Law and Race Commons^™

Progressive Reform Panel, Shaun Marshall, Chris Daly, Medea Benjamin, Brad Seligman

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Social Security Panel, Reuel Schiller, Peter Edelman, David Levine, Thomas Davidoff

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Keynote Addresses, Dolores Huerta, Peter Edelman

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Cross-Cultural Lawyering By The Book: The Latest Clinical Texts And A Sketch Of A Future Agenda, Ascanio Piomelli

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

Over the past decade, the literature on lawyering has paid increased attention to the impact of cultural differences on interactions between attorneys and clients. This essay assesses the latest generation of clinical textbooks on interviewing and counseling and how they seek to prepare student-lawyers for crosscultural work. It highlights differences in these textbooks' definitions of culture, measures of crosscultural success, descriptions of the dimensions along which cultures differ, the side(s) of the lawyer-client relationship on which they focus, and the behaviors they suggest. The essay argues these texts are at their best when they define culture both broadly and fluidly, …

The Color Of Sexual Harassment And The Public/Private Divide, Janeille Zorina Matthews

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This article argues that the conception of sexual harassment as simply a gendered harm is inadequate because sexual harassment is not only about gender but also about race, class, sexual orientation and other realities of existence. Sexual harassment is about power and about keeping particular women out of particular economic spheres. Using the Commonwealth Caribbean as an example, this article concludes that an intersectional understanding of sexual harassment, and a more nuanced understanding of the public/private divide, will lead to better workplace harassment legislation. While much of the focus is on the Commonwealth Caribbean, a North American example suggests that …

Race And The Jury: Racial Influences On Jury Decision-Making In Death Penalty Cases, Mustafa El-Farra

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This note identifies the overwhelming influence of how the race of the victim and the defendant affects prosecutors and juries in capital punishment cases. The author focuses on the legislative and judicial shortcomings that have lead to a failure in proscribing and combating the issue of purposeful discrimination against minority defendants. The author proffers different remedies to address this problem, citing ideas mentioned in several state court cases as well as various federal legislative attempts to protect against racial discrimination in the application of capital punishment.

Civil Claims For Uncivilized Acts: Filing Suit Against The Government For American Indian Boarding School Abuses, Andrea A. Curcio

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This country's history is replete with evidence that the United States government deliberately caused the deaths of millions of American Indians. What is less well-known is the government's attempt to destroy the American Indian peoples by forcing generations of American Indian children to attend off-reservation boarding schools. In this article, Professor Curcio describes the use of government-run boarding schools as a way to destroy American Indian childrens' connections to their peoples, and ultimately, as a way to destroy the American Indian peoples. She discusses the schools' harsh and deadly living conditions and the schools' destructive impact upon generations of American …

Latcrit At Ten Years, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Transforming Discriminatory Corporate Cultures: This Is Not Just Women's Work, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The Symposium on Women and the "New" Corporate Governance began with an opening address by Sheila Wellington, the President of Catalyst. "Don't change women," she said, "change corporations." I agree with Ms. Wellington, but I would go one step further by observing that companies will change only if men change. The overwhelming majority of the directors and officers who manage and govern large public companies in the United States are white men. Public companies will enjoy healthy relationships with their women employees only to the extent encouraged and facilitated by the men who control these corporations. But how does …

Parity/Disparity: Electoral Gender Inequality On The Tightrope Of Liberal Constitutional Traditions, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

To force an end to the seemingly interminable war with Sparta, Lysistrata, the title character in Aristophanes’ comedy, exhorts the women of Athens to achieve peace by arousing their husbands’ desires while refusing them any gratification. This political act would force the men to end the war: “[d]oesn’t matter what they threaten to do — even if they try to set fire to the place — they won’t make us open the gates except on our own terms.”

Two thousand three hundred years later, democracy and gender still have a tortured relationship. Although most democracies provided women with the …

The Diversity Rationale: Unprovable, Uncompelling, Brian N. Lizotte

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Student body diversity-and the purported educational benefits diversity bestows- is the final Supreme Court-endorsed justification for affirmative action by public universities. Are the benefits of diversity indeed "substantial," as the Grutter majority claimed? The author analyzes the social scientific research upon which the Court relied in articulating the diversity interest. By critiquing its theory and methodology, the author shows how the research fails to prove educational benefits; and by considering the logic underlying social science generally, he shows how the causal relationship is, technically, not provable. The author questions, then, how the diversity interest can possibly be compelling.

The End Of Preclearance As We Knew It: How The Supreme Court Transformed Section 5 Of The Voting Rights Act, Peyton Mccrary, Christopher Seaman, Richard Valelly

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article’s analysis reveals that by the 1990s the intent, or purpose, prong of Section 5 had become the dominant basis for objections to discriminatory voting changes. During that decade an astonishing 43 percent of all objections were, according to this assessment, based on discriminatory purpose alone. Thus, a key issue for Congress in determining how to deal with the preclearance requirement of the Act due to expire in 2007-assuming it seeks to restore the protection of minority voting rights that existed before January 2000-is whether to revise the language of Section 5 so as to restore the long-accepted definition …

Urban Legends, Desegregation And School Finance: Did Kansas City Really Prove That Money Doesn't Matter?, Preston C. Green Iii, Bruce D. Baker

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines whether conservative critics are correct in their assertion that the Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) desegregation plan clearly establishes that no correlation exists between funding and academic outcomes. The first section provides a summary of public education in KCMSD prior to 1977, the beginning of the Missouri v. Jenkins school desegregation litigation. The second and third sections analyze whether the Jenkins desegregation and concurrent school finance litigation (Committee for Educational Equality v. State) addressed these problems. The fourth section provides an overview of school finance litigation and explains how KCMSD desegregation plan has been …

How Should A Court Deal With A Primary Question That The Legislature Seeks To Avoid?, Gidon Sapir

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Legislative avoidance of principled decisions on substantive questions by transferring the decision-making task to the executive branch, is a frequent scenario. The legislature does this by way of either express or hidden delegation, i.e., by using ambiguous wording that on its face only requires interpretation but which in fact requires a substantive decision on the matter at stake. The Israeli legislature resorted to the hidden delegation tactic to avoid the adoption of a substantive decision in the dispute over the question of who is a Jew--a dispute that has divided Israeli society and World Jewry (especially its U.S. component) since …

From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

LULAC v. Perry held that Texas violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it displaced nearly 100,000 Latino residents from a congressional district in Laredo to protect the Republican incumbent they refused to support. At the same time, the Justices let stand the dismantling of a so-called “coalition” district in Fort Worth where African-American voters comprising a minority of the district’s population allegedly enjoyed effective control in deciding the district’s representative. Only Justice Kennedy supported the outcome in both Laredo and Fort Worth. His opinion marks the first time that he, or indeed a majority of the Justices, …

Skin-Tone Effects Among African Americans: Perceptions And Reality, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is commonly assumed that lighter skinned African Americans receive preferential treatment over darker skinned counterparts. Using individual data from three sources, this paper examines the influence of skin tone on education and on wages. Lighter skin tone has a consistent positive impact on educational attainment but has a less consistent influence on wages. Possible mechanisms by which skin tone differences might influence economic outcomes are investigated, including measurement error, perceived attractiveness, access to integrated schools or work groups, perceived discrimination, and genetic differences. The perception that there is differential treatment on the basis of skin tone is more pronounced …

Raising The Red Flag: The Continued Relevance Of The Japanese Internment In The Post-Hamdi World, Aya Gruber

Publications

In the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the Japanese interment has re-emerged as a topic of serious discourse among legal scholars, politicians, civil libertarians, and society in general. Current national security policies have created concerns that the government has stepped dangerously close to the line crossed by the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Civil libertarians invoke the internment to caution policy-makers against two of the most serious dangers of repressive national security policies: racial decision-making and incarceration without process. Bush defenders advance several arguments in response to internment comparisons. The most conservative is an ardent defense …

A Brief History Of The U.S.-American Indian Nations Relationship, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores a startling and previously unnoticed line of cases in which state courts in the Jim Crow era ruled against white plaintiffs trying to use common law nuisance doctrine to achieve residential segregation. These "race-nuisance" cases complicate the view of most legal scholarship that state courts during the Jim Crow era openly eschewed the rule of law in service of white supremacy. Instead, the cases provide rich social historical detail showing southern judges wrestling with their competing allegiances to both precedent and the pursuit of racial exclusivity. Surprisingly, the allegiance to precedent generally prevailed. The cases confound prevailing …

Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This comparative study between the quest for political racial inclusivity in 1890s Louisiana and the fight against state-sanctioned racialized violence in Cuba in the early 1900s exposes similarities, tensions, and differences between the two systems. The article traces the evolving contests for citizenship and suffrage in each climate at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the twentieth, juxtaposing the expression of race, suffrage, and citizenship in the constitution and political climate of each locale. In 1898, the new Louisiana state constitution disenfranchised African-Americans, while in 1900 Cuba was positioning itself for a grant of universal …

Documenting Discrimination In Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act Since 1982, Ellen D. Katz, Margaret Aisenbrey, Anna Baldwin, Emma Cheuse, Anna Weisbrodt

Other Publications

The Voting Rights Initiative ("VRI") at the University of Michigan Law School was created during the winter of 2005 to help inform [...] the debates that led to this latest congressional reauthorization and the legal challenge to it that is certain to follow. A cooperative research venture involving 100 students working under faculty direction set out to produce a detailed portrait of litigation brought since 1982 under Section 2. This Report evaluates the results of that survey. The comprehensive data set may be found in a searchable form at http://www.votingreport.org or http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/votingrights. The aim of this report and the accompanying …

The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …

Public Attitudes About The Culpability And Punishment Of Young Offenders, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Jill Antonishak, Jennifer T. Degennaro

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom holds that the public supports harsh punishment of juvenile offenders, and politicians often argue that the public demands tough policies. But public opinion is usually gauged through simplistic polls, often conducted in the wake of highly publicized violent crimes by juveniles. This study seeks to probe public opinion about the culpability of young offenders as compared to adult counterparts through more nuanced and comprehensive measures in a neutral setting (i.e. not in response to a high profile crime or during a political campaign when the media focuses on the issue). The opinions of 788 community adults were individually …

Muslim Profiles Post-9/11: Is Racial Profiling An Effective Counterterrorist Measure And Does It Violate The Right To Be Free From Discrimination?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Racial profiling as a defensive counterterrorism measure necessarily implicates a rights trade-off: if effective, racial profiling limits the right of young Muslim men to be free from discrimination in order to promote the security and well-being of others. Proponents of racial profiling argue that it is based on simple statistical fact and represents just smart law enforcement. Opponents of racial profiling, like New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, say that it is dangerous and just nuts.

As a theoretical matter, both sides are partly right. Racial profiling in the context of counterterrorism measures may increase the detection of terrorist …

Grutter At Work: A Title Vii Critique Of Constitutional Affirmative Action, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Note argues that Title VII doctrine both illuminates internal contradictions of Grutter v. Bollinger and provides a framework for reading the opinion. Grutter's diversity rationale is a broad endorsement of integration that hinges on the quantitative concept of critical mass, but the opinion's narrow-tailoring discussion instead points to a model of racial difference that champions subjective decisionmaking and threatens to jettison numerical accountability. Title VII doctrine supports a reading of Grutter that privileges a view of diversity as integration and therefore cautions against the opinion's conception of narrow tailoring. Grutter, in turn, can productively inform employment discrimination law. The …

The Adventure(S) Of Blackness In Western Culture: An Epistolary Exchange On Old And New Identity Wars, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated. The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts …

Framing Affirmative Action, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

With the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative ("MCRI"), Michigan joins California and Washington to constitute the new postaffirmative action frontier. For proponents such as Ward Connerly, affirmative action is on the edge of extinction. Connerly plans to carry his campaign against what he calls "racial preferences" to eight states in 2008, scoring a decisive Super-Tuesday repudiation of a social policy that he portrays as the contemporary face of racial discrimination.

On the other side of the issue, proponents of affirmative action are struggling to regroup, fearful that the confluence of lukewarm support among Democratic allies, messy presidential politics …

Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a capital defendant's claim that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of Georgia's death penalty system constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, even as McCleskey effectively bars constitutional challenges to racial disparities in the criminal justice system where invidious bias is difficult to establish, the Court invites advocates to pursue legislation as a remedy to racial disparities. Indeed, the McCleskey Court offers as a rationale for its ruling the judiciary's institutional incompetence to remedy these disparities, holding that "McCleskey's arguments are best …

Affirming Michigan’S Action: The Michigan Journal Of Race & Law's Response To Dr. Carcieri's Grutter V. Bollinger And Civil Disobedience, Adam Blumenkrantz, Jason Belmont Conn, Amrita Mallik, Michael Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.