Law and Race Commons^™

(Un)Reasonable Suspicion: Racial Profiling In Immigration Enforcement After Arizona V. United States, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

n June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its landmark decision in Arizona v. United States, 1 striking down three of the four provisions of Arizona’s notorious Senate Bill (“S.B.”) 10702 challenged by the United States Department of Justice as preempted by federal immigration law. Despite agreeing with the government that the majority of Arizona’s attempt to regulate immigration at the state level through S.B. 1070 was impermissible, the Supreme Court let stand the most controversial section of the law, Section 2(B)—the socalled “show me your papers” provision.3 Under Section 2(B), state and local law enforcement …

Dignité/Dignidade: Organizing Against Threats To Dignity In Societies After Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

This chapter is not an attempt to join the fractious debate over philosophical first principles or juridical first usages of the term 'dignity'. Instead, it explores the tight connection between the institution of slavery and the giving of specific meanings to the concept of dignity, in particular times and particular places. To explore the dynamics of the intertwined process of creating and drawing upon meaning for the terms 'dignity' and 'slavery', I examine two historical movements that emerged after formal abolition.

Affirmative Action, Justice Kennedy, And The Virtues Of The Middle Ground, Allen K. Rostron

Faculty Works

When the Supreme Court hears arguments this fall about the constitutionality of affirmative action policies at the University of Texas, attention will be focused once again on Justice Anthony Kennedy. With the rest of the Court split between a bloc of four reliably liberal jurists and an equally solid cadre of four conservatives, the spotlight regularly falls on Kennedy, the swing voter that each side in every closely divided and ideologically charged case desperately hopes to attract. Critics condemn Kennedy for having an unprincipled, capricious, and self-aggrandizing style of decision-making. Though he is often decisive in the sense of casting …

Roe's Race: The Supreme Court Decision, Legal History, And The Racial Politics Of Abortion, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Questions of race and abortion have shaped current legal debates about defunding Planned Parenthood and banning race-selection abortion. In these discussions, abortion opponents draw a close connection between the eugenic or population-control movements of the twentieth century and the contemporary abortion-rights movement. In challenging legal restrictions on abortion, abortion-rights activists generally insist that their movement and its predecessors have primarily privileged reproductive choice.

Notwithstanding the centrality of race to abortion politics, there has been no meaningful history of the racial politics of abortion that produced or followed Roe v. Wade. This Article bridges this gap in the abortion discussion by …

Federal Constraints On States’ Ability To License An Undocumented Immigrant To Practice Law , Adam Wright

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

No court has decided whether an undocumented immigrant can be admitted to a state bar in a manner consistent with federal law. At the time of this writing, the issue is pending before the California Supreme Court. Federal law prohibits states from providing public benefits to undocumented immigrants. In its definition of a “public benefit,” 8 U.S.C. § 1621 includes any professional license “provided by an agency of a State . . . or by appropriated funds of a State . . . .” The law’s prohibitions, however, are not unqualified. The statute’s “savings clause” allows states to provide public …

'May It Please The Court?': A Short Story, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

This story tells a fictional account of a black woman lawyer who is about to try the biggest case of her life. While many black women lawyers seek to express their individuality and bring the best of themselves into their work and lives, conventions and norms about race and gender force them to give huge attention to things that likely matter little in the long run. In this story, we go on a journey of self-discovery with the protagonist, Angel, in hopes that she will be able to please the court in this—her trial of a lifetime.

Partisanship, Politics, And The Voting Rights Act: The Curious Case Of U.S. V. Ike Brown, Donald E. Campbell

Journal Articles

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been described as the "crown jewel" of the Civil Rights Movement. The success of the Act to remove official obstacles to voting is undeniable, and the influx of African American voters into the political system changed the nature of politics in the United States at all levels. The political and cultural context has changed so greatly that in 2006, it was politically possible for the President Bush's Justice Department to bring the first claim against an African American for violating the voting rights of white citizens. This article seeks to explain how this …

Why Police Learn From Third-Party Data, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This essay argues that third-party data collection, particularly of administrative complaints and departmental audit information, holds greater promise than lawsuit data collection. It does so by asserting that third-party data collection is more useful for three reasons. First, third-party data collection prevents manipulation by individual police officers and law enforcement agencies. Second, it assures that police behavioral trends are actually identified. Lastly, third-party data collection helps to deter published § 1983 cases. The essay, however, only models and tests the final claim.

