Law and Race Commons^™

Measuring Environmental Justice: Analysis Of Progress Under Presidents Bush, Obama, And Trump, Mollie Soloway

Student Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

The Racial Architecture Of Criminal Justice, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

One of the pleasures of contributing to symposia—especially symposia where each contribution is brief—is the ability to engage in new explorations, test new ideas, and offer new provocations. I do that now in this essay about race, architecture, and criminal justice. I begin by discussing how race is imbricated in the architecture of courthouses, the quintessential place of supposed justice. I then take race and architecture a step further. If we think of architecture expansively—Lawrence Lessig’s definition of architecture as “the physical world as we find it” comes to mind—then it becomes clear that race is also imbricated in the …

Racial Transition, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Redeemers, Anthony M. Kreis

Georgia Law Review

This Article is about the long arc of a Second Redemption. A
new life to the politics of racial grievance surfaced in the wake
of a diversifying polity, a decline of rural power, and a Black
man’s rise to the American presidency. And that reinvigorated
force was the linchpin of Donald Trump’s ascendency to power.
Trump was a part of a broader conservative governing
coalition, which held its center of gravity in rural, white
America. Leading members of that coalition feverishly eroded
democratic norms to entrench minoritarian power. They
justified their pernicious work by claiming to be the true heirs …

Black Livelihoods Matter: Capitalist Myths Of Economic Efficiency In Racist Lending Policies (A Prologue And A Plea), Kim Vu-Dinh

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing The Voting Rights Act: Subnational Action And Voting Rights Post-1965, Sean M. Holly

Honors Theses

The discussion of suffrage and the development of the U.S. electorate is misguidedly based solely around federal action; constitutional amendments and federal legislation are commonly revered as primary determinants of the right to vote. This tendency poses a specific problem with contemporary discussions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Specifically, discussions of the VRA ignores the ability of subnational actors to innovate politically and readjust their vehicles of political development in the wake of federal supposition of state powers. The Voting Rights Act did not destroy state authority regarding the right to vote; it merely disrupted their vehicles of …

In Fear Of Black Revolutionary Contagion And Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, And The Genesis Of Racialized Structural Violence In American Foreign Policy And Immigration Law, Ciji Dodds

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This article investigates the power relation between the political anatomy of the Black soul and non-somatic expressions of white supremacy-based violence. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment in conjunction with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence, I posit that the exercise of state-sanctioned discipline and punishment in furtherance of white supremacy constitutes racialized structural violence. Thus, this article contributes to the current public discourse concerning the role white supremacy plays in America by establishing a new construct that can be used to dissect the nature of racial oppression.

Furthermore, this article analyzes the genesis and construction of racialized …

A Fare Share: A Proposed Solution To Address The Racial Disparity In Access To Public Transportation Funding In America, Michael Swistara

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Black American households are up to six times less likely to own a car than white families and are four times more likely to rely on public transportation to meet their daily needs. Despite this, communities of color have seen consistent disinvestment in their transit infrastructure. Four hundred years of continued housing segregation combined with post-recession austerity policies and ongoing pro-automobile bias has exacerbated this disparity. This Note proposes a straightforward legislative tool to begin to combat this inequity. The proposed legislation would require that urbanized areas spend their public transit dollars according to the population density of the communities …

Origin Stories: Critical Race Theory Encounters The War On Terror, Natsu Taylor Saito

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Stories matter. They matter to those intent on maintaining structures of power and privilege, and to those being crushed by those structures. In the United States, the space to tell, and to hear, our stories has been expanding. This means that the histories and lived realities of those who have been excluded, particularly people of color, are seeping into mainstream discourse, into the books our children read, the movies and television shows they watch, and the many websites comprising social media. Critical race theory has played a role in this expansion. It insists that we recognize the legitimacy of the …

No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico And Constitutional Obligation, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.

Looking Toward Restorative Justice For Redlined Communities Displaced By Eco-Gentrification, Helen H. Kang

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

MJEAL chose to publish Helen Kang’s piece, Looking Toward Restorative Justice for Redlined Communities Displaced by Eco-Gentrification, because it offers a unique analytic approach for analyzing the roots of environmental racism and the appropriate tools to help rectify it. She offers an argument for why restorative justice needs to be the framework and explains how we can accomplish this in the context of a whole government solution. MJEAL is excited to offer what will be an influential approach for environmental restorative justice to the broader activist and academic community.

Toward A Race-Conscious Critique Of Mental Health-Related Exclusionary Immigration Laws, Monika Batra Kashyap

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article employs the emergent analytical framework of Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) to offer a race-conscious critique of a set of immigration laws that have been left out of the story of race-based immigrant exclusion in the United States—namely, the laws that exclude immigrants based on mental health-related grounds. By centering the influence of the white supremacist, racist,and ableist ideologies of the eugenics movement in shaping mental health-related exclusionary immigration laws, this Article locates the roots of these restrictive laws in the desire to protect the purity and homogeneity of the white Anglo- Saxon race against the threat of …

When Critical Race Theory Enters The Law & Technology Frame, Jessica M. Eaglin

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Michigan Technology Law Review is proud to partner with our peers to publish this essay by Professor Jessica Eaglin on the intertwining social construction of race, law and technology. This piece highlights how the approach to use technology as precise tools for criminal administration or objective solutions to societal issues often fails to consider how laws and technologies are created in our racialized society. If we do not consider how race and technology are co-productive, we will fail to reach substantive justice and instead reinforce existing racial hierarchies legitimated by laws.

