Law and Race Commons^™

The Ghost Of Jim Crow: The Human Right To Housing, Generational Wealth, The Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, And The American Legal System, Miranda Guedes

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Forgotten Activists: Black People In The Disability Rights Movement, Kiyra Ellis

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hair Me Out: Why Discrimination Against Black Hair Is Race Discrimination Under Title Vii, Alexis Boyd

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In May 2010, Chastity Jones sought employment as a customer service representative at Catastrophe Management Solutions (“CMS”), a claims processing company located in Mobile, Alabama. When asked for an inperson interview, Jones, a Black woman, arrived in a suit and her hair in “short dreadlocks,” or locs, a type of natural hairstyle common in the Black community. Despite being qualified for the position, Jones would later have her offer rescinded because of her hair. CMS claimed that locs “tend to get messy” and violated the “neutral” dress code and hair policy requiring employees to be “professional and business-like.” Therefore, CMS …

Panel 2 - Unreported Shortcomings Of Title Ix, Lisa Taylor, Leslie Annexstein, Elizabeth Kristein, Natasha Martin, Elizabeth Kristen

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

MODERATOR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our second panel, Unreported Shortcomings of Title IX. I’m going to start off with a quick introduction of our moderator. Today we have Dean Lisa Taylor who is our Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Affinity Relations at WCL. She is much beloved by students of the Journal and students of WCL in general. And I know she is going to kick off a great panel. Dean Taylor, it’s all yours.

The Battle Over Bostock: Dueling Presidential Administrations & The Need For Consistent And Reliable Lgbt Rights, Regina L. Hillman

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court released its opinion in the landmark civil rights case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. In the Bostock decision, the Court held that protections from employment discrimination “because of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”) include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Prior to the Court’s decision, millions of LGBT employees had no protection from discriminatory treatment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and discrimination was pervasive.

Surveillance Normalization, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has expanded public surveillance measures in an attempt to combat the spread of the virus. As the pandemic wears on, racialized communities and other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by this increased level of surveillance. This article argues that increases in public surveillance as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic give rise to the normalization of surveillance in day-to-day life, with serious consequences for racialized communities and other marginalized groups. This article explores the legal and regulatory effects of surveillance normalization, as well as how to protect civil rights and liberties …

Importing Indian Intolerance: How Title Vii Can Prevent Caste Discrimination In The American Workplace, Brett Whitley

Arkansas Law Review

"If Hindus migrate to other regions on [E]arth, [Indian] Caste would become a world problem." - Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1916) Imagine it is the year 2020. You are one of the more than 160 million people across India that are labeled as Dalits, formerly known as the “Untouchables." Most Hindus view Dalits as belonging to the lowest rung in the ancient system of social stratification that impacts individuals across the globe called the caste system. Your people have endured human rights abuses for centuries, but luckily, neither you nor a loved one have ever been the victim of one of …

On Proper[Ty] Apologies And Resilience Gaps, Marc L. Roark

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reframing Hate, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The concept and naming of “hate crime,” and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years—although the prominent target groups have shifted over time—and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator’s motivation? …

How The Gun Control Act Disarms Black Firearm Owners, Maya Itah

Washington Law Review

Through 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), the Gun Control Act (GCA) outlaws the possession of a firearm “in furtherance of” a drug trafficking crime. The statute’s language is broad, and federal courts have interpreted it expansively. By giving prosecutors wide discretion in charging individuals with § 924(c) violations, the language enables the disproportionate incarceration of Black firearm owners.

This Comment addresses this issue in three parts. Part I discusses the ways early gun control laws overtly disarmed Black firearm owners. Additionally, Part I provides context for the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which coincided with the backlash to …

Deficit Frame Dangers, Jonathan P. Feingold

Georgia State University Law Review

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as an essential, if insufficient, catalyst of social change. In part, it is. But in critical respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, civil rights litigation can hinder short- and long-term projects of racial justice. Specifically, certain civil rights doctrines reward plaintiffs for emphasizing community deficits—or what I term a “deficit frame.” Legal doctrine, in other words, invites legal narratives that track, activate, and reinforce pernicious racial stereotypes. This dynamic, even in the context of well-intended litigation, risks entrenching conditions that drive racial inequality—including the conditions that litigation is often intended to address. …

The Last Call For Civil Rights: Toward Economic Equality, Steve Lee

Georgia State University Law Review

Over six decades have passed since the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s, but American society has not yet fully realized the promise of the civil rights movement, which at its core embodies the protection and promotion of equity and dignity of all people. Despite the historic improvements that accord the legal protection of equal rights among different races, genders, and ethnic groups, significant economic disparity among racial and regional lines persists. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.” However, the pursuit of economic equality has not been …

Some Objections To Strict Liability For Constitutional Torts, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

Qualified immunity protects officials from damages for constitutional violations unless they have violated "clearly established" rights. Local governments enjoy no immunity, but they may not be sued on a vicarious liability theory for constitutional violations committed by their employees. Critics of the current regime would overturn these rules in order to vindicate constitutional rights and deter violations.

