Law and Race Commons^™

White Male Heterosexist Norms In The Confirmation Process, Theresa M. Beiner

Law Faculty Scholarship

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing took a controversial turn when commentators picked up on a reference in the New York Times to a portion of a speech she gave in 2001. In that speech, then Judge Sotomayor opined that, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." That statement, along with her participation in the per curiam decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, caused a minor storm during her confirmation. More recently, former Harvard Dean and former …

Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community"

Hyper-Incarceration As A Multidimensional Attack: Replying To Angela Harris Through The Wire, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper responds to a symposium article by Angela Harris, arguing "mass incarceration" should be understood as "hyper-incarceration" because it is targeted based on multiple dimensions of identities. He extends Harris's analysis of the multidimensionality of identities by means of a case study of how class operates during the drug war era, as depicted in the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire.

Reshaping The Narrative Debate, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

In Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan Williams sets out to alter the terms of the public discussion about working, caregiving, and work-family conflicts. In doing so, Williams also reframes part of the conversation about the use of narratives in legal analysis and policy-making.

This essay describes the debate about narrative or storytelling in the legal academy. Two decades ago, a pitched jurisprudential battle surfaced in the pages of law reviews about the value of storytelling as legal scholarship. Since that time, narrative has sifted into academic texts: people are telling stories all over the place. …

Unsex Cedaw, Or What’S Wrong With Women’S Rights, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

CEDAW, signed on July 17, 1980 by sixty-four countries, has as its principal goals the protection and promotion of women's rights and the elimination of discrimination against women. As of March 7, 2011, 186 countries—more than ninety­ percent of the United Nations' member states—are parties to the Convention. The most notable non-party to the Convention is the United States. In addition, as of May 15, 2010, there are seventy-nine Signatories and ninety-nine Parties to the Optional Protocol, a supplement io CEDAW designed to remedy some of the treaty's shortcomings. Although challenges have hobbled implementation of CEDAW, it remains the …

Teaching Gender As A Core Value In Business Organizations Class, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I teach a business organizations course that is typically a large class with up to ninety students. At some point in the first week of each semester, I talk about public companies and the men who lead them. I point out to my students that while it is appropriate in most contexts to use gender-neutral language, it would be inaccurate to do so when talking about big business. Only fifteen percent of the board seats at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, and only sixteen percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers are women. I let my students know …

Introduction To The Symposium: Access To Justice: Mass Incarceration And Masculinity Through A Black Feminist Lens, Adrienne D. Davis, Annette R. Appell

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Introduction to the Symposium, Race to Justice: Mass Incarceration and Masculinity through a Black Feminist Lens, rehearses the animating forces that led to a colloquium and a series of papers that explore the question of mass incarceration and the negative state engagement surrounding it through gendered and feminist lenses. The Introduction explains how an analysis of mass incarceration through the lens of gender complicates what is often conceived as a story about race. Instead mass incarceration can be more deeply understood through its gendered effects on men and the women and children connected to those men. These connections include …

Inside Out, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Russell Robinson has done it again. With Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves. The Article represents much of what generally makes Robinson’s work so compelling. First, he writes about tremendously complex subjects and attends to their many complexities in remarkably lucid prose. Second, despite his critical perspective, he does not hesitate to make prescriptive arguments.

In this Article, he even ventures into the hallowed ground of constitutional argument, something he has not done since his first article on race-based …

Discrimination By Comparison, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary's dependence on comparators – those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic – as a favored heuristic for observing discrimination. The profound mismatch of the comparator methodology with current understandings of identity discrimination and the realities of the modern workplace has nearly depleted discrimination jurisprudence and theory. Even in run-of-the-mill cases, comparators often cannot be found, particularly in today's mobile, knowledge-based economy. This difficulty is amplified for complex claims, which rest on thicker understandings of discrimination developed …

African-American Grandmothers: Does The Gender-Entrapment Theory Apply? Essay Response To Professor Beth Richie, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Many African-American grandmothers are entrapped by the cycle of incarceration in poor black communities. This Essay explores whether the social and economic conditions that compel battered women to commit crimes also impact their mothers - who end up raising the children they leave behind. Professor Beth Richie's theory of gender entrapment as described in her book, “Compelled to Crime,” is not limited to incarcerated women who have been victims of domestic violence. African-American grandmothers who take on the role of kinship caregivers for their grandchildren are also entrapped by a complex interplay of race, gender, and class, making them vulnerable …

Ua5/3 University Attorney - Committee File, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Unprocessed committee files created by the University Attorney. Committees include the Council on Higher Education Special Committee on Minority Affairs, Administrative Council and Teacher Admissions, Certification, and Student Teaching Committee. This record group is unprocessed and must be reviewed for potential restricted materials before access is granted. Please contact the University Archivist prior to your visit.

