Law and Race Commons^™

Response To Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Jennifer Wriggins

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Issues of race and racism in the U.S. torts system continue to deserve much more attention from legal scholarship than they receive, and Keeping Cases from Black Juries is a valuable contribution. Studying racism as it infects the torts system is difficult because explicit de jure exclusions of black jurors are in the past; race is no longer on the surface of tort opinions; and court records do not reveal the race of tort plaintiffs, defendants, or jurors. Yet it is essential to try and understand the workings of race and racism in the torts system. The authors pose …

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.

Justice For Rodney King, Scott C. Burrell, Alan R. Dial, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

May 1992 letter from three Howard University School of Law students to President George H.W. Bush advocating that the United States Department of Justice invoke the Petite Policy to initiate a criminal action against the Los Angeles Police Department police officers responsible for brutally beating Rodney King despite the fact that these offers had been acquitted in a California state court. The letter, which was read in front of the White House by Thomas Mitchell to hundreds of people who had gathered to urge the federal government to take action, sets forth a clear legal basis to permit the Justice …

Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …

Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a …

From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, And Community Through Partition Sales Of Tenancies In Common, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

This article considers one of the primary ways in which African Americans have lost millions of acres of land that they were able to acquire in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning part of the twentieth century and the sociopolitical implications of this land loss. Specifically, this article highlights the fact that forced partition sales of tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs' property, have been a major source of black land loss within the African American community. The article argues that involuntary black land loss has had a significant negative impact upon …

Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, And The "Double Discount", Thomas W. Mitchell, Stephen Malpezzi, Richard K. Green

Thomas W. Mitchell

What impact does a forced sale have upon a property owner's wealth? And do certain characteristics of a property owner such as whether they are rich or poor or whether they are black or white, tend to affect the price yielded at a forced sale? This Article addresses arguments made by some courts and legal scholars who have claimed that certain types of forced sales result in wealth maximizing, economic efficiencies. The Article addresses such economic arguments by returning to first principles and reviewing the distinction between sales conducted under fair market value conditions and sales conducted under forced sale …

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Lisa T. Alexander

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …

Section 1: Moot Court: Pena-Rodriguez V. Colorado, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

Postracial Remedies, Derrick Darby, Richard E. Levy

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence is decidedly postracial. The Court has restricted the Equal Protection Clause to intentional discrimination by the government, concluding that the Constitution does not prohibit private acts of discrimination and rejecting challenges based on disparate impact, even when rigorous statistical analysis indicates that race is likely a factor. It has held that remedying the effects of past societal discrimination is an insufficient basis for race-specific remedies such as affirmative action. It has also ended remedies of this sort designed to combat previous state-sponsored racial discrimination, such as court-ordered desegregation measures in the schools and the …

Black Boys Matter: Developmental Equality, Nancy E. Dowd

Hofstra Law Review

The life course of Black boys is a stark reminder of the realities of inequality. While recent attention to policing and high profile deaths of Black youth and adults has raised consciousness of life-threatening situations, this focus exposes the most visceral and deadly aspect of a much larger set of issues. Those issues begin at birth, and are powerfully framed before adulthood, creating inequality particularly when the individual is most vulnerable, in childhood. This Article confronts the inequalities of Black boys and their subordination, as a vehicle to expose inequalities more generally based on children’s identities. The life course of …

Reserved Election: Boost For Multiracialism?, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Singapore is on the threshold of the most significant re-engineering to its constitutional architecture since the introduction of the Elected Presidency (EP) in 1991.

Education Rights And Wrongs: Publicly Funded Vouchers, State Consitutions, And Education Death Spirals, Michael Heise

Michael Heise

No abstract provided.