Law And Anti-Blackness, Michele Goodwin

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and hate, creating race and otherness through legislating reproduction— literal and figurative. Part II turns to the Thirteenth Amendment. It argues that the preservation of slavery endured through …

Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons For The Gig Economy, Yvette Butler

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow …

And What Of The “Black” In Black Letter Law?: A Blaqueer Reflection, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

This is a reflective, analytical essay remarking on the role that Blackness has and continues to play in the construction, understanding and application of "black letter law." This essay is written from a Black and BlaQueer perspective and displays how a shift in standpoint--moving from the invisible, standard white "reasonable person"--underscores and illuminates the current legal and sociopolitical crisis we find ourselves in. It is continuation of the discussion began in my earlier articles "Furtive Blackness: On Blackness & Being," "The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life" and the working paper "Sexual Profiling & BlaQueer Furtivity: BlaQueers On The …

Microaggressions, Questionable Science, And Free Speech, Edward Cantu, Lee Jussim

Faculty Works

The topic of microaggressions is hot currently. Diversity administrators regularly propagate lists of alleged microaggressions and express confidence that listed items reflect what some psychologists claim they do: racism that is, at the very least, unconscious in the mind of the speaker. Legal academics are increasingly leveraging microaggression research in theorizing law and proposing legal change. But how scientifically legitimate are claims by some psychologists about what acts constitute microaggressions? The authors—one a law professor, the other a psychologist—argue that the answer is “not much.” In this article, the authors dissect the studies, and critique the claims, of microaggression researchers. …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents.

Comparing Dadd V. Anoka County With Corbitt V. Vickers: Why Defendants Should Bear The Burden Of Establishing Qualified Immunity In A Motion To Dismiss, Aisha Green

American University Law Review

In the wake of last summer’s George Floyd protests, qualified immunity is once again at the forefront of the debate. Officials, such as police officers, can raise qualified immunity as an affirmative defense in response to allegations that they have violated an individual’s constitutional rights. The different interpretations of qualified immunity’s meaning, use, and scope among the circuit courts have contributed to the development of strong opinions on both sides of the defense.

Particularly, circuit courts are split over who bears the burden of establishing qualified immunity when defendants use it as a basis for a motion to dismiss under …

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreword.

The Deans' Roundtable, Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean Danielle Conway, Dean Tamara Lawson, Dean Mario Barnes, Dean L. Song Richardson

Seattle University Law Review

The Deans' Roundtable.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents.

Not Your Mule? Disrupting The Political Powerlessness Of Black Women Voters, Chinyere Ezie

University of Colorado Law Review

On the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, this Article reflects on the legacy of Black women voters. The Article hypothesizes that even though suffrage was hard fought, it has not been a vehicle for Black women to meaningfully advance their political concerns. Instead, an inverse relationship exists between Black women's political participation and their relative level of socioeconomic and political well-being. Taking recent national elections as a case study, the Article identifies two sources of Black women's political powerlessness: "caretaker voting" and the "trapped constituency problem." The Article concludes that Black women's strong voter turnout coupled with their …

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In Voting, Ming H. Chen, Hunter Knapp

University of Colorado Law Review

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This Essay describes several barriers facing immigrants and naturalized citizens that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers on the basis of immigrants and foreign-born voters having rights of semi-citizenship. By placing naturalization backlogs, voting restrictions, and reapportionment battles in the historical context of voter suppression, it provides a descriptive and normative account of the political misrepresentation of immigrants.

Introduction To The Special Issue: A Retrospective On Race In America, Angela S. Boettcher, Quintin H. Morse, Nora Rainey Olson Cooke, Erin Mclaughlin, Caroline Young, Charissa Wood, Sasha Strong, Natasha Viteri, Taylor Schad

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Constitution In Context: The Continuing Significance Of Racism, T. Alexander Aleinikoff

University of Colorado Law Review

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and sex. Many Title VII cases have arisen when an applicant's or employee's non-conformity with an employer's policy barring certain hairstyles or clothing has resulted in an adverse employment action, such as a denial or termination of employment. Generally, courts have not deemed an adverse employment action resulting from an applicant's or employee's non-conformity with an employment policy banning the display of mutable characteristics commonly associated with a particular racial or ethnic group a violation of Title VII's proscription …

Title Vii: What's Hair (And Other Race-Based Characteristics) Got To Do With It?, D. Wendy Greene

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Consumer Bankruptcy And Race: Current Concerns And A Proposed Solution, Edward J. Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fintech And Race-Based Inequality In The Home Mortgage And Auto Financing Markets, Winnie F. Taylor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Racial Reckoning Of Public Interest Law, Atinuke O. Adediran, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.