Law and Race Commons^™

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

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In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

Voting Realism, Gilda R. Daniels

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Since Shelby County v. Holder, the country has grown accustomed to life without the full strength of the Voting Rights Act. Efforts to restore Section 4 have been met with calls to ignore race conscious remedies and employ race neutral remedies for modern day voting rights violations. In this new normal, the country should adopt “voting realism” as the new approach to ensuring that law and reality work to address these new millennium methods of voter discrimination.

The Fight For Equal Protection: Reconstruction-Redemption Redux, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Patricia Stottlemyer

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With Justice Scalia gone, and Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy in their late seventies, there is the possibility of significant movement on the Supreme Court in the next several years. A two-justice shift could upend almost any area of constitutional law, but the possible movement in race-based equal protection jurisprudence provides a particularly revealing window into the larger trends at work. In the battle over equal protection, two strongly opposed visions of the Constitution contend against each other, and a change in the Court’s composition may determine the outcome of that struggle. In this essay, we set out the current state …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

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Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Reconciling Equal Protection Law In The Public And In The Family: The Role Of Racial Politics, Dorothy E. Roberts

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In Constitutional Colorblindness and the Family, Katie Eyer brings to our attention an intriguing contradiction in the Supreme Court's equal protection jurisprudence. Far from ending race‐based family law rules with its 1967 decision, Loving v. Virginia, the Court has ignored lower courts' decisions approving official uses of race in foster care, adoption, and custody decisions in the last half century. Thus, as Eyer observes, “during the same time that the Supreme Court has increasingly proclaimed the need to strictly scrutinize all government uses of race, family law has remained a bastion of racial permissiveness.”

Scholars who oppose race‐matching …

Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women Of Color, Equality, And The Right Of Privacy, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.