Law Commons^™

#Blacklivesmatter: From Protest To Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In summer 2020, mass protests spread across the globe challenging police brutality and racial injustice and demanding change. Fueled by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, these protests drew 15 million to 26 million participants in the United States alone to participate in late May and June of 2020. The sheer scale of these protests made them the largest movement in U.S. history. While there has been some consensus that this unprecedented protest movement pushed social awareness and changed the national conversation around race, existing research has yet to clearly …

The Federal Reserve And A Cascade Of Failures: Inequality, Cognitive Narrowness And Financial Network Theory, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent financial crisis hollowed out the core of American middle-class financial stability. In the wake of the financial crisis, household net worth in the U.S. fell by 24%, for a loss of $16 trillion. Moreover, retirement accounts, the largest class of financial assets, took a steep drop in value, as did house prices, and these two classes of assets alone represent approximately 43% of all household wealth. The losses during the principal crisis years, 2007–2009, were devastating, “erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity,” in the words of a 2013 report. By the Federal Reserve. Beyond these direct household …

Antitrust, Competition Policy, And Inequality, Jonathan B. Baker, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …

Black Male Exceptionalism? The Problems And Potential Of Black Male-Focused Interventions, Paul D. Butler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Black male exceptionalism” is the premise that African American men fare more poorly than any other group in the United States. The discourse of Black male exceptionalism presents African American men as an “endangered species.” Some government agencies, foundations, and activists have responded by creating “Black male achievement” programs. There are almost no corresponding “Black female achievement” programs. Yet empirical data does not support the claim that Black males are burdened more than Black females. Without attention to intersectionality, Black male achievement programs risk obscuring Black females and advancing patriarchal values. Black male achievement programs also risk reinforcing stereotypes that …

The Duty Of States To Assist Other States In Need: Ethics, Human Rights, And International Law, Lawrence O. Gostin, Robert Archer

O'Neill Institute Papers

This article deals with a foreign policy question of extraordinary importance: What responsibilities do States have to provide economic and technical assistance to other states that have high levels of need affecting the health and life of their citizens? The question is important for a variety of reasons. There exist massive inequalities in health globally, with the result that poorer countries shoulder a disproportionate burden of disease and premature death. While poor countries have by far the greatest ongoing health needs, they also have the least capacity to meet those needs. In addition to the pervasive and debilitating effects of …

Upending Status: A Comment On Switching, Inequality, And The Idea Of The Reasonable Person, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, by Cynthia Lee (2003).

Cynthia Lee has written a hard-hitting and insightful book on bias and the law of homicide. Her purpose is to document how murder law’s “reasonable person” may absorb the unreason of prejudice in its various forms (from biases of race to gender to sexual orientation). Doctrinally, Lee’s book is wide-ranging and ambitious, covering a variety of standard defenses, such as provocation (chs. 1–3) and self-defense (chs. 5–7), in contexts ranging from excessive use of force to intimate homicide, from hate …