziz’s book points to several important …

Understanding An American Paradox: An Overview Of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Spearit

Articles

In The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Sahar Aziz unveils a mechanism that perpetuates the persecution of religion. While the book’s title suggests a problem that engulfs Muslims, it is not a new problem, but instead a recurring theme in American history. Aziz constructs a model that demonstrates how racialization of a religious group imposes racial characteristics on that group, imbuing it with racial stereotypes that effectively treat the group as a racial rather than religious group deserving of religious liberty. In identifying a racialization process that effectively veils religious discrimination, Aziz’s book points to several important …

Law School News: From Classroom To Courtroom 11-10-2022, Michelle Choate

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Justice For All: Demanding Accessibility For Underrepresented Communities In The Law: A Roger Williams University Law Review, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Two Approaches To Equality, With Implications For Grutter, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The question “what is equality?”, applied to the distribution of resources across races, suggests the following answer: when there appears to be no need for a policy that focuses on improving the welfare of one race relative to another. There is another way to approach the same question: equality is when traditionally-recognized paths to advancement do not give preference to or disadvantage an individual because of his race. Notice the difference here is between end-state and process-based notions of equality, a distinction Nozick emphasized in his examination of justice in distribution. Nozick rejected end-state theories of justice in distribution. I …

Law School News: Should Prison Be Abolished? 10-6-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Colorblind Capture, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

We are facing two converging waves of racial retrenchment. The first, which arose following the Civil Rights Movement, is nearing a legal milestone. This term or the next, the Supreme Court will prohibit affirmative action in higher education. When it does, the Court will cement decades of conservative jurisprudence that has systematically eroded the right to remedy racial inequality.

The second wave is more recent but no less significant. Following 2020’s global uprising for racial justice, rightwing forces launched a coordinated assault on antiracism itself. The campaign has enjoyed early success. As one measure, GOP officials have passed, proposed or …

Bristol And Newport And The Transatlantic Slave Trade 09-01-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

'The Stop Woke Act': Hb 7, Race, And Florida's 21st Century Anti-Literacy Campaign, Katheryn Russell-Brown

UF Law Faculty Publications

Florida’s Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop WOKE) took effect July 1, 2022. The new law, known as House Bill 7 (HB 7), regulates how race issues can be taught in the K-20 educational system and imposes stiff sanctions for violations. This Article provides an incisive analysis of HB 7, with a particular focus on the law school classroom. It begins with a discussion of anti-literacy laws adopted during slavery and how these laws prohibited enslaved Blacks from learning to read and write. The historical analysis establishes that HB 7 is a modern-day iteration of anti-literacy …

Pov: As A Nation, Where Are We Now On Gun Policy?, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Last month, the federal government passed the first gun safety legislation in decades, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, while at the same time, the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to carry guns in public. It is important then to assess where this country finds itself with regard to gun policy after these two seemingly contrasting and momentous events.

The Crt Of Black Lives Matter, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Critical Race Theory ("CR T"), or at least its principles, stands at the core of most prominent social movements of today-from the resurgence of the #MeToo Movement, which was founded by a Black woman, Tarana Burke, to the Black Lives Matter Movement, which was founded by three Black women: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors. In fact, Critical Race Theorists have long defined CRT itself as a movement, one that has not only provided theoretical interventions regarding the relationship between race, racism, power, and the law, but that has also encouraged and, in fact, inspired and guided social movements. …

The Black-White Paradigm’S Continuing Erasure Of Latinas: See Women Law Deans Of Color, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

The Black-white paradigm persists with unintended consequences. For example, there have been only six Latina law deans to date with only four presently serving. This Article provides data about women law deans of color, the dearth of Latina law deans, and explanations for the data. It focuses on the enduring Black-white paradigm, as well as other external and internal forces. This Article suggests how to increase the number of Latina law deans and emphasizes why it matters.

Color Of Creatorship - Author's Response, Anjali Vats

Articles

This essay is the author's response to three reviews of The Color of Creatorship written by notable intellectual property scholars and published in the IP Law Book Review.

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

The Pathological Whiteness Of Prosecution, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Criminal law scholarship suffers from a Whiteness problem. While scholars appear to be increasingly concerned with the racial disparities within the criminal legal system, the scholarship’s focus tends to be on the marginalized communities and the various discriminatory outcomes they experience as a result of the system. Scholars frequently mention racial bias in the criminal legal system and mass incarceration, the lexical descendent of overcriminalization. However, the scholarship often fails to consider the roles Whiteness and White supremacy play as the underlying logics and norms driving much of the bias in the system.

This Article examines the ways that Whiteness …

Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 2 - Why Are There So Few Black Financial Regulators?, Chris Brummer

Penn Program on Regulation Podcasts

For generations, regardless of which party has controlled the White House, Black leaders have been virtually absent across the federal government’s financial regulatory bodies—a state of affairs that has severely limited the representation of Black communities and their interests in financial policy decisions in the United States. Chris Brummer of Georgetown Law discusses why longstanding racial disparities in financial regulatory leadership continue even today—and what changes might be required to overcome them.

Law School News: Welcome, Professor Bernard Freamon 04-20-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Although many have written about racial and gender underrepresentation in STEM, no author has ever endeavored to simultaneously quantify the racial and gender gap at universities in the …

Hip Hop And The Law : Presented By Intellectual Property Law Association 03/31/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz

Law & Economics Working Papers

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgements paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those …

Who’S Afraid Of Bob Jones?: 'Fundamental National Public Policy' And Critical Race Theory In A Delicate Democracy, Lynn D. Lu

Publications and Research

In Summer of 2021, Republican legislators across the United States introduced a host of bills to prohibit government funding for schools or agencies that teach critical race theory (“CRT”), described by the American Association of Law Schools not as a single doctrine but a set of “frameworks” to “explain and illustrate how structural racism produces racial inequity within our social, economic, political, legal, and educational systems[,] even absent individual racist intent.” Characterizing such an explicitly race-conscious analysis of legal and social institutions as “divisive,” opponents of CRT, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, labeled it “nothing short of state-sponsored …