Law and Race Commons^™

Rethinking Objectivity: The Problem Of Pretext In The Fourth Amendment, Monu S. Bedi

Indiana Law Journal

Pretextual encounters continue to erode the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Simply put, a police officer can act on personal bias or animus as long as the search or seizure is deemed “objectively reasonable.” Numerous scholars (e.g., Bennett Capers, Gabriel Chin, and David Harris) have critiqued this objective standard, contending it perpetuates discriminatory practices, particularly against communities of color. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself suggested that the Court might need to reconsider the legal precedent she helped establish. More recently, Orin Kerr has also argued that the Court’s reliance on objective determinations is inconsistent with …

System Disparities: Racial Criminalization And The Risk Of Coerced And False Confessions In Youth, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Black youth may be even more vulnerable than other youth to admitting to crimes they did not commit in the context of police interrogations. In support, analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations indicates that 65% of people who were wrongfully convicted on the basis of false confessions they gave when under 18 years old are Black, whereas only 14% of the U.S. population is Black. In this chapter, I seek to understand the overrepresentation of Black youth in samples of juvenile false confessors by examining the cultural stereotype about Black criminality in relation to both investigators and …

Generative Suspicion And The Risks Of Ai-Assisted Police Reports, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

Police reports play a central role in the criminal justice system. Many times, police reports exist as the only official memorialization of what happened during an incident, shaping probable cause determinations, pretrial detention decisions, motions to suppress, plea bargains, and trial strategy. For over a century, human police officers wrote the factual narratives that shaped the trajectory of individual cases and organized the entire legal system.

This practice is about to change with the creation of AI-assisted police reports. Today, with the click of a button, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI using predictive text capabilities, can …

Middle Schoolers Explore The Rule Of Law At Second Annual Mandell-Boisclair Justice Camp 7-17-2025, Jordan J. Phelan

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Middle Schoolers Explore The Rule Of Law At Second Annual Mandell-Boisclair Justice Camp 07-17-2025, Jordan J. Phelan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Healing Communities With Police Divestment: Seeking Abolition Through Transformative Reform And Community-Government Collaboration, Jessica E. Gillson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of the U.S. carceral system have persisted throughout the country’s history, recently fueling renewed activism and bipartisan calls for reform. However, proposed solutions remain divisive. This thesis first defines the current status of our prison systems, then explores collaborative alternatives to incarceration and policing that support communities and break cycles of incarceration.

Focusing on partnerships among local governments, community organizations, justice-involved individuals, and law enforcement, this study examines holistic approaches to crime prevention, reentry, and reintegration. Using an interdisciplinary framework incorporating restorative justice, community resilience, and systems theory, it investigates how community-based strategies can …

Survival Labor, Yvette Butler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.

The carceral system continues to disproportionately harm racial minorities and people living in poverty. The foundations of many laws regulating racialized bodies and the policing of those bodies has created a culture where blackness is equivalent to criminality. While a penal abolitionist framework is helpful …

Constitutionalizing Racism, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Unreasonable is Devon Carbado at his best. Through accessible prose, carefully crafted hypotheticals, effective visualizations, and some cross-examination (for the reader), Carbado reintroduces us to the Fourth Amendment. In arresting detail, Unreasonable" exposes how the Supreme Court has turned the Fourth Amendment against “the people”—and specifically, against people racialized as Black. Part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect “the right of the people” from police overreach. Yet over the past half-century, the Supreme Court has systematically repositioned the Fourth Amendment as a weapon of police power. Or as Carbado argues: whereas many assume …

Police Brutality & Unions: Collective Bargaining Is The Problem, Not Law Enforcement, Falco Anthony Muscante Ii

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

When Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and when Jason Van Dyke fired sixteen rounds at Laquan McDonald who was walking away from the responding officers, were Chauvin and Van Dyke acting exclusively of their own volition, or were their actions indicative of a deeper, systemic issue? Nearly 60% of law enforcement officers enjoy collective bargaining protections from their police unions, but these protections create a lack of accountability.

Police unions can bargain collectively with police departments because of state legislation, which typically allow for negotiation over matters affecting wages, hours, and terms and …

The Racialized History Of Vice Policing, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Vice policing targets the consumption and commercialization of certain pleasures that have been criminalized in the United States—such as the purchase of narcotics and sexual services. One might assume that vice policing is concerned with eliminating these vices. However, in reality, this form of policing has not been centered on protecting and preserving the moral integrity of the policed communities by eradicating vice. Instead, the history of vice policing provides an example of the racialized nature of policing in the United States. Vice policing has been focused on (1) maintaining racial segregation, (2) containing vice in marginalized communities, and (3) …

Black And Blue Police Arbitration Reforms, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests that engulfed the country after seeing a video of the appalling killing of a Black male, George Floyd, by a Minnesota police officer in 2020 has led to a tremendous number of questions about dealing with racial issues in policing. Similar concerns arose a little more than fifty years ago when police unions gained power to respond to the civil rights protests occurring during those times by establishing strong protections for their officers in light of brutality claims. This rhythmic progression of protests and union responses is destined to continue without any lasting reforms focused on …

Law School News: Joyce And Bill Cummings Of Cummings Foundation To Deliver Keynote Address At Rwu Commencement 4-20-2023, Jill Rodrigues

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Policing The College Campus: History, Race, And Law, Vanessa Miller, Katheryn Russell-Brown