Colonialism And Constitutional Memory, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

The United States shares a number of basic traits with various British settler societies in the nonwhite world. These include longstanding histories in which colonists and their descendants divided legal, political, and economic rights between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be they expropriated indigenous groups or racial minorities. But Americans rarely think of themselves as part of an imperial family of settler polities and instead generally conceive of the country as quintessentially anti-imperial and inclusive. What explains this fact and what are its political consequences? This Article offers an initial response, arguing that a significant reason is the symbolic power of …

A Bronx Tale: Disposable People, The Legacy Of Slavery, And The Social Death Of Kalief Browder, D. Marvin Jones

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

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 …

Branded: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin, Shontavia Johnson

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Though existing for several millennia in various cultures, body modification through tattooing is becoming more popular in the United States. Twenty percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, and among Millennials this number grows to almost forty percent. As the popularity of tattoos has increased in recent years, so too have questions revolving around concepts of intellectual property and the plausible limitations of any rights stemming therefrom. This Article addresses the implications, for both the tattooist and the tattooed, of using trademarked designations as tattoos. Neither the courts nor Congress have definitively answered the question of how traditional trademark …

Newsroom: Horwitz On Marijuana Legalization 7/15/2016, John S. Kiernan, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

How We Move Beyond Dallas, Spencer Overton, Kami Chavis

Popular Media

Calls for healing and reconciliation in the wake of recent racial violence overlook the substantive, concrete steps that experts say would help forestall the next police tragedy.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: America's Cycle Of Violence 7-8-16, Michael Yelnosky

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Seeking A Balance: Judicial Diversity In Ri 7/7/2016, Michael M. Bowden, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Killing Two Achievements With One Stone: The Intersectional Impact Of Shelby County On The Rights To Vote And Access High Performing Schools, Steven L. Nelson

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The Civil Rights Movement sought to ensure access to the right to vote and to quality education. Although these two pursuits are historically inseparable, scholars have addressed education and voting rights as separate struggles within one movement. This Article addresses the intersection of educational equity and voting rights by assessing the role of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder on Black voters’ ability to participate in the politics of education and educational policy via school board selection processes. This Article argues that the Court’s decision in Shelby County restricted access to political participation for Black voters in …

The Fourth Sector: Creating A For-Profit Social Enterprise Sector To Directly Combat The Lack Of Social Mobility In Marginalized Communities, Carlos Jurado

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The United States is currently facing record high rates of income inequality and, as a result, there is a general lack of social mobility. This is troublesome for Americans because of the potential disastrous implications for the United States economy. The current state of the American market has enabled an environment where a few elite continue to hoard large amounts of the profits generated by the economy while the lower class has experienced a substantial growth in population with incomparable economic growth. In addition, the middle class has significantly diminished and can soon be rendered ineffective in its role as …

Fortitude In The Face Of Adversity: Delta Sigma Theta’S History Of Racial Uplift, Gregory S. Parks, Marcia Hernandez

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The common narrative about the African-American quest for social justice and civil rights during the 20th century consists, largely, of men and women working through

organizations to bring about change. The typical list of organizations includes, inter alia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. African- American collegiate-based sororities are almost never included in this list. Nevertheless, at the turn of the 20th century, a small group of organizations founded on personal excellence sparked the development and sustaining of fictive-kinship ties and racial …

Niños, Niñas Y Adolescentes In Guatemala: Reflections On The Implementation Of The Ley Pina, Stacy Kowalski

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This Note examines Guatemala’s Ley de Protección Integral de la Niñez y Adolescencia (Law for the Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents, or Ley PINA) and analyzes why this law has not effectively protected the rights of children and adolescents, within the context of historical and structural violence, which contribute to a lack of prioritization of youth in Guatemala. In 2014, the United States experienced a large influx of unaccompanied minors fleeing primarily from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. A delegate of attorneys and law students traveled to Guatemala to interview child advocates, including government officials, and representatives of non-governmental …

On Empathy, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Wheeler discusses the deadly mass shooting of June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, and his belief that more empathy is needed in the world. Wheeler then relates, through personal anecdotes, his own journey toward empathy. He concedes that there is no recipe for empathy, but believes that sharing personal stories can spur conversation, thinking, and collective action.

Societal Connection Between Blackness And Criminality Leads To Violence Against Innocent, Casey Bohrman

Casey Bohrman

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Op-Ed: Yelnosky On Judicial Selection 6-17-2016, Michael J. Yelnosky, Providence Journal, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.