Law and Race Commons^™

Women Of Color And Health: Issues And Solutions, June Cross, Nia Weeks, Kristen Underhill, Chloe Bootstaylor

Faculty Scholarship

Chloe Bootstaylor: Welcome to our second panel. This panel focuses on women of color in health, issues, and solutions. The session is inspired by Professor June Cross of the Columbia School of Journalism and her recent film, Wilhemina’s War, which follows the story of Wilhemina Dixon and depicts the obstacles that Americans with HIV/AIDS face in accessing not only adequate healthcare but also financial, infrastructural, and social support in their communities.

This panel will consist of Professor Underhill and Nia Weeks. June Cross will join us a little later on. We will start with a clip from her film, …

Post-Racialism And The End Of Strict Scrutiny, David Schraub

Indiana Law Journal

In recent years, a growing social consensus has emerged around the aspiration of a “post-racial” America: one where race is no longer a fault line for social strife or, perhaps, a morally significant trait whatsoever. This ambition, however, lies in tension with the most basic constitutional principle governing our treatment of race in the public sphere: that of “strict scrutiny.” Post-racialism seeks to diminish the salience of race to near negligibility. The strict scrutiny of racial classifications, by contrast, significantly enhances the salience of race by treating it differently from virtually every other personal attribute or characteristic—including hair or eye …

Bringing Racial Justice To The Courtroom And Community: Race Matters For Juvenile Justice And The Charlotte Model, Susan Mccarter, Elisa Chinn-Gary, Louis A. Trosch, Jr., Ahmed Toure, Abraham Alsaeedi, Jennifer Harrington

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This article describes regional institutional organizing efforts to bring racial justice to the Charlotte courts and community through a collaborative called Race Matters for Juvenile Justice (RMJJ). The authors explain community and institutional organizing in-depth using the example of minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system, but recognize the pervasiveness of racial and ethnic disparities. Moreover, as the Race Matters for Juvenile Justice-Charlotte Model has gained national prominence, many jurisdictions seek to replicate the collaborative and the authors, therefore, provide RMJJ’s history as well as strategies for changing the narrative through communication and education, workforce development, data and research, community …

Undignified: The Supreme Court, Racial Justice, And Dignity Claims, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a formal equality mandate. In response, legal scholars have advocated alternative conceptions of equality, such as antisubordination theory, that interpret equal protection in more substantive terms. Antisubordination theory would consider the social context in which race-based policies emerge and recognize material distinctions between policies intended to oppress racial minorities and those designed to ameliorate past and current racism. Antisubordination theory would also closely scrutinize facially neutral state action that systemically disadvantages vulnerable social groups. The Court has largely ignored these reform proposals. Modern Supreme Court rulings, however, have invoked the …

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

The criminal justice system has expanded dramatically over the last several decades, extending its reach into family life. This expansion has disproportionately and negatively impacted Black communities and social networks, including Black families. Despite these pervasive shifts, legal scholars have virtually ignored the intersection of criminal, family, and racial justice. This Article explores the gap in literature in two respects. First, the Article weaves together criminal law, family law, and racial justice by cataloging ways in which the modern criminal justice state regulates family life, particularly for Black families. Second, the Article examines the depth of criminal justice interference in …

Integration Reclaimed: A Review Of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness, Michelle Adams

Articles

Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. Today, more Americans are committed to integration than ever before. Yet this attachment to integration is hardly robust. There is a widespread perception that integration has failed. A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic resources are spent on integration. At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the "left" criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and culture. Scholars from across the political spectrum have sought to explain this …

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate.

Engendering The History Of Race And International Relations: The Career Of Edith Sampson, 1927–1978, Gwen Jordan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Edith Sampson was one of the leading black women lawyers in Chicago for over fifty years. She was admitted to the bar in 1927 and achieved a number of firsts in her career: the first black woman judge in Illinois, the first African American delegate to the United Nations, and the first African American appointed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sampson was also a pro-democracy, international spokesperson for the U.S. government during the Cold War, a position that earned her scorn from more radical African Americans, contributed to a misinterpretation of her activism, and resulted in her relative obscurity …

What A Load Of Hope: The Post-Racial Mixtape, Jeremiah Chin

Articles

This Comment analyzes how Supreme Court decisions and recent legislation have used the language of post-racialism to re-center whiteness through the law. Rather than using explicit racist language, the post-racial project exploits the language of historical antiracist efforts to negate experiences with discrimination while continuing a hostile environment for racial groups and promoting white supremacy in the United States.

Beginning with Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger, and school desegregation in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, this Comment analyzes …

From Private Violence To Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, And Social Control, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and rearticulate themselves within institutional settings to manufacture social punishment and human suffering. Beyond addressing the convergences between private and public power that constitute the intersectional dimensions of social control, this Article addresses political failures within the antiracism and antiviolence movements that may contribute to the legitimacy of …

Twenty Years Of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of postracialism. The Article will explore two central inquiries. This first query attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The Article hypothesizes that legal discourse presented a particularly legible template from which to demystify the role of reason and the rule of law in upholding the racial order. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT's trajectory in light of today's "post-racial" milieu. The Article posits …

Reading Charles Black Writing: "The Lawfulness Of The Segregation Decisions" Revisited, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

The year 2010 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charles L. Black, Jr.'s "The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions." Professor Black's magisterial essay on the Supreme Court's 1954-1955 decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and its companion cases is, by any account, a foundational text in the scholarly literature on race and law in the United States. Black's short but searing defense of Brown introduced ideas and arguments about race, about law, and about the law of race that transformed the field. I can think of no better way to celebrate this inaugural issue of the Columbia …