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The structure, impact, and historical roots of campus policing on the American college campus receives little academic attention. In fact, campus policing is often overlooked in legal analyses and research studies, including its relationship to race. Campus policing and race deserves a critical assessment from legal scholars because race is fixed to the ways the criminal-legal system presents itself on campus. The racialized implications of policing on campus are rooted in historical social and legal contexts that still exist today. However, the lack of research on campus policing is not surprising. American colleges and universities have successfully marketed themselves as …

Sheriffs, Shills, Or Just Paying The Bills?: Rethinking The Merits Of Compelling Merchant Cooperation With Third-Party Policing In The Aftermath Of George Floyd’S Death, Stephen Wilks

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article frames the killing of George Floyd as the result of flawed business regulation. More specifically, it captures the expansion of third-party policing paradigms throughout local nuisance abatement regulations over a period of time that coincided with the militarization of policing culture across the United States. Premised on the notion that law enforcement alone cannot succeed in reducing crime and disorder, such regulations transform grocery stores, pharmacies, bars, and other retail spaces into surveillance hubs by prescribing situations that obligate businesses to contact the police. This regulatory framework, however, sustains the larger historical project of rationalizing enhanced scrutiny of …

A Synthesis Of The Science And Law Relating To Eyewitness Misidentifications And Recommendations For How Police And Courts Can Reduce Wrongful Convictions Based On Them, Henry F. Fradella

Seattle University Law Review

The empirical literature on perception and memory consistently demonstrates the pitfalls of eyewitness identifications. Exoneration data lend external validity to these studies. With the goal of informing law enforcement officers, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, judges, and judicial law clerks about what they can do to reduce wrongful convictions based on misidentifications, this Article presents a synthesis of the scientific knowledge relevant to how perception and memory affect the (un)reliability of eyewitness identifications. The Article situates that body of knowledge within the context of leading case law. The Article then summarizes the most current recommendations for how law enforcement personnel should—and …

No Justice, No Peace: The Need For A State Version Of § 1983 In Response To The Movement For Black Lives, Madison N. Heckel

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Mutual Liberation: The Use And Abuse Of Non–Human Animals By The Carceral State And The Shared Roots Of Oppression, Michael Swistara

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

The carceral state has used non–human animals as tools to oppress Black, Indigenous, and People of the Global Majority (BIPGM) for centuries. From bloodhounds violently trained by settlers to aid in their genocidal colonial project through the slave dogs that enforced a racial caste system to the modern deployment of police dogs, non–consenting non–human animals have been coopted into the role of agents of oppression. Yet, the same non– human animals are themselves routinely brutalized and oppressed by the carceral state. Police kill several thousands of family’s companion dogs every year in the United States. Law enforcement agencies train animals …

Bans With No Bite: Why Racial Profiling Bans Are Unable To Create Racial Justice In Policing, Rebecca Yin

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hip Hop And The Law : Presented By Intellectual Property Law Association 03/31/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (February 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming Safety: Participatory Research, Community Perspectives, And Possibilities For Transformation, Janet Moore

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This paper offers the first known interdisciplinary, community-based participatory research study to focus directly on two questions that have drawn increased attention in the wake of global protests over racialized police violence: 1) What is the definition of safety? and 2) How can safety be made equally accessible to all? The study is part of a larger project that was co-designed by community members and academic researchers. The project aimed to strengthen local justice reform efforts by adding new data literacy skills to existing community-organizing capacity among Black residents of the Cincinnati, Ohio metropolitan area. Community-led roundtable discussions offered community …

Suspicionless Policing, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

The tragic death of Elijah McClain—a twenty-three-year-old, slightly built, unarmed African American male who was walking home along a sidewalk when he was accosted by three Aurora, Colorado police officers—epitomizes the problems with policing that have become a prominent topic of national conversation. Embedded within far too many police organizations is a culture that promotes aggressive investigative behaviors and a disregard for individual liberties. Incentivized by a Supreme Court that has, over the course of several decades, empowered the police with expansive powers, law enforcement organizations have often tested—and crossed—the constitutional limits of their investigative authorities. And too often it …

Law School News: Dean's Distinguished Service Award 2021: Ralph Tavares 05/28/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Black Lives Matter Abroad, Too: Proposed Solutions To The Racialized Policing Of Ethiopian Jews In Israel, Samy Abdallah

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Note will first discuss the presence of Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and then compare their stature and rights (or lack thereof) to another insular group in Israel—Arab Palestinians. Finally, this Note will discuss possible solutions and remedies to these fatal police shootings. Considering that the possibility of criminal liability for officers is low, this Note will argue that both civil remedies and additional training for police are necessary to avert future shootings of Ethiopian Jews.

Law Library Blog (February 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Despite the recent movement against police violence, police officers have been endangering their communities by engaging in a new form of violence— policing while refusing to wear facial coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many states advise people to wear masks and to socially distance when in public spaces. However, police officers have frequently failed to comply with these guidelines as they interact with the public to enforce these COVID-19 laws. Police enforcement of COVID-19 laws is problematic for two reasons: (1) it provides a method for pathologizing marginalized communities as biological threats; (2) it creates a racialized pathway …

Improving Police Officer Accountability In Minnesota: Three Proposed Legislative Reforms, Jim Hilbert

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Refunding The Community: What Defunding Mpd Means And Why It Is Urgent And Realistic, Jli Vol. 39 Editorial Board

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Seven (At Least) Lessons Of The Myon Burrell Case, Leslie E. Redmond, Mark Osler

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

George Floyd's Legacy: Reforming, Relating, And Rethinking Through Chauvin's Conviction And Appeal Under A Felony-Murder Doctrine Long-Weaponized Against People Of Color, Greg Egan

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.