Law and Race Commons^™

Derrick Bell: Godfather Provocateur, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Derrick Bell, the originator and founder of Critical Race Theory, passed away on October 5, 2011 at the age of 80. Around the world he is considered a hero, mentor, friend and exemplar. Known as a creative innovator and agitator, Professor Bell often sacrificed his career in the name of principles and objectives, inspiring a generation of scholars of color and progressive lawyers everywhere. Bell resigned a tenured position on the Harvard Law School faculty to protest Harvard’s refusal to hire and tenure women of color onto its law school faculty. For the past twenty years, Professor Bell taught …

Our Broken Misdemeanor Justice System: Its Problems And Some Potential Solutions, Eve Brensike Primus

Reviews

Although misdemeanors comprise an overwhelming majority of state criminal court cases, little judicial and scholarly attention has been focused on how misdemeanor courts actually operate. In her article, Misdemeanors, Alexandra Natapoff rights this wrong and explains how the low-visibility, highly discretionary decisions made by actors at the misdemeanor level often result in rampant discrimination, incredible inefficiency, and vast miscarriages of justice. Misdemeanors makes a significant contribution to the literature by refocusing attention on the importance of misdemeanor offenses and beginning an important dialogue about what steps should be taken going forward to fix our broken misdemeanor justice system.

The Realism Of Race In Judicial Decision Making: An Empirical Analysis Of Plaintiffs' Race And Judges' Race, Pat K. Chew, Robert E. Kelley

Articles

American society is becoming increasingly diverse. At the same time, the federal judiciary continues to be predominantly White. What difference does this make? This article offers an empirical answer to that question through an extensive study of workplace racial harassment cases. It finds that judges of different races reach different conclusions, with non-African American judges less likely to hold for the plaintiffs. It also finds that plaintiffs of different races fare differently, with African Americans the most likely to lose and Hispanics the most likely to be successful. Finally, countering the formalism model’s tenet that judges are color-blind, the results …

The Paradox Of Political Power: Post-Racialism, Equal Protection, And Democracy, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Racial minorities have achieved unparalleled electoral success in recent years. Simultaneously, they have continued to rank at or near the bottom in terms of health, wealth, income, education, and the effects of the criminal justice system. Social conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court, have latched onto evidence of isolated electoral success as proof of “post-racialism,” while ignoring the evidence of continued disparities for the vast majority of people of color.

This Essay will examine the tension between the Court's conservatives' repeated calls for minorities to achieve their goals through the political process and the Supreme Court's increasingly restrictive "colorblind" …

Reimagining Criminal Prosecution: Toward A Color-Conscious Professional Ethic For Prosecutors, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

Prosecutors, like mostAmericans, view the criminal-justice system asfundamentally race neutral. They are aware that blacks are stopped, searched, arrested, and locked up in numbers that are vastly out of proportion to their fraction of the overall population. Yet, they generally assume that this outcome is justified because it reflects the sad reality that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime in America. They are unable to detect the ways in which their own discretionary choices-and those of other actors in the criminal-justice system, such as legislators, police officers, and jurors-contribute to the staggering and disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. In …