Law and Race Commons^™

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

Justice And Law Journals, Gabriel "Jack" Chin, Adam B. Wolf

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

What is the role for a law journal in advancing justice? What is the role of a justice-minded practitioner in furthering legal scholarship? And what is the intersection—practically and normatively—for law journals, legal scholars, practitioners, and justice? This brief Article attempts to lay a foundation for answering these important, but oft-neglected, questions. In the following conversation, a frequent contributor to the Michigan Journal of Race & Law (MJRL) and a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal posit some ideas on how legal scholarship engages with justice, and how race-conscious practitioners can interact with race-conscious legal scholars.

Playing Cowboys And Iranians: Selective Colorblindness And The Legal Construction Of White Geographies, John Tehranian

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article examines the selective invocation of colorblindness in legal and political discourse and argues that the trope has served as a powerful vehicle for the creation, perpetuation, and patrolling of white geographiesspaces characterized by an implicit hierarchy privileging white racial identity. After assessing the new rhetoric of race in the Age of Obama, the Article focuses on identifying and deconstructing the modern paradox of colorblindness jurisprudence. On the one hand, the courts have increasingly hewed to a colorblind vision of the Constitution when weighing the permissibility of race-based admissions and hiring programs for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. And, yet, on …

'Truth And Reconciliation': A Critical Step Toward Eliminating Race And Gender Violations In Tenure Wars, Angela Mae Kupenda, Tamara F. Lawson

Journal Articles

In this Article, the co-authors confront one of the next generation issues for underrepresented groups in legal education: what happens after tenure victories, especially for the victors in a war wrought with gender and racial inequities? Even if all is fair in love, war, and tenure battles, it remains most troubling when, even in this century, acts of racial and/or gender aggression are targeted at qualified tenure candidates. These violations of the "tenure rules of engagement" based on implicit or explicit racial or gender bias preserve discriminatory practices that impact underrepresented groups and maintain the status quo in the academy …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article addresses the Cherokee Nation and its historic conflict with the descendants of its former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This Article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red, and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American), and European-ancestored people of the United States have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and the past and continuing use of skin color-coded belonging not only undermines the coherence of Cherokee sovereignty, identity, and belonging but also problematizes the notion of an explicitly aboriginal way of …

The Mismatch Myth In U.S. Higher Education: A Synthesis Of The Empirical Evidence At The Law School And Undergraduate Levels, William C. Kidder, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education commonly cite two principles to justify their opposition. One is that admissions to institutions of higher education should be based on "merit," which is often treated by critics of affirmative action as consisting of little more than test score results and high school or undergraduate grades. The second is the legal and moral imperative of not making consequential decisions based on race. We shall not address these principles except to note that others have shown that they do not make the case against affirmative action (Carbado & Harris 2008, Shultz & Zedeck 2011, …

Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud, Athena Mutua, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

In The Name Of The Child: Race, Gender, And Economics In Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case is ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. This Article demonstrates that it is about a lot more than that. It is a microcosm of anxieties about Indianness, race, and the changing nature of parenthood. While made in the name of the child, moreover, the decision supports practices and policies that do not forward and may …

2015-2016 Course Development Grants For Uf Graduate Students, Anju K. Davidson

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

No abstract provided.

Crisis And Trigger Warnings: Reflections On Legal Education And The Social Value Of The Law, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 615 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by understanding the law school crisis through the framework of disaster capitalism. This framing uncovers the ways in which reformers are taking advantage of the current crisis to restructure legal education. Under the circumstances, faculty may reasonably read the contemporaneous student-led movement to require trigger warnings in the classroom as an assault on academic freedom. This reading, however, clouds the water. Part II attempts to clear the confusion by decoupling the trigger-warning movement from the broader phenomenon of law school corporatization. Trigger-warning demands might alternatively be read as a student critique of traditional law school pedagogy. Especially …

Jurisprudential Ties That Blind: The Means To Ending Affirmative Action, Tanya M. Washington

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Stereotype Threat And Racial Differences In Citizens’ Experiences Of Police Encounters, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Bette L. Bottoms, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We conducted 2 studies to investigate how cultural stereotypes that depict Blacks as criminals affect the way Blacks experience encounters with police officers, expecting that such encounters induce Blacks to feel stereotype threat (i.e., concern about being judged and treated unfairly by police because of the stereotype). In Study 1, we asked Black and White participants to report how they feel when interacting with police officers in general. As predicted, Blacks, but not Whites, reported concern that police officers stereotype them as criminals simply because of their race. In addition, this effect was found for Black men but not Black …

Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court requires that equal protection plaintiffs prove defendants acted with discriminatory intent. The intent rule has insulated from judicial invalidation numerous policies that harmfully impact racial and ethnic minorities. Court doctrine also mandates that state actors generally remain colorblind. The colorblindness doctrine has led to the judicial invalidation of policies designed to ameliorate the conditions of racial inequality. Taken together, these two equality doctrines facilitate racial domination. The Court justifies this outcome on the ground that the Constitution does not protect "group rights. "

Constitutional law theorists have criticized these aspects of equal protection doctrine. Recently, however, some …

Race And Rapport: Homophily And Racial Disadvantage In Large Law Firms, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

Over the past two decades, clients and other constituencies have pushed large law firms to pursue greater racial diversity in attorney hiring and retention. Although these firms have devoted extraordinary resources toward better recruiting and retaining attorneys of color, and despite a proliferation of “best practices” guides and diversity policy recommendations, these considerable efforts have yielded only modest gains. With respect to black attorneys in particular, the tide of racial progress in these firms has moved forward at a glacial pace, even ebbing and receding in recent years.

