Law and Race Commons^™

Human Rights Law And Racial Hate Speech Regulation In Australia: Reform And Replace?, Dr. Alan Berman

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement And White Power: An F.B.I. Report Unraveled, 41 T. Marshall L. Rev. 103 (2015), Samuel Vincent Jones

Samuel V. Jones

Because of intensifying civil strife over the recent killings of unarmed Black men, women, and boys, many Americans are wondering, “What's wrong with our police?” Remarkably, one of the most compelling but unexplored explanations may rest with an FBI warning of October, 2006, which reported that “[W]hite supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” represented a significant national threat.

The Incongruous Intersection Of The Black Panther Party And The Ku Klux Klan, Angela A. Allen-Bell

Seattle University Law Review

When, in 2015, a Louisiana prison warden publically likened the Black Panther Party to the Ku Klux Klan, I was stunned. The differences between the two groups seemed so extreme and so obvious I could not imagine ineptness of this magnitude. Not long after this, a Georgia legislator unashamedly express that the Ku Klux Klan was not a racist, terrorist group, but merely a vigilante group trying to keep law and order. After initial dismay, each of these instances evoked thoughts of the far-reaching implications of officials making operational and policy decisions around such a flawed appreciation of history. These …

Confronting Race And Collateral Consequences In Public Housing, Ann Cammett

Seattle University Law Review

Access to affordable housing is one of the most critical issues currently facing low-income families. In many urban areas, rising costs, dwindling economic opportunity, and gentrification have foreclosed access to previously available rental stock and contributed to a crisis in housing. For African Americans lingering economic disparities arising from generations of forced racial segregation and the disproportional impact of mass incarceration have magnified these problems. In this Article I explore legal barriers to publicly subsidized housing, a “collateral consequence” of criminal convictions that increasingly serves as a powerful form of housing discrimination. Evictions, denial of admission, and permanent exclusion of …

Editors' Introduction, Melanie O'Brien, Joann Digeorgio-Lutz, Lior Zylberman, Christian Gudehus, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Randle Defalco, Hilary Earl

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Thirteenth Amendment, Disparate Impact, And Empathy Deficits, Darrell A.H. Miller

Seattle University Law Review

Modern civil rights policy is, as the late Justice Scalia warned, at “war.” On the one hand, some laws, like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) and the Fair Housing Act, can impose liability for decisions due to their racial impacts rather than their racial motivation. Defendants in such cases can always respond that the challenged decision (a test, a criterion, an allocation) is necessary in some legally cognizable sense; but the courthouse doors open with the prima facie case of disparate impact. On the other hand, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, ever since …

The Thirteenth Amendment, Human Trafficking, And Hate Crimes, Jennifer Mason Mcaward

Seattle University Law Review

The two most recent federal statutes passed pursuant to Congress’s Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power are the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) and the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Act of 2009. While the Thirteenth Amendment basis of the TVPA has never been questioned in court, the constitutionality of the Shepard-Byrd Act has been challenged (albeit unsuccessfully) in a series of recent cases. This Essay will consider this disparity and suggest that it tells us something about the parameters of the Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power. In particular, it suggests that congressional power is at its apex when the conduct regulated—like human …

Class As Caste: The Thirteenth Amendment’S Applicability To Class-Based Subordination, William M. Carter Jr.

Seattle University Law Review

The Thirteenth Amendment currently enjoys a robust renaissance among legal scholars who contend that it provides a judicial remedy for and congressional authority to proscribe the “badges and incidents of slavery.” As discussed below, this interpretation, although not self- evident from the Amendment’s bare text, is well supported by the Amendment’s history and context, the Framers’ explicit intentions, the legislative debates in Congress leading to the Amendment’s adoption, and the contemporaneous legal understanding of the ways in which the Slave Power that had come to dominate and distort American society. This Article briefly explores whether the Thirteenth Amendment applies to …

A New Peonage?: Pay, Work, Or Go To Jail In Contemporary Child Support Enforcement And Beyond, Noah D. Zatz

Seattle University Law Review

Child support enforcement is one of several contemporary contexts in which the state threatens to incarcerate people if they fail to work. This symposium essay explores whether this practice violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude. At first glance, such threats fall squarely within the ambit of the early 20th century peonage cases. There, the Supreme Court struck down criminal enforcement of legal obligations to work off a debt. Several modern courts have declined to reach a similar conclusion when child support enforcement puts obligors to a choice between paying, working, and going to jail. To do so, these …

Slave Contracts And The Thirteenth Amendment, John C. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

The Thirteenth Amendment—the commandment that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States”— did not truly eradicate incidents of slavery. This is hardly a controversial point. The postwar emergence of the Black Codes—laws meant to confine African Americans’ ability to rent, travel, and live as free humans would expect to—ensured that slavery’s conditions continued unabated. The Amendment itself permits slavery to exist “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Still, did the Thirteenth Amendment not abolish the most fundamental characteristic of chattel slavery—the ability to trade in and …

Sub-Saharan Africa: The Right Of Intervention In The Name Of Humanity, R. H. Payne

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Between Black And White: The Coloring Of Asian Americans, 14 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 637 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

Kim D. Chanbonpin

As in other ethnic and racial groups, colorism plays a significant role in the social interactions in and among Asian Americans. Investigating colorism in the Asian American community provides insights into how group members construct their own racial identities in relation to the broader race-stratified society. A colorism inquiry is a necessary intervention into the existing discourse of Asian American identity construction because it complicates common understandings of the Black/White binary in ways that shed new light on inter- and intra-racial relationships. This article addresses colorism in the Asian American community, and demonstrates both how Asian Americans have been racialized …

The Myth Of The “Welfare Queen”: Reproductive Oppression In The Welfare System, Emily R. Champlin

Poverty Law Conference & Symposium

This paper focuses on two major policy flaws that are rooted in the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen.” These policies work together to punish single motherhood and deny poor women the ability to control their own reproductive futures. They were enacted under the guise that they will stop the cycle of poverty. In reality, they drive women and families deeper into it.

First, in the background section, this paper gives an overview of the history of the “welfare queen” myth and the dramatic changes in the U.S. welfare system. In the analysis section, part one covers the family cap …

Myth: Hard Work And Credentials Determine Employment Opportunities

Alev Dudek

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook Iii

Brooklyn Law Review

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …

Rationed Justice, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

In the United States, "equal justice under law" is at the very forefront of our American justice system. "Equal justice" is meant to guarantee equal access to the justice system. "Equal access to the judicial process is the sin qua non of a just society." Many Americans, however, do not have any access to the justice system, never mind that of equal access. "Equal justice" has not reached the nation's indigent, or even many of our moderate-income citizens.

The 'New Selma' And The Old Selma: Arizona, Alabama, And The Immigration Civil Rights Movement In The Twenty-First Century, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

In his unfinished manuscript, “The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB 56,” the late Raymond A. Mohl, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, directly and succinctly identified the true nature of the motivations behind the passage of HB 56 in the Alabama legislature. Professor Mohl observed that “nativist fears of large numbers of ethnically different newcomers, especially over job competition and unwanted cultural change, sometimes referred to as “cultural dilution,” provided political cover for politicians who sought to control and regulate immigration within state borders, but also to push illegal …

Independence And Immigration, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Australians' "Right" To Be Bigoted: Protecting Minorities' Rights From The Tyranny Of The Majority, Jillian Rudge

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia’s few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of …

Owning Red: A Theory Of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group of the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents make contemporary headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within a historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands, artifacts, bodies, religions, identities, and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian …

The Thirteenth Amendment, Disparate Impact, And Empathy Deficits, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 9) (2016), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.