Law and Race Commons^™

The Constitutional Tort System, Noah Smith-Drelich

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutional torts—private lawsuits for constitutional wrongdoing—are the primary means by which violations of the U.S. Constitution are vindicated and deterred. Through damage awards, and occasionally injunctive relief, victims of constitutional violations discourage future misconduct while obtaining redress. However, the collection of laws that governs these actions is a complete muddle, lacking any sort of coherent structure or unifying theory. The result is too much and too little constitutional litigation, generating calls for reform from across the political spectrum along with reverberations that reach from Standing Rock to Flint to Ferguson.

This Article constructs a framework of the constitutional tort system, …

The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Despite the recent movement against police violence, police officers have been endangering their communities by engaging in a new form of violence— policing while refusing to wear facial coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many states advise people to wear masks and to socially distance when in public spaces. However, police officers have frequently failed to comply with these guidelines as they interact with the public to enforce these COVID-19 laws. Police enforcement of COVID-19 laws is problematic for two reasons: (1) it provides a method for pathologizing marginalized communities as biological threats; (2) it creates a racialized pathway …

Toward A Law And Politics Of Racial Solidarity, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others have occurred under different factual circumstances, in different states, at the hands of both state and private actors, and have engendered different levels of outrage on the basis of their perceived egregiousness. Collectively and cumulatively, they have forced Americans to, once again, wrestle with the visible manifestation of racism and structural inequality. This confrontation is not simply a function of the inability to avert one’s eyes when faced with incontrovertible evidence of evident inhumanity and abject degradation, though it is in part that. After all, how to justify the …