Law and Race Commons^™

Towards An Outcrit Pedagogy Of Anti-Subordination In The Classroom, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This Article discusses how traditional teaching practices can reinforce systemic discrimination, exclusion, subordination and oppression within the classroom in particular detriment to women and students of color. The Article traces the discussions about pedagogy in Outcrit literature and proposes that Outcrit scholars teaching techniques within the classroom should reflect anti-subordination praxis in teaching. Drawing from the work of Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell and others, the Article proposes that teaching from an anti-subordination perspective requires a praxis of collaborative, non-hierarchical teaching that calls for an epistemological shift. A pedagogy that frees the student to think independently and leads to an experience …

Foreword: Diversity In The Legal Profession: A Comparative Perspective, Deborah L. Rhode

Fordham Law Review

    In principle, the legal profession in the United States and United Kingdom is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion. In practice, it lags behind. This colloquium explores what stands in the way. Leading scholars from both countries look at the gap between aspirations and achievement, and suggest some concrete strategies for change.

Shaping Diversity And Inclusion Policy With Research, Julie Ashdown

Fordham Law Review

    The legal profession in England and Wales is perceived as pale, male, and stale (that is, white, male, and older), but is that actually the case? And, if it is, what could or should a representative body like the Law Society do about it? This Article considers the situation from the perspective of solicitors. It reviews the research that the Law Society has commissioned over the last twenty years and how the findings have impacted policymaking. This Article looks at the main initiatives resulting from the research and considers whether they have made a difference and what the continuing challenges …

Busy Doing Nothing: An Exploration Of The Disconnect Between Gender Equity Issues Faced By Large Law Firms In The United Kingdom And The Diversity Management Initiatives Devised To Address Them, Savita Kumra

Fordham Law Review

    The Article has three parts: the first reviews the data showing women’s increased participation in the legal sector and assesses why increased participation has not led to inclusion at senior levels. The main barriers are macro and micro processes of social reproduction, poor access to mentors and influential business networks, and gender bias in society at large.

    In the second part, the response by large law firms is assessed. This has largely consisted of “business case” approaches to diversity management. The key characteristics of these approaches are presented, as is an overview of key practices adopted by large law firms. …

Going Public: Diversity Disclosures By Large U.K. Law Firms, Steven Vaughan

Fordham Law Review

    The Legal Services Board (LSB) has been the parent regulator of legal services in England and Wales since 2009. Born of the wide-ranging reforms introduced by the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA), the LSB is tasked with promoting the regulatory objectives contained within the LSA, including “encouraging an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession.” In July 2011, the LSB introduced a rule requiring the collection of data on workforce diversity and the publication of that data by the legal profession. This was the first—and indeed, is the only—direct regulatory intervention taken with regard to diversity in the legal profession. …

Bicultural Experience In The Legal Profession: A Developmental Network Approach, Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey

Fordham Law Review

    A developmental network refers to the egocentric network of individuals who take an active interest in and concerted actions toward advancing a protégé’s career. In Part I of this Article, I draw upon the literature to outline the lived experiences of black lawyers, highlighting the need for them to manage their working identity. In Part II, I further develop bicultural experience as a construct for exploring racial minority experience in a professional context with recent developments from the acculturation literature. In Part III, I introduce the developmental network as a vehicle for understanding developmental relationships. Part IV summarizes the methodology …

Diversity In The Legal Profession: Perspectives From Managing Partners And General Counsel, Deborah L. Rhode, Lucy Buford Ricca

Fordham Law Review

    Within the American legal profession, diversity is widely embraced in principle but seldom realized in practice. Women and minorities are grossly underrepresented at the top and overrepresented at the bottom. What accounts for this disparity and what can be done to address it are the subjects of this Article. It provides the first comprehensive portrait of the problem from the vantage of leaders of the nation’s largest legal organizations. Through their perspectives, this Article seeks to identify best practices for diversity in law firms and in-house legal departments, as well as the obstacles standing in the way.

    Part I begins …

Race And Rapport: Homophily And Racial Disadvantage In Large Law Firms, Kevin Woodson

Fordham Law Review

    This Article calls attention to a different, heretofore unacknowledged source of racial disadvantage in these firms, one that is neither dependent upon these inferences of racial bias, nor incompatible with them. Cultural homophily, the tendency of people to develop rapport and relationships with others on the basis of shared interests and experiences, profoundly and often determinatively disadvantages many black attorneys in America’s largest law firms. Although not intrinsically racial, cultural homophily has decidedly racial consequences in this context because of the profound social and cultural distance that separates black and white Americans, evident in pronounced racial patterns in a wide …

Reproduction And The Rule Of Law In Latin America, Michele Goodwin, Allison M. Whelan

Fordham Law Review

    When Carmen Guadalupe Vasquez was rushed to [the] hospital after giving birth to a stillborn baby boy, the doctors first treated her life-threatening bleeding and then called the police, who handcuffed her to the bed. In El Salvador, where all abortion is illegal and emergency wards are turned into crime scenes, the confused, weak, and desperately ill 18-yearold maid was placed under investigation for terminating her pregnancy and driven away in a police van.

