Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Restorative Justice, Slavery And The American Soul, A Policy-Oriented Approach To The Question Of Slavery Reparations By The United States, Michael F. Blevins

ExpressO

This LL.M. Intercultural Human Rights thesis (May, 2005), awarded the best student paper prize for 2005 by the Institute of Policy Sciences at Yale University (in October, 2005), after analysing past and curent issues regarding the culture wars controversy of "reparations", proposes a specific process for establishing Truth and Reconciliation regarding the legacy of slavery in the United States. The proposal recommends commissions in each Federal judicial district under the supervision of a U.S. Slavery Justice and Reconciliation Commission (USSJRC), calling for "America's 21st Century Contract with Africa and African-Americans".

Causation And Attenuation In The Slavery Reparations Debate, Kaimipono D. Wenger

ExpressO

The success or failure of slavery reparations will depend on causation. Many criticisms of reparations have focused on the attenuated nature of the harm, suggesting that modern claimants are not connected to slaves, that modern payers are not connected to slave owners, and that harms suffered by modern Blacks cannot be connected to slavery. This Article examines these attenuation concerns and finds that they come in three related but distinct varieties: Victim attenuation, wrongdoer attenuation, and act attenuation. These three components, defined in this Article, show themselves in a number of interrelated arguments.

The Article then discusses how ideas about …

Paper Daughters, Nancy K. Ota

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Better Late Than Never: A Takings Clause Solution To Reparations, Yanessa L. Barnard

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Construire La Liberté Ou Le Défi Haïtien, Bernard Hadjadj

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The major challenge of Haitian society remains building liberty after emerging from slavery and acquiring independence. Two centuries after the birth of the first Black Republic, the new social contract that rose from this spirit of “living together” is still in penury. The author examines the principal obstacles on the way to building freedom: namely, the inclusion of a large number of the excluded, which implies the dismantling of misery and the promotion of learning; the institution of authority through law and responsibility which presupposes the end of the “master” figure as a symbol of power, as well as that …

Lessons About Reform From “A Very Dangerous Woman”, Sherry H. Penney, James Livingston

New England Journal of Public Policy

We discuss reform in antebellum America through the life of Martha Coffin Wright, an activist in the abolition and early women’s rights movements. Consideration of her motivations for reform; the obstacles faced by these movements; their methods, successes, and failures, may offer guidelines for reformers of today.

Tribes And Tribulations: Beyond Sovereign Immunity And Toward Reparation And Reconciliation For The Estelusti, Carla D. Pratt

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Two "Wrongs" Do/Can Make A Right: Remembering Mathematics, Physics, & Various Legal Analogies (Two Negatives Make A Positive; Are Remedies Wrong?) The Law Has Made Him Equal, But Man Has Not, John C. Duncan Jr

Journal Publications

This article demonstrates the incomplete logic and inconsistent legal reasoning used in the argument against affirmative action. The phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" is often heard in addressing various attempts to equalize, to balance, and to correct the acknowledged wrongs of slavery and segregation and their derivative effects. Yet, "two wrongs do/can make a right" has a positive connotation. This article reviews the history of societal and judicial wrongs against Blacks, as well as the evolution of the narrowing in legal reasoning concerning discrimination against minorities, including Blacks. Next, the legal reasoning behind legacy programs will be reviewed …

Causation And Attenuation In The Slavery Reparations Debate, Kaimipono D. Wenger

ExpressO

Recent discussions of reparations have noted the difficulty reparations advocates have in showing causation. Criticisms of reparations have focused on the attenuated nature of the harm, suggesting that modern claimants are not connected to slaves, that modern payers are not connected to slave owners, and that modern disadvantages cannot be connected to slavery.

This Article examines attenuation concerns and finds that they come in three related but distinct varieties: Victim attenuation, wrongdoer attenuation, and act attenuation. These three components, defined in this Article, show themselves in a number of interrelated legal and moral arguments. They have important strategic consequences, and …

Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, And White Structural Oppression: An Analysis Of Critical Race Practive/Praxis, Reginald Leamon Robinson

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Give Them Their Due: An African-American Reparations Program Based On The Native American Federal Aid Model, Mishael A. Danielson, Alexis Pimentel

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Plight Of "Nappy-Headed" Indians: The Role Of Tribal Sovereignty In The Systematic Discrimination Against Black Freedmen By The Federal Government And Native American Tribes, Terrion L. Williamson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Note concerns the role the government has played in the exclusion of Black Freedmen from Native American nations through its implementation and interpretation of the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity ("tribal sovereignty" or "tribal immunity"). Part I discusses the background of the Freedmen within the Five Civilized Tribes and provides an overview of the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity, including its role in the controversy concerning the status of Black Indians. Part II discusses the interpretations given to the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity by United States courts and executive agencies and the effects of those interpretations on relations …

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.

Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a sympathetic interpretation of reparations claims made on behalf of African Americans and suggests how they could properly be honored. It reviews the federal government’s role in supporting racial subordination and its continuing failure to address the inequitable consequences, which public policy now largely ignores. It sketches a national rectification project, comprising a comprehensive set of public programs that would attack the persisting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The programs can be justified by the government’s duty to insure equal opportunity for our society’s children and, most urgently, by corrective justice, because the inequities are attributable …

Le 'Droit D'Avoir Des Droits': Les Revendications Des Ex-Esclaves À Cuba (1872-1909), Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske

Articles

In Cuba, a distinctive process of gradual emancipation brought a large number of enslaved and recently-freed men and women into the legal culture. What earlier might have remained oral or physical challenges now took legal form, as slaves and former slaves built alliances with those who could assist them in their appeals. The assertions of former slaves suggest an emerging conviction of a "right to have rights", going well beyond the immediate refusal of their own bondage. In this light, the office of the notary and the courts of first instance became places where freedom itself was constituted through the …

Response To Boyle's Comment, David Horowitz

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unsavory Black Insinuations: A Reply To David Boyle, David Horowitz

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Racial Jusice On Trial - Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, And The War On Terror, Eric K. Yamamoto, Susan K. Serrano, Michelle Natividad Rodriguez

Michigan Law Review

Much has been written recently on African American reparations and reparations movements worldwide, both in the popular press and scholarly publications. Indeed, the expanding volume of writing underscores the impact on the public psyche of movements for reparations for historic injustice. Some of that writing has highlighted the legal obstacles faced by proponents of reparations lawsuits, particularly a judicial system that focuses on individual (and not group-based) claims and tends to squeeze even major social controversies into the narrow litigative paradigm of a two-person auto collision (requiring proof of standing, duty, breach, causation, and direct injury). Other writings detail the …

Why The Reparations Movement Should Fail, Gregory Kane

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Slavery And The Roots Of Sexual Harassment, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

In recent years, feminist scholars and activists have demonstrated the ways that U.S. slavery functioned as a system of gender supremacy. It entailed the dominance of men over women as well as whites over blacks. Adding the gender lens has shed immense light on the ways that sex, law, and power operated in the racially supremacist enslaving South. In recent years, this literature has emphasized the ways that slavery's sexual and racial subordination converged around the bodies of enslaved black women. One project within this literature characterizes slavery as a "sexual political economy" to make explicit the connections between its …

Reparations For Slavery: A Dream Deferred, Watson Branch

San Diego International Law Journal

When the year began, the prediction was that 2001 was going to be the "Year of Reparations." Both internationally and in the United States, the consensus held that the time had finally come for governments around the world to face up to racism and apologize for the harm brought about by slavery and its aftermath harm in the past, to those long dead, and in the present, to those who, because of the color of their skin, still suffer from racism. Governments were expected to make amends for that harm through restitution and compensation, whether individual or collective. This willingness …

Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging The Body Politic In The Reconstruction South, Lisa Cardyn

Michigan Law Review

From its establishment in the months following the Civil War by a motley assortment of disgruntled former rebels, the first Ku Klux Klan, like its many vigilante counterparts, employed terror to realize its invidious social and political aspirations. This terror assumed disparate shapes - from the storied nightriding of disguised bands on horseback, to cryptic threats, horrific assaults, and, not infrequently, murder. While students of Reconstruction have considered many facets of klan violence, none to date has focused exclusively on sexual violence in its historical specificity. Yet, as the work of Catherine Clinton, Laura Edwards, and Martha Hodes persuasively demonstrates, …

Colorblindness, Race Neutrality, And Voting Rights, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

The Reconstruction Amendments' guarantee of civil rights and political equality for racial minorities means that with respect to voting and representation, raceneutral results should be as much a constitutional imperative as colorblind process. As such, a colorblind electoral rule that unintentionally lessens the ability of a minority group to vote or to choose its candidate of choice should be deemed unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment, not merely unlawful under the Voting Rights Act, unless the jurisdiction can provide a strong justification for the rule focused on why such a rule is reasonably necessary to safeguard the electoral process. This change …

Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?, Margalynne J. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the role of unjust enrichment in substantive and remedial restitution as one option available to the movement that seeks to secure reparations for the descendants of the millions who were enslaved, transported from the African continent, and dispersed throughout the Americas and Europe.  The reparations movement also seeks fitting remedies for the continuing depredations imposed upon people of African descent in the years that have followed the abolition of slavery.  The substantive and remedial law of restitution, particularly the concepts of unjust enrichment and the remedy of constructive trust, provide particularly apt vehicles for reparations claims.

After …

What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

One of the striking and original achievements of the Michigan Law Review in its first century was the publication in 1989 of a Symposium entitled Legal Storytelling. Organized by the remarkable editor-in-chief, Kevin Kennedy - who tragically died not long after his graduation - the Symposium not only brought an important topic to the forefront of legal thinking, it did so in an extraordinarily interesting way. For this was not a mere collection of papers; the authors met in small editorial groups to discuss their work in detail, and as a result the whole project has a remarkable coherence and …

Property In Writing, Property On The Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land, And Citizenship In The Aftermath Of Slavery, Cuba, 1880-1909, Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske

Articles

In the most literal sense, the abolition of slavery marks the moment when one human being cannot be held as property by another human being, for it ends the juridical conceit of a "person with a price." At the same time, the aftermath of emancipation forcibly reminds us that property as a concept rests on relations among human beings, not just between people and things. The end of slavery finds former masters losing possession of persons, and former slaves acquiring it. But it also finds other resources being claimed and contested, including land, tools, and animals-resources that have shaped former …

Editor's Note, Melanie M. Lee

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Un/Re/Dis Covering Slave Breeding In Thirteenth Amendment Jurisprudence, Pamela D. Bridgewater

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Defining The Agenda: A New Struggle For African-American Women In The Fight For Reproductive Self-Determination, Melanie M. Lee

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Case For United States Reparations To African Americans, Adrienne D. Davis

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.