Although large law firms now hire significant numbers of black attorneys as …

2015-2016 Course Development Grants For Uf Faculty, Anju K. Davidson

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

No abstract provided.

Feminism In Yellowface, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

This article analyzes the relationship between sexualized stereotypes of Asian women, specifically the Asian prostitute epitomized in the Suzie Wong stereotype, and the tendency of American immigration law, even in pro-women legislation such as the TVPA, to promote conservative norms regarding female sexuality and domesticity. Part I explains the significance of Asian prostitution in the history and evolution of United States immigration policy. In the nineteenth century, the Asian prostitute was constructed as the antithesis to normative American sexuality, as a foreign peril that threatened the integrity of the American domestic unity and therefore required rejection and exclusion. Part II …

Always Already Suspect: Revising Vulnerability Theory, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Martha Fineman proposes a post-identity "vulnerability" approach that focuses on burdens we all share; this article argues that theory needs to incorporate recognition of how invisible privileges exacerbate some people's burdens. Vulnerability theory is based on a recognition that we are all born defenseless, become feeble, must fear natural disasters, and might be failed by social institutions. It thus argues for a strong state that takes affirmative steps to insure substantive equality of opportunity. While vulnerability theory might help explain and remedy situations like Hurricane Katrina, it also might be susceptible to an argument that racial profiling is a necessary …

The Keyes To Reclaiming The Racial History Of The Roberts Court, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

This Article advocates for a fundamental re-understanding about the way that the history of race is understood by the current Supreme Court. Represented by the racial rights opinions of Justice John Roberts that celebrate racial progress, the Supreme Court has equivocated and rendered obsolete the historical experiences of people of color in the United States. This jurisprudence has in turn reified the notion of color-blindness, consigning racial discrimination to a distant and discredited past that has little bearing to how race and inequality is experienced today.

The racial history of the Roberts Court is centrally informed by the context and …

Reconsidering Legal Regulation Of Race, Sex, And Sexual Orientation, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Access To Justice In The Poor People’S Courts, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

Access to justice efforts have been focused more on access than justice, due in part to the framing of access to justice issues around the presence or absence of lawyers. This article argues that access to justice scholars and activists should also think about social justice and provides a roadmap for running a legal services program geared toward making court systems more just. The article also further develops the concept of “poor people’s courts,” a term that has been used to describe courts serving large numbers of low-income people without representation. The article argues that access to justice efforts can …

Policing And The Clash Of Masculinities, Ann Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In 2014 and 2015, the news media inundated U.S. society with reports of brutal killings by police of black men in major American cities. Unfortunately, police departments do not typically keep data on police killings of civilians. The data that exist do show, however, that at least for a five-month period in 2015, there was a disproportionate rate of police killings of unarmed black men.

There is no question that race and class play a key role in the nature of policing that occurs in poor black urban neighborhoods, but the relationship between police officers and their victims is not …

Identity Property: Protecting The New Ip In A Race-Relevant World, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

This Article explores the relatively new idea in American legal thought that people of color are human beings whose dignity and selfhood are worthy of legal protection. While the value and protection of whiteness throughout American legal history is undeniable, non-whiteness' has had a more turbulent history. For most of American history, the concept of non-whiteness was constructed by white society and reinforced by law-i.e., through a process of socio-legal construction-in a way that excluded its possessor from the fruits of citizenship. However, people of color have resisted this negative construction of selfhood. This resistance led to the development of …

Still Fighting After All These Years: Minority Voting Rights 50 Years After The March On Washington, Deborah N. Archer

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Blind Spot: The Inadequacy Of Neutral Partisanship, Melissa Mortazavi

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

"Fuck Your Breath": Black Men And Youth, State Violence, And Human Rights In The 21st Century, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This polemical essay was written at the behest of Black men and youth, and it is dedicated to African American women who relentlessly fight to safeguard the rights and well-being of Black men, even when in the process their maltreatment and welfare are grossly overlooked and forgotten. Bree Newsome's courageous and necessary removal of the confederate flag in the South Carolina State House is a prime example of such fearless activism. Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur's-a former leader of the revolutionary organization known as the Black Liberation Armyascendency to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is another tragically intoxicating …

Spatial Terrorism, Dawinder S. Sidhu

Faculty Scholarship

Terrorism, under federal law, generally means an act of politically- or socially-motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. Terrorism within the meaning of federal law, in other words, exists only if a cognizable motive is uncovered. This definition also sees the United States as an undifferentiated landscape—by its own terms, it fails to take into account any geographic nuance in acts of mass violence. This Article suggests that spatial considerations are relevant in determining whether an act of mass violence constitutes an act of terrorism for purposes of federal law. It points to cities—which are characterized by a highly concentrated, fluid population, …

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Indigenous Peoples In The United States Of America, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

From Access To Success: Affirmative Action Outcomes In A Class-Based System, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Scholarly discussion about affirmative action policy has been dominated in the past ten years by debates over "mismatch theory'"--the claim that race-conscious affirmative action harms those it is intended to help by placing students who receive preferences among academically superior peers in environments where they will be overmatched and unable to compete. Despite serious empirical and theoretical challenges to this claim in academic circles, mismatch has become widely accepted outside those circles, so much so that the theory played prominently in Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas. This Article explores whether mismatch occurs in …

Administering Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court's evisceration of section …