This Article argues that across-the-board abolition of these limits on liability would be unwise as the costs would outweigh the benefits. In some contexts, however, exceptions may be justified. Much of the recent controversy surrounding qualified immunity involves suits in which police officers …

Tainted Precedent, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Second Founding And The First Amendment, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Constitutional doctrine generally proceeds from the premise that the original intent and public understanding of pre-Civil War constitutional provisions carries forward unchanged from the colonial Founding era. This premise is flawed because it ignores the Nation’s Second Founding: i.e., the constitutional moment culminating in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the civil rights statutes enacted pursuant thereto. The Second Founding, in addition to providing specific new individual rights and federal powers, also represented a fundamental shift in our constitutional order. The Second Founding’s constitutional regime provided that the underlying systemic rules and norms of the First Founding’s Constitution …

Lawyers For White People?, Jessie Allen

Articles

This article investigates an anomalous legal ethics rule, and in the process exposes how current equal protection doctrine distorts civil rights regulation. When in 2016 the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct finally adopted its first ever rule forbidding discrimination in the practice of law, the rule carried a strange exemption: it does not apply to lawyers’ acceptance or rejection of clients. The exemption for client selection seems wrong. It contradicts the common understanding that in the U.S. today businesses may not refuse service on discriminatory grounds. It sends a message that lawyers enjoy a professional prerogative to discriminate against …

Pursuing Diversity: From Education To Employment, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

A central pillar of the Supreme Court’s educational affirmative-action jurisprudence is that the pedagogical benefits of being educated with students from diverse backgrounds are sufficiently “compelling” to justify some degree of race-conscious selection in university admissions.

This essay argues that the blanket permission to advance educational diversity, defensible or not, should not be extended to employment. The purpose of the workplace is not pedagogical. Rather, employees are hired and paid to do a job, deliver a service, produce a product, and complete specified tasks efficiently and effectively. Whether race-conscious practices for the purpose of creating a more diverse workforce will …

Foreword, Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones

Freedom Center Journal

The articles in this issue of The Freedom Center Journal are timely challenges to the persistent efforts to undermine the American values enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution and the body of the Constitution itself with its three Civil War Amendments.

The student editors of this volume intended the selected contributions to offer readers a nuanced view of our nation’s current identity crisis. The collection is offered in the hope that it will encourage further thinking and discussion about what it means to be part of the American experiment with democratic self-governance in an age of resurgent white supremacy.

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence class certification under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. We find that the ideological composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having dramatically higher rates of procertification outcomes than all-Republican panels—nearly triple in about the past twenty years. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of …

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Bridget J. Crawford, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Mehrsa Baradaran, Noa Ben-Asher, I. Bennett Capers, Osamudia R. James, Keisha Lindsay

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, …

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

This article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence precedential lawmaking on class certification under Rule 23. We find that the partisan composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having more than double the certification rate of all-Republican panels in precedential cases. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of two females (but not one), is associated with …

Remembrance, One Person, One Vote: The Enduring Legacy Of Joaquin Avila, Robert Chang

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

A Genealogy Of Programmatic Stop And Frisk: The Discourse-To-Practice-Circuit, Frank Rudy Cooper

University of Miami Law Review

President Trump has called for increased use of the recently predominant policing methodology known as programmatic stop and frisk. This Article contributes to the field by identifying, defining, and discussing five key components of the practice: (1) administratively dictated (2) pervasive Terry v. Ohio stops and frisks (3) aimed at crime prevention by means of (4) data-enhanced profiles of suspects that (5) target young racial minority men.

Whereas some scholars see programmatic stop and frisk as solely the product of individual police officer bias, this Article argues for understanding how we arrived at specific police practices by analyzing three levels …

The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Advancements in genetic technology have resurrected long discarded conceptualizations of “race” as a biological reality. The rise of modern biological race thinking – as evidenced in health disparity research, personal genomics, DNA criminal forensics, and bio-databanking - not only is scientifically unsound but portends the future normalization of racial inequality. This Article articulates a constitutional theory of shared humanity, rooted in the substantive due process doctrine and Ninth Amendment, to counter the socio-legal acceptance of modern genetic racial differentiation. It argues that state actions that rely on biological racial distinctions undermine the essential personhood of individuals subjected to such taxonomies, …

Police In America: Ensuring Accountability And Mitigating Racial Bias Feat. Professor Destiny Peery

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Litigating Police Misconduct: Does The Litigation Process Matter? Does It Work?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Police In America: Ensuring Accountability And Mitigating Racial Bias Feat. Paul Butler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Reforming The Ranks: Policy Initiatives To Ensure Police Accountability & Improve Police And Community Relations

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.