Law and Race Commons^™

The Empty Promises Of Diversity Mou's: How The Fcc Can Strengthen Commitments To Racial Equity, Jeleesa Omala

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

African Americans have been systematically disenfranchised from nearly all sectors of American society since the country’s founding. As such, African Americans do not just perceive the problem of racial discrimination as a matter of personal prejudice but also a matter of survival. Without access to fundamental resources like higher education, healthcare, and economic opportunity, the quality of Black life decreases astronomically. The nation begins to equate being Black with being “less than,” and continues to disinvest in Black populations, which signals to Black people that their lives do not matter.

Nevertheless, determined Black entrepreneurs continue to fight to expand …

Minimum Sentences, Maximum Suffering: A Proposal To Reform Mandatory Minimum Sentencing, Jordan Ramsey

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

This paper offers several proposals to reform mandatory minimum sentencing laws and asks how we can best uphold Freedom and the Rule of Law within sentencing law.

The War On Drugs, Moral Panics, And The Groundhog Day Effect: Confronting The Stereotypes That Perpetuate The Cycle Of Disparity, Tasha Withrow

The Mid-Southern Journal of Criminal Justice

There has been a specter haunting America for over 400 years. That specter is an insidious and destructive beast that has found its way into every crevice and layer of all American institutions. Racism, racial stereotypes, racial stigma, biases, and White supremacy has infiltrated every power structure since the foundation of America and has created a system of social control that has perpetually oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised generations of people of color. One of the most catastrophic by-products generated from America’s historic racist ideology has been that of the over-criminalization of people of color for drug crimes justified by discriminatory …

The Color Of Justice, Alexis Hoag

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pandemics And Housing Insecurity: A Blueprint For Land Use Law Reform, John R. Nolon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

COVID-19, racial inequity, housing insecurity, and climate change have come together to create widespread, large-scale crises. This Article introduces these four pandemics and describes in detail what local governments are doing to combat one of them: housing insecurity. It reviews recent progress with traditional inclusionary zoning requirements, discusses the move toward greater density in single-family zoning, lists strategies being used to remediate distressed housing, and notes the importance of affordable housing as a necessary strategy for preventing lower-income household displacement caused by gentrification. The reciprocal impacts of these four pandemics are clear; local land use leaders should examine how mitigating …

The Political And Social Change Driven By Protest: The Need To Reform The Anti-Riot Act And Examine Anti-Riot Provisions, Ronald E. Britt Ii

Fordham Law Review

The right to join in peaceful assembly and petition is critical to an effective democracy and is at the core of the First Amendment. The assault of peaceful protestors in the pursuit of racial justice is not a new phenomenon, and legislators at the federal and state levels have drafted anti-riot provisions as a measure to target protestors they deem an existential threat to American society. As these provisions have become increasingly prevalent in light of the protests following the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, they have the likelihood of severely chilling the effect on protestors’ right to …

Trek To Triumph, Briaunna Buckner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

I was screaming in the stairwell of my home, holding a dead baby. The air was so thick that I could barely breathe. Tears were racing down my face as her twin sister, Zola, was screeching at the top of her lungs. “WHY LORD, don't take my baby!” Every emotion, every word, and every second after that moment felt black. All the sweet memories from just eight days of being able to hold her, kiss her, and love her fell in a black pit along with the dreams I had for my life. As I looked down at my sweet …

Insuring Contraceptive Equity, Jennifer Hickey

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The United States is in the midst of a family planning crisis. Approximately half of all pregnancies nationwide are unintended. In recognition of the social importance of family planning, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes a “contraceptive mandate” that requires insurers to cover contraception at no cost. Yet, a decade after its enactment, the ACA’s promise of universal contraceptive access for insured women remains unfulfilled, with as many as one-third of U.S. women unable to access their preferred contraceptive without cost.

While much attention has been focused on religious exemptions granted to employers, the primary barrier to no-cost contraception is …

Examining The Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The Uniform Bar Examination, