Law and Race Commons^™

Critics sometimes maintain that hate crime law punishes an offender for her motive and character and is therefore doctrinally and morally illegitimate. This manuscript explores the concept of culpability to examine this challenge, and argues that critics inaccurately assume that our criminal law conditions culpability on a robust understanding of choice. This inaccuracy significantly undermines the doctrinal critique against hate crime law, which in fact appears to be consistent with many other laws that consider motive and character as relevant factors in determining degree of guilt and proportionate punishment. Notwithstanding the apparent doctrinal validity of hate crime law, the author …

In recent years, Asian Americans have increasingly laid claim to a place in civil rights history. One strategy of this movement has been to renounce the black/white paradigm as a biracial model of race relations that no longer accurately describes contemporary America. In this essay, I suggest that the black/white paradigm is more compelling than commonly assumed, and explore six dimensions of the paradigm that speak to its contemporary relevance to the Asian American civil rights agenda.