Activating Systemic Change Toward Full Participation: The Pivotal Role Of Boundary Spanning Institutional Intermediaries, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Racial and social justice advocacy is in an era of transition. Race continues to permeate people's lives and to structure the social and economic hierarchy, but often in complicated ways that elude bright line categories. Disparities frequently result from cognitive bias, unequal access to opportunity networks, and other structural dynamics, rather than from intentional exclusion. For example, disparities in access to higher education persist as a result of differences in access, information, resources, networks, and evaluation, which give rise to achievement differentials at each critical turning point affecting successful advancement. These differences accumulate to produce substantial disparities in college participation …

Reflecting On The Dream Of The Marathon Man: Black Dean Longevity And Its Impact On Opportunity And Diversity, Leroy Pernell

Journal Publications

At the beginning of the 2005-2006 academic year there was, what many viewed, as a comparatively bounteous crop of African-American deans of ABA-approved law schools. However, several changes during that year caused the crop to diminish rapidly. At the time of this writing, there are eighteen deans of color at American Bar Association approved law schools within the United States. Of these, fifteen are African-American and two are Latino. Of this number, five African-American deans are deans of law schools associated with historically black universities. These comments address, not necessarily the absolute number of African-American or Latino deans at any …

New Frameworks For Racial Equality In The Criminal Law, Jeffery Fagan, Mukul Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium, " Pursuing Racial Fairness in the Administration of Justice: Twenty Years After McClesky v. Kemp," was conceived and inspired by Theodore Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Ted Shaw and his staff worked with Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan to recruit an outstanding group of scholars and activists who met on March 2-3, 2007 to hear and comment on the articles appearing in this Symposium. In addition to the authors whose work appears in this issue, many others made important contributions to the Symposium through their commentaries and presentations. These …

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962): Lawyering In An Unjust Society, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race, Corporate Law, And Shareholder Value, Thomas W. Joo

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Integrating Racial Justice Into The Civil Procedure Survey Course, Kevin R. Johnson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Disposable Mothers, Deployable Children, Annette R. Appell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Review of Interracial IntimaciesL Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption by Randall Kennedy

Learning From Conflict: Reflections On Teaching About Race And Gender, Susan Sturm, Lani Guinier

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992 had been teaching for four years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I taught voting rights and criminal procedure, subjects related to what I had done as a litigator. Preparing for class meant reading many of the same cases I had read preparing for trial. Some were even cases I had tried. Teaching offered me a fresh chance to read those cases with new interest. I could see the subtle linkages between cases that I had not previously noticed. From the distance of the academy, I observed the evolution of the doctrine without feeling overcome by the …

Racial Justice: Moral Or Political?, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly one hundred years ago, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. Were he writing today, DuBois might well conclude that in the U.S., the problem of the coming century will be the problem of the color-bind. Although Americans arguably remain "the most 'race-conscious' people on earth," our national conversation about "race" now stands at an impasse. Our ways of talking, or refusing to talk, about race increasingly speak past the racialized dilemmas of educational equity, affirmative action, poverty, welfare reform, housing, lending, labor and employment discrimination, health …

The Uses Of History In Struggles For Racial Justice: Colonizing The Past And Managing Memory, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Commentary, Professor Katherine Franke offers an analysis on Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's California's Racial History and Constitutional Rationales for Race-Conscious Decision Making in Higher Education and Rebecca Tsosie's Sacred Obligations: Intercultural Justice and the Discourse of Treaty Rights. These two Articles, she observes, deploy history for the purposes of justifying certain contemporary normative claims on behalf of peoples of color: affirmative action in higher education for Delgado and Stefancic, and sovereignty rights for native peoples in Tsosie's case. Franke explores the manner in which stories of past conquest and discrimination contribute to contemporary conceptions of racial …

Prosecution And Race: The Power And Privilege Of Discretion, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article examines prosecutorial discretion and argues it is a major cause of racial inequality in the criminal justice system. It asserts that prosecutorial discretion may instead be used to construct effective solutions to racial injustice. The article maintains that since prosecutors have more power than any other criminal justice officials, with practically no corresponding accountability to the public they serve, they have the responsibility to use their discretion to help eradicate the discriminatory treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system.

Part I of the Article explains the importance and impact of the prosecution function. Part II discusses …

Race, Cops, And Traffic Stops, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article discusses the Supreme Court's failure to provide a clear and effective remedy for discriminatory pretextual traffic stops. The first part explores the discretionary nature of pretextual stops and their discriminatory effect on African-Americans and Latinos. Then, the article examines Whren v. United States, a Supreme Court case in which the petitioners claimed that these “pretextual stops” violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and are racially discriminatory. The Supreme Court rejected the claim, upholding the constitutionality of pretextual stops based on probable cause and noting that claims of racial discrimination must be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause. …

The Future Of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming The Innovative Deal, Susan Sturm, Lani Guinier

Faculty Scholarship

We are witnessing a broad-based assault on affirmative action – in the courts, the legislatures, and the media. Opponents have defined affirmative action as a program of racial preferences that threatens fundamental American values of fairness, equality, and democratic opportunity. Opponents successfully depict racial preferences as extraordinary, special, and deviant – a departure from prevailing modes of selection. They also proceed on the assumption that, except for racial or gender preferences, the process of selection for employment or educational opportunity is fair, meritocratic, and functional. Thus, they have positioned affirmative action as unnecessary, unfair, and even un- American.

Those of …