Law and Race Commons^™

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Donna Coker, Thalia González

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The persistent criminalization and pathologizing of Black youth in the U.S. educational system is a fundamental driver for their entry into the criminal legal system. Despite decades of evidence of the far-reaching harms of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and, more recently, demands from Black Lives Matter activists to defund school police, the role of schools in criminalizing Black girls has been left out of mainstream academic discourse. This occurs even though Black girls experience some of the most subjective and discriminatory practices in schools and evidence of an upward trend in discipline disparities since the mid-2000s. For Black girls with …

(G)Local Intersectionality, Martha F. Davis

Washington and Lee Law Review

Intersectionality theory has been slow to take root as a legal norm at the national level, even as scholars embrace it as a potent analytical tool. Yet, in recent years, intersectionality has entered law and policy practices through an unexpected portal: namely, local governments’ adoption of international norms. A growing number of local governments around the world explicitly incorporate intersectionality into their law and practice as part of implementing international antidiscrimination norms from human rights instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of …

Murdering Crows: Pauli Murray, Intersectionality, And Black Freedom, Lisa A. Crooms-Robinson

Washington and Lee Law Review

What is intersectionality’s origin story and how did it make its way into human rights? Beginning in the 1940s, Pauli Murray (1910–1985) used Jane Crow to capture two distinct relationships between race and sex discrimination. One Jane used the race-sex analogy to show that race and sex were both unconstitutionally arbitrary. The other Jane captured Black women’s experiences and rights deprivations at the intersection of race and sex. Both Janes were based on Murray’s fundamental belief that the struggles against race and sex discrimination were different phases of the fight for human rights.

In 1966, Murray was part of the …

Foreword: Centering Intersectionality In Human Rights Discourse, Johanna Bond

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the last decade, intersectionality theory has gained traction as a lens through which to analyze international human rights issues. Intersectionality theory is the notion that multiple systems of oppression intersect in peoples’ lives and are mutually constitutive, meaning that when, for example, race and gender intersect, the experience of discrimination goes beyond the formulaic addition of race discrimination and gender discrimination to produce a unique, intersectional experience of discrimination. The understanding that intersecting systems of oppression affect different groups differently is central to intersectionality theory. As such, the theory invites us to think about inter-group differences (i.e., differences between …

Sexual Violence, Intangible Harm, And The Promise Of Transformative Remedies, Jill C. Engle

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article describes alternative remedies that survivors of sexual violence can access inside and outside the legal system. It describes the leading restorative justice approaches and recommends one of the newest and most innovative of those—“transformative justice”—to heal the intangible harms of sexual violence. The Article also discusses the intersectional effects of sexual violence on women of color and their communities. It explains the importance of transformative justice’s intersectional approach to redress sexual violence. Transformative justice offers community-based, victim-centric methods that cultivate deep, lasting healing for sexual violence survivors and their communities, with genuine accountability for those who have caused …