Report & Recommendations Legal Scholar Team, Margaret E. Montoya, Tucker Culbertson, Marc-Tizoc González

Faculty Scholarship

The Report’s Recommendations for next steps reflect and incorporate the multiple experiences, false starts, insights, frustrations and new beginnings that represent the various ways that diversity works within the different sectors of the legal profession. We have included Recommendations that are already being used as well as some that are ambitious and aspirational. Within each of the four sectors of the profession, the recommendations are broadly categorized, but not prioritized. We recognize that every individual or organization will have its own priorities based on its unique circumstances. We do encourage the Report’s users to select and prioritize recommendations for next …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article uses the term contingent equal protection to describe the constitutional analysis that applies to a range of governmental efforts to ameliorate race and sex hierarchies. "Contingent" refers to the fact that the equal protection analysis is contingent upon the existence of structural, de facto inequality. Contingent equal protection cases include those that involve explicit race and sex classifications, facially neutral efforts to reduce inequality, and accommodation of sex differences to promote equality. Uniting all three kinds of cases under a single conceptual umbrella reveals the implications that developments in one area can have for the other two.

The Struggling Class: Replacing An Insider White Female Middle Class Dream With A Struggling Black Female Reality, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

“What is the appropriate role of former outsiders who are now on the inside?” I propose that the appropriate role for an outsider who is now an insider, is not to sprawl out on plush, white, crushed velvet sofas, sipping vintage wines or imported teas and nibbling at aged cheese and delicate crackers while enjoying being one among a quota or token few that made it to the inside. Rather, the role of a former outsider is to go to work from the inside to dismantle the house, shrewdly using available tools to remove the nails from the walls, loosening …

Shift Happens: The U.S. Supreme Court's Shifting Antidiscrimination Rhetoric, Theresa M. Beiner

Law Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court’s discourse on discrimination affects how fundamental civil rights - such as the right to be free from gender and race discrimination - are adjudicated and conceptualized in this country. Shortly after Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Court established precedent that assumed discrimination, absent some other compelling explanation for employer conduct. While the Court was more reluctant to presume such discrimination by governmental actors, it was deferent to Congress’s ability to set standards that would presume discrimination. Over time, however, that presumption and the Court’s deference to Congress has …

Do Ugly Criminals Receive Harsher Sentences? An Analysis Of Lookism In The Criminal Justice System, Kelly Beck

Business and Economics Honors Papers

For many years, researchers have attempted to find a link between beauty and labor market outcomes. Although many important findings have been noted in these studies, the beauty analysis utilized was a subjective measurement. This subjective method, while important, may have external factors creating bias in the rating itself. In this study, the impact of beauty is applied to criminals and their sentences. Using a computer based symmetry measurement tool, an objective beauty measurement will be utilized. This study will seek to uncover whether or not criminals who are less attractive, measured through facial symmetry, receive harsher prison sentences than …

Seeking Educational Self-Determination: Raza Studies For Revolution, Margaret E. Montoya, Marcos Pizarro, Monica Nanez, Ray Chavez, Nadine Bermudez

Faculty Scholarship

This article is a multi-textured effort to explain the educational, social justice work of MAESTR@S, an innovative, organic group of educational activists fighting to address the needs of Latina/o youth. It is unlike anything we have ever written and probably unlike anything you are likely to read in an academic journal such as Equity & Excellence in Education.We do not have a well-defined result that we are reporting to you. Instead, we see ourselves on a quest, with a deep concern about the current educational choices facing most raza youth and their teachers, and a commitment to try to work …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court's long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision's implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de …

Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …

Pregnant Man: A Conversation, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol,, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Scholarship

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family and …

Making Up Is Hard To Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation In The Law School Classroom, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias that complicates the use of student evaluations in assessing teaching …

Introduction To The Symposium: The Politics Of Identity After Identity Politics, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Essays in this volume seek to shed some light on the politics of identity after the 2008 Presidential election in which identity politics dominated. To explore how 2008 and its aftermath have shifted both academic and political debates, Professor Adrienne Davis invited scholars from a variety of disciplines who embrace diverse methodologies—political theory; cultural studies; history; and law. These authors explore identity politics as a field of academic inquiry; a cultural discourse; a legal claim; a negotiation of institutions and power; and a predicate for political alliances. Collectively, the Articles both develop new frameworks and intervene in old ones …