Legal Professional De(Re)Regulation, Equality, And Inclusion, And The Contested Space Of Professionalism Within The Legal Market In England And Wales, Lisa Webley

Fordham Law Review

    This Article aims to examine equality and inclusion in legal services from the perspectives of would-be lawyers and would-be clients. It begins by examining the state and solicitors’ changing relationship regarding access to justice, professional independence, and the rule of law. It then considers the changes that the LSA 2007 wrought, and whether this neoliberal turn can deliver equality and inclusion within the profession and by the profession for those seeking redress with legal help. It also explores whether de(re)regulation may be altering the legal profession(s)’s ability to act as gatekeeper to the profession(s) and whether this too may have …

Difference Blindness Vs. Bias Awareness: Why Law Firms With The Best Of Intentions Have Failed To Create Diverse Partnerships, Russell G. Pearce, Eli Wald, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen

Fordham Law Review

    This Article uses the example of BigLaw firms to explore the challenges that many elite organizations face in providing equal opportunity to their workers. Despite good intentions and the investment of significant resources, large law firms have been consistently unable to deliver diverse partnership structures—especially in more senior positions of power. Building on implicit and institutional bias scholarship and on successful approaches described in the organizational behavior literature, we argue that a significant barrier to systemic diversity at the law firm partnership level has been, paradoxically, the insistence on difference blindness standards that seek to evaluate each person on their …

How Diversity Can Redeem The Mcdonnell Douglas Standard: Mounting An Effective Title Vii Defense Of The Commitment To Diversity In The Legal Profession, Stacy Hawkins

Fordham Law Review

    This Article undertakes an analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of the developing body of Title VII diversity law. The jurisprudence of diversity was first developed by the U.S. Supreme Court in equal protection cases, but it has not been confined to that context. In particular, lower federal courts have been adjudicating cases asserting an interest in diversity as a means of challenging or justifying race/ethnicity- or gender-conscious policies and/or practices under Title VII. These cases have given rise to a body of Title VII diversity law that has remained largely unexplored in the scholarly literature. Because these cases have gone …

Biglaw Identity Capital: Pink And Blue, Black And White, Eli Wald

Fordham Law Review

    This Article advances a new capital analysis, depicting BigLaw relationships not as basic labor-salary exchanges but rather as complex transactions in which BigLaw and its lawyers exchange labor and various forms of capital—social, cultural, and identity. Unlike the traditional Tournament Theory model, in which BigLaw and its lawyers come across as near hopeless pawns powerless to combat vicious exogenous societal forces outside of their control, the proposed capital model conceives of BigLaw and its lawyers as active players who are very much responsible for the outcomes of their exchanges. Moreover, exactly because the capital model describes the underrepresentation of diverse …

Flourishing Rights, Wendy A. Bach

Michigan Law Review

There is something audacious at the heart of Clare Huntington’s Failure to Flourish. She insists that the state exists to ensure that families flourish. Not just that they survive, or not starve, or be able, somehow, to make ends meet—but that they flourish. She demands this not just for some families but, importantly, for all families. This simple, bold, and profoundly countercultural demand allows Huntington to make a tremendously convincing case that the state can begin to do precisely that. Failure to Flourish is a brave, rigorously produced, carefully researched, and politically astute book. Huntington seeks to persuade a wide …

Minority And Women Entrepreneurs: Building Capital, Networks, And Skills, Michael S. Barr

Other Publications

The United States has an enviable entrepreneurial culture and a track record of building new companies. Yet new and small business owners often face particular challenges, including lack of access to capital, insufficient business networks for peer support, investment, and business opportunities, and the absence of the full range of essential skills necessary to lead a business to survive and grow. Women and minority entrepreneurs often face even greater obstacles. While business formation is, of course, primarily a matter for the private sector, public policy can and should encourage increased rates of entrepreneurship, and the capital, networks, and skills essential …

Sketches Of A Redemptive Theory Of Contract Law, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article is about the game we call contract law and what it does and means to those who, at one time or another, have been categorically barred from play. How have "outsider" players-such as racial minorities, women, and sexual minorities -entered the game and, subsequently, how have its governing rules-that is, contract doctrines applied or not applied to them? On the flipside, how have common law contract doctrines responded to the entry of new players in the game? And, to the extent contract law has so responded, why has it done so? In asking and responding to these questions, …

The Diversity Challenge: Exploring The 'Invisible College' Of International Arbitration, Susan Franck

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

As diversity can affect the perceived legitimacy of a state’s dispute resolution system and the quality of judicial decisions, diversity levels in the national bench and bar have been an area of transnational concern. By contrast, little is known about diversity of adjudicators and counsel in international arbitration. With a lack of accurate, complete, and publicly available data about international arbitrators and practitioners, speculation about membership in the “invisible college” of international arbitration abounds. Using data from a survey of attendees at the prestigious and elite biennial Congress of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration permitted one glimpse into the …

The “Social Magic” Of Merit: Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In The English And Welsh Legal Profession, Hilary Sommerlad

Fordham Law Review

The discourse of merit is central to the “boundary” practices deployed by the white male elite of the English legal profession to exclude outsiders. The official discourse of government and regulatory body reports presents merit as an objectively verifiable and quantifiable property, synonymous with “excellence,” the salience of which in the recruitment process is indicative of the modernization of the profession. In this form it is mobilized to deflect criticism of the slow progress toward diversity. Critical interrogation of the discourse of merit reveals that it operates rather differently as a key structuring principle of the profession. The alternative meaning …

Naming Men As Men In Corporate Legal Practice: Gender And The Idea Of “Virtually 24/7 Commitment” In Law, Richard Collier

Fordham Law Review

This Article seeks to reframe and turn the conversation about gender equity in the legal profession on its head, taking up Hannah Brenner’s recent call to reconceptualize problems and rethink solutions around gender equity in the profession. It does so by moving beyond the frame of the retention of women and exploring selected aspects of the gendered practices of men in relation to this notion of the ideal legal professional in large transnational “city” law firms. The Article traces how particular ideas about men and gender are, on closer examination, implicated in a broader recasting of lawyer professionalism within the …

'Truth And Reconciliation': A Critical Step Toward Eliminating Race And Gender Violations In Tenure Wars, Angela Mae Kupenda, Tamara F. Lawson

Journal Articles

In this Article, the co-authors confront one of the next generation issues for underrepresented groups in legal education: what happens after tenure victories, especially for the victors in a war wrought with gender and racial inequities? Even if all is fair in love, war, and tenure battles, it remains most troubling when, even in this century, acts of racial and/or gender aggression are targeted at qualified tenure candidates. These violations of the "tenure rules of engagement" based on implicit or explicit racial or gender bias preserve discriminatory practices that impact underrepresented groups and maintain the status quo in the academy …

In The Name Of The Child: Race, Gender, And Economics In Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case is ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. This Article demonstrates that it is about a lot more than that. It is a microcosm of anxieties about Indianness, race, and the changing nature of parenthood. While made in the name of the child, moreover, the decision supports practices and policies that do not forward and may …

Crisis And Trigger Warnings: Reflections On Legal Education And The Social Value Of The Law, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 615 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by understanding the law school crisis through the framework of disaster capitalism. This framing uncovers the ways in which reformers are taking advantage of the current crisis to restructure legal education. Under the circumstances, faculty may reasonably read the contemporaneous student-led movement to require trigger warnings in the classroom as an assault on academic freedom. This reading, however, clouds the water. Part II attempts to clear the confusion by decoupling the trigger-warning movement from the broader phenomenon of law school corporatization. Trigger-warning demands might alternatively be read as a student critique of traditional law school pedagogy. Especially …

Reconsidering Legal Regulation Of Race, Sex, And Sexual Orientation, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Access To Justice In The Poor People’S Courts, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

Access to justice efforts have been focused more on access than justice, due in part to the framing of access to justice issues around the presence or absence of lawyers. This article argues that access to justice scholars and activists should also think about social justice and provides a roadmap for running a legal services program geared toward making court systems more just. The article also further develops the concept of “poor people’s courts,” a term that has been used to describe courts serving large numbers of low-income people without representation. The article argues that access to justice efforts can …

Policing And The Clash Of Masculinities, Ann Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In 2014 and 2015, the news media inundated U.S. society with reports of brutal killings by police of black men in major American cities. Unfortunately, police departments do not typically keep data on police killings of civilians. The data that exist do show, however, that at least for a five-month period in 2015, there was a disproportionate rate of police killings of unarmed black men.

There is no question that race and class play a key role in the nature of policing that occurs in poor black urban neighborhoods, but the relationship between police officers and their victims is not …

Blind Spot: The Inadequacy Of Neutral Partisanship, Melissa Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The More Things Change . . . : Exploring Solutions To Persisting Discrimination In Legal Academia, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Professional Women Silenced By Men-Made Norms, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

The call of this symposium was for articles regarding women's rights and the movement toward equality. We are still wrestling with what equality should mean. In this Article, when I refer to equality I envision it as both a strategy and as the end goal. Equality as a strategy means assessing the inherent inequalities of particular situations and using the means necessary to remedy the inequalities and achieve equality as the end goal. The end goal is for women (with all our complexities and intersectionalities) to achieve the same rights and results as men (with all their complexities and intersectionalities) …

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Publications

Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law exists within an overarching American criminal law culture in which the U.S penal system has become a "peculiar institution" and a defining governance structure. Much of criminal law discourse is subject to a type of ideological capture in which it is natural to assume that criminalization is a valid, if not preferred, solution to social dysfunction. Accordingly, progressives’ primary concerns about harms to minority victims takes place in a political-legal context in which criminalization is the technique of addressing harm. In turn, progressive criminal law theorizing manifests some deep internal tensions. …