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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Freedom, Democracy, And The Right To Education, Derek W. Black
Freedom, Democracy, And The Right To Education, Derek W. Black
Northwestern University Law Review
While litigation continues in an effort to establish a fundamental right to education under the U.S. Constitution, the full historical justification for this right remains missing—a fatal flaw for many jurists. This Article fills that gap, demonstrating that the central, yet entirely overlooked, justification for a federal right to education resides in America’s education story during the era of slavery and Reconstruction.
At that time, education was first and foremost about freedom. The South had criminalized education to maintain a racialized hierarchy that preserved slavery. Many African-Americans, seeing education as the means to both mental and physical freedom, made extraordinary …
Section 5'S Forgotten Years: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth Amendment Before Katzenbach V. Morgan, Christopher W. Schmidt
Section 5'S Forgotten Years: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth Amendment Before Katzenbach V. Morgan, Christopher W. Schmidt
Northwestern University Law Review
Few decisions in American constitutional law have frustrated, inspired, and puzzled more than Katzenbach v. Morgan. Justice Brennan’s 1966 opinion put forth the seemingly radical claim that Congress—through its power, based in Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to “enforce, by appropriate legislation,” the rights enumerated in that Amendment—shared responsibility with the Court to define the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment rights. Although it spawned a cottage industry of scholarship, this claim has never been fully embraced by a subsequent Supreme Court majority, and in City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court rejected the heart of the Morgan …
The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman
The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman
Northwestern University Law Review
Graham v. Connor established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims. The Supreme Court not only refined an objective reasonableness test to describe the constitutional standard, but also held that the Fourth Amendment is the sole avenue for courts to adjudicate claims that police violated a person’s constitutional rights in using force. In this Essay, we ask: What impact did this decision have on the nature of police excessive force claims in federal courts? To address this, we engaged in a qualitative examination of 500 federal cases (250 in the twenty-six years before Graham and 250 in the …
Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger
Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger
Northwestern University Law Review
The litigation campaign that led to McCleskey v. Kemp did not begin as an anti-death-penalty effort. It grew in soil long washed in the blood of African-Americans, lynched or executed following rude semblances of trials and hasty appeals, which had prompted the NAACP from its very founding to demand “simple justice” in individual criminal cases. When the Warren Court signaled, in the early 1960s, that it might be open to reflection on broader patterns of racial discrimination in capital sentencing, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) began to gather empirical evidence and craft appropriate constitutional responses. As …