Another Interdisciplinary Collaboration—This Time With A Professor Of German!, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

The University of New Mexico International Studies Institute has a relationship with the German government in which the Institute runs a summer program at a castle near Dusseldorf known as Schloss-Dyck. In summer 2010, I am going to have the privilege of teaching in the program with a Jason Wilby, a UNM visiting Professor of German. We put a joint proposal together. He will teach about the culture, political environment and constitutional framework right after the Weimar Republic was created as a result of WWI. I will teach about the Nuremberg trials, with a particular focus on the trial of …

A Medical/Legal Teaching And Assessment Collaboration On Domestic Violence: Assessment Using Standardized Patients/Standardized Clients, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez, Cameron Crandall, Steve Mclaughlin, Diane Rimple, Mary Neidhart, Teresita Mccarty, Lou Clark, Carrie Martell, Gabriel Campos

Faculty Scholarship

Assessment of skills is an important, emerging topic in law school education. Two recent and influential books, Educating Lawyers published by the Carnegie Foundation and Best Practices in Legal Education, published by the Clinical Legal Education Association have both suggested dramatic reform of legal education. Among other reforms, these studies urge law schools to use outcome-based' assessments, i.e., using learning objectives and assessing knowledge and skills in standardized situations based on specific criteria, rather than simply comparing students' performances to each other.

Commencement Address, Cuny School Of Law, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Who we are, how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, what we value, how our memories connect us to specific histories in specific places — we communicate this information best through narratives. In Spanish we sometimes call such stories cuentos — an accounting. I encourage all of you to take time over the next few days to celebrate your graduation, this singular accomplishment of your lives, by accounting — by telling stories to those who have helped you, held you up, fed you, wiped your tears, paid your bills. Share your recollections.

A 'Ho New World: Raced And Gendered Insult As Ersatz Carnival And The Corruption Of Freedom Of Expression Norms, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Carnivalization, a concept developed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and later employed in broad social and cultural contexts, is the tearing down of social norms, the elimination of boundaries and the inversion of established hierarchies. It is the world turned upside down. Ersatz carnival is a pernicious, inverted form of carnival, one wherein counter discourses propounded by outsiders are appropriated by elites and frequently redeployed to silence and exclude those same outsiders. The use of the slur 'ho by gangsta' rappers in the performance of songs that articulate a vision of urban culture is an example of carnivalization. However, when …

The State As Batterer: Learning From Family Law To Address American's Family-Like Racial Dysfunction, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

The women's movement for equality bootstrapped to the movement for equality for Blacks. Now the reverse can happen. This Article uses family law and the plight of some battered women, as a lens to address analogous racial conflicts in the broader American family.

Race And Essentialism In Gloria Steinem, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper reflects on Angela Harris's essay Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.. Harris is one of the foremost law professors in the country. She has co-written or coedited several important critical race theory and feminist theory casebooks as well as a casebook for a first-year course. This particular essay is one of the most cited critical race theory pieces ever, having been referred to in at least 796 articles. Professor Cooper joins a group of distinguished peers, describing the power Harris' work has on them now and when they were developing scholars.

Our First Unisex President?: Black Masculinity And Obama's Feminine Side, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

People often talk about the significance of Barack Obama's status as our first black President. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, however, a newspaper columnist declared, "If Bill Clinton was once considered America's first black president, Obama may one day be viewed as our first woman president." That statement epitomized a large media discourse on Obama's femininity. In this essay, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper thus asks how Obama will influence people's understandings of the implications of both race and gender.

To do so, he explicates and applies insights from the fields of identity performance theory, critical race theory, and masculinities studies. …

A 'Ho New World: Raced And Gendered Insult As Ersatz Carnival And The Corruption Of Freedom Of Expression Norms, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

Carnivalization, a concept developed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and later employed in broad social and cultural contexts, is the tearing down of social norms, the elimination of boundaries, and the inversion of established hierarchies. It is the world turned upside down. Ersatz carnival is a pernicious, inverted form of carnival, one wherein counter-discourses propounded by outsiders are appropriated by elites and frequently redeployed to silence and exclude those same outsiders. The use of the slur "'ho" by gangsta' rappers in the performance of songs that articulate a vision of urban culture is an example of carnivalization. Thus, when words …