Next Generation Civil Rights Lawyers: Race And Representation In The Age Of Identity Performance, Anthony V. Alfieri, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Articles

This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati's Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America, and utilizes their insights to both explore the challenges that face the next generation of civil rights lawyers and offer suggestions on how this next generation of civil rights lawyers can overcome these difficulties. Overall, this Book Review highlights one similarity in the roles of black civil rights attorneys past and present: the need for lawyers in both generations to perform their identities in …

Complementarity And Post-Coloniality, Nirej S. Sekhon

Faculty Publications By Year

The International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction is complementary to that of national criminal jurisdictions. While most agree that complementarity is a cornerstone principle, debate continues as to what precisely it should mean for the ICC’s relationship to national criminal justice actors. “Positive complementarity,” a view many commentators hold, suggests that the ICC should use its power to educate, persuade, and prod states parties to undertake international criminal law investigations. For positive complementarity’s more optimistic proponents, the future holds promise for a coordinated system of global justice in which the ICC plays a secondary role to national courts in vindicating international criminal …

Invisible Histories & The Failure Of Protected Classes, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

Our legal history suggests that the evolution of our discrimination law has been and likely should be the continuing enumeration of protected classes. There is, however, a counter-intuitive problem: protecting specific groups suggests to the public that everyone else is fair game, providing implicit legitimacy to other harmful stereotypes. To illustrate this problem this article constructs the legal history of stereotypes and prejudicial acts against Appalachians, a marginalized group that does not fit neatly in the protected categories. Considering then how our courts have treated the relationship between stereotypes and discrimination, along with recent sociological evidence, this article suggests that …

Integration Reclaimed: A Review Of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness, Michelle Adams

Articles

Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. Today, more Americans are committed to integration than ever before. Yet this attachment to integration is hardly robust. There is a widespread perception that integration has failed. A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic resources are spent on integration. At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the "left" criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and culture. Scholars from across the political spectrum have sought to explain this …

It's [Not] A Black Thing: The Black/Gay Split Over Same-Sex Marriage - A Critical [Race] Perspective, Adele M. Morrison

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

“You Will See My Family Became So American”: Immigration, Racial Visibility, And Specular Citizenship, Sherally Munshi

Studio for Law and Culture

This paper explores the vexed relationship between legal form and personhood that arises in the context of Indian immigration and naturalization in the early twentieth century. In 1932, Dinshah P. Ghadiali received notice that the government was seeking to cancel his citizenship on grounds of “racial ineligibility.” In his self-published writing about the trial, Ghadiali wondered whether he been singled out for persecution by professional rivals. In fact, he had been caught in a larger campaign to denaturalize citizens of Indian origin after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), determined that “Hindus” were racially ineligible …

We Are Always Already Imprisoned: Hyper-Incarceration And Black Male Identity Performance, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this Essay, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper recenters the experiences of men of color, particularly those of black men, in light of Reagan's War on Drugs and recent scholarship illustrating the over-representation of men of color in prison for petty drug use. The mainstream's depiction of black men as always already imprisoned disciplines us into the never-finished quest to prove we are a "Good Black Man," rather than a "Bad Black Man." In order to propose greater empathy for black men's imprisonment, this article proceeds in the following manner. In Part I, Professor Cooper sets the stage for considering the …

How I Rode The Bus To Become A Professor At The University Of Denver Sturm College Of Law; Reflections On Keyes's Legacy For The Metropolitan, Post-Racial, And Multiracial Twenty-First Century, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Did Booker Increase Sentencing Disparity? Why The Evidence Is Unpersuasive, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

The Sentencing Commission’s recent report on the effects of United States v.Booker makes a number of very worri- some claims.The most alarming is that the gap in sen- tences between otherwise similar Black and White men has nearly quadrupled: from 4.5 percent before Booker, to 15 percent after it, to 19.5 percent after United States v. Kimbrough and United States v.Gall. 1 The Commission further claims that interjudge disparity has increased in two-thirds of the federal districts, and that interdistrict variation has also increased.2 If its findings were accurate, and if these changes could be causally attributed to Booker and …

Mandatory Sentencing And Racial Disparity, Assessing The Role Of Prosecutors And The Effects Of Booker, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi

Articles

This Article presents new empirical evidence concerning the effects of United States v. Booker, which loosened the formerly mandatory U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, on racial disparities in federal criminal cases. Two serious limitations pervade existing empirical literature on sentencing disparities. First, studies focus on sentencing in isolation, controlling for the “presumptive sentence” or similar measures that themselves result from discretionary charging, plea-bargaining, and fact-finding processes. Any disparities in these earlier processes are excluded from the resulting sentence-disparity estimates. Our research has shown that this exclusion matters: pre-sentencing decision-making can have substantial sentence-disparity consequences. Second, existing studies have used loose causal inference …

Landscape Fairness: Removing Discrimination From The Built Environment, Stephen Clowney

Utah Law Review

At its core, this Article argues that the everyday landscape is one of the most overlooked instruments of modern race-making. Drawing on evidence from geography and sociology, the paper begins by demonstrating that the built environment inscribes selective and misleading versions of the past in solid, material forms. These narratives — told through street renamings, parks, monuments, and buildings — ultimately marginalize African-American communities and transmit ideas about racial power across generations.

