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Full-Text Articles in Law

Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter Jan 2022

Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter

Touro Law Review

Law has a distinctive temporal structure—an ontology—that defines it as a social institution. Law knits together past, present, purpose, and projected future into a demand for action. Robert Cover captures this dynamic in his metaphor of law as a bridge to an imagined future. Law’s orientation to the future necessarily poses the question of commitment or complicity. For law can shape the future only when people act to make it real. Cover’s bridge metaphor provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of law’s ontology and the pathologies that arise from its neglect or misuse. A bridge carries us …


Racial Revisionism, Shaun Ossei-Owusu Jan 2021

Racial Revisionism, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

Review of Corey Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).


Ideology, Race, And The Death Penalty: "Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics" In Advocacy Research, Anthony Walsh, Virginia Hatch Jan 2017

Ideology, Race, And The Death Penalty: "Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics" In Advocacy Research, Anthony Walsh, Virginia Hatch

Journal of Ideology

We use the literature on race in death penalty to illustrate the hold that ideology has on researchers and journalists alike when a social issue is charged with emotional content. We note particularly how statistical evidence become misinterpreted in ways that support a particular ideology, either because of innumeracy or because—subconsciously or otherwise—one’s ideology precludes a critical analysis. We note that because white defendants are now proportionately more likely to receive the death penalty and to be executed than black defendants that the argument has shifted from a defendant-based to a victim-based one. We examine studies based on identical data …


A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach To In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Lolita Buckner Inniss Jan 2010

A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach To In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the …


Decline Of Title Vii Disparate Impact: The Role Of The 1991 Civil Rights Act And The Ideologies Of Federal Judges, Michael J. Songer Jan 2005

Decline Of Title Vii Disparate Impact: The Role Of The 1991 Civil Rights Act And The Ideologies Of Federal Judges, Michael J. Songer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This study employs various statistical techniques to test the efficacy of the 1991 Civil Rights Act in moderating the highly restrictive disparate impact regime imposed by Wards Cove, and to evaluate the hypothesis that political ideology should be a more powerful predictor of case outcomes following the 1991 Act. Part I of the paper describes the evolution of disparate impact doctrine from 1971 to the present. Part II analyzes data from randomly selected disparate impact cases brought by African American plaintiffs and finds that the current disparate impact doctrine emanating from the 1991 Civil Rights Act dramatically decreases the likelihood …


Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption Of Slave Families At Court Sales, Thomas D. Russell Jan 1996

Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption Of Slave Families At Court Sales, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This legal history article presents the empirical finding that the risk of family separation at slave auctions was higher at court-ordered and court-supervised sales as compared with private sales of capitalist auctioneers. The article also examines legal and ideological justification for the destruction of slave families. Law served to disguise human agency in the breakup of slave families.

This article builds upon the author’s earlier finding that a majority of slave auctions in South Carolina were conducted by the courts. The data for this article and the previous study were drawn from antebellum primary sources including trial-court records, the salesbooks …


South Carolina's Largest Slave Auctioneering Firm, Thomas D. Russell Jan 1993

South Carolina's Largest Slave Auctioneering Firm, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article presents the original finding that South Carolina's legal system conducted a majority of the state's slave auctions during the antebellum years.Courts conducted slave auctions in several circumstances. Sheriffs sold the property of debtors; and courts also conducted or supervised sales in order to divide estates. Drawing upon extensive empirical analysis of primary sources in various South Carolina archives, this article compares the total number of slaves sold at court-ordered or court-supervised sales with the best empirical estimates for private slave sales - whether at auction or not. The conclusion is that the courts acted as the state's greatest …