After demonstrating that the landscape remains the agar upon which racial hierarchies replicate themselves, the Article then pivots and examines current efforts to rid the built environment of …

South Carolina's 'Evolutionary Process', Ellen D. Katz

Articles

When Congress first enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, public officials in South Carolina led the charge to scrap the new statute. Their brief to the Supreme Court of the United States described the VRA as an “unjustified” and “arbitrary” affront to the “Equality of Statehood” principle, and a “usurp[ation]” of the State’s legislative and executive functions. Not surprisingly, the Warren Court was unpersuaded and opted instead to endorse broad congressional power to craft “inventive” remedies to address systematic racial discrimination and to “shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of evil to its victims.” …

Shelby County V. Holder: Why Section 2 Matters, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Editor’s Note: Professor Ellen D. Katz writes and teaches about election law, civil rights and remedies, and equal protection. She and the Voting Rights Initiative at Michigan Law filed a brief as amicus curiae in Shelby County v. Holder, on which the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments February 27. Here, she examines why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bears consideration in the case, which involves a challenge to Section 5 of the act.

Latina And Latino Judges: Changing The Complexion Of The Bench, Mary Dolores Guerra

Florida A & M University Law Review

Although having a diverse bench is instrumental to a fair judicial system, the first Mexican American was not appointed to the federal bench until 1961. In that year, President John F. Kennedy appointed Reynaldo G. Garza, to the U.S. federal bench as a district court judge. Judge Garza hoped that by becoming an "effective jurist" he would quell any scrutiny over his appointment and, moreover, "encourage [the] appointment of other qualified Mexican Americans to the federal bench." Judge Garza was the only Latino appointed to the federal bench until 1979 when President Jimmy Carter appointed several Latinos to the bench, …

A Latina Law Professor's Personal Perspective After The Zimmerman Trial Verdict, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

Black Women's Post-Slavery Silence Syndrome: A Twenty-First Century Remnant Of Slavery, Jim Crow, And Systemic Racism--Who Will Tell Her Stories?, Patricia A. Broussard

Journal Publications

One hot summer's day in the late 1950s, a young mother put her three young children down for a nap. She also bathed and prepared four of her sister's children for naptime. This young woman had volunteered to care for her nephew and nieces while their mother, her younger sister, was in the hospital delivering her fifth child. A short while after putting all of the children in their beds, the children's father, her brother-in-law, knocked on the door. The young woman assumed that he had come over to see his children and to bring them news of their mother …

Reimagining Democratic Inclusion: Asian Americans And The Voting Rights Act, Ming Hsu Chen, Taeku Lee

Publications

The current legal framework for protecting voting rights in the United States has been dramatically destabilized by Supreme Court decisions re-interpreting the protections against minority vote dilution and requires rethinking to survive modern challenges. At the same time, the nation has itself undergone dramatic changes in the racial composition of its polity and in the complexity and salience of race as a factor in political life. In this paper, we focus on a relatively unexamined constituent of this complex reality of modern racial diversity that illustrates some of the core features that all minority groups face in continuing VRA challenges: …

Leniency As A Miscarriage Of Race And Gender Justice, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Untoward Consequences: The Ironic Legacy Of Keyes V. School District No. 1, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The Keyes case began with high hopes that desegregation would lead to educational equity for black and Latino students in the Denver Public Schools. The lawsuit made history by successfully using circumstantial evidence to establish intentional discrimination and bring court-ordered busing to a school system outside the South. In the intervening years, that initial success became laden with irony. Because Denver was a tri-ethnic community of whites, blacks, and Latinos, the litigation revealed the complexities of pursuing reform in a school district not defined by a history of black-white relations.

The courts had to decide whether Latinos would count as …

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate.

Shattered Dreams: An Analysis Of The Georgia Board Of Regents' Admissions Ban From A Constitutional And International Human Rights Perspective, Azadeh Shahshahani, Chaka Washington

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

Access to higher education for undocumented immigrants is a highly debated issue across the country. While some states have been more inclusive of undocumented students, other states have implemented laws which make higher education unattainable for this group. In 2008, South Carolina enacted House Bill 4400 which bars undocumented immigrants from attending public colleges and universities. The University System of Georgia is, so far, the only other public university system to enact a policy which outright bans undocumented students from certain colleges.

This article begins by discussing the Georgia Board of Regents' ban from a constitutional perspective, applying an equal …

A Local Official's Guide To Language Access Laws, David Jung, Noemi Gallardo, Ryan Harris

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

Sharp growth in immigration has introduced California to a large number of persons who do not speak and understand English well enough to make use of basic social services. These individuals may not know what public services are available, may not be able to communicate with local officials, and may not receive information that local agencies release to the public. Local agencies throughout California should ensure that all their services are accessible to persons for whom English is a barrier to understanding.

This article first explains why the California and federal constitutions forbid laws requiring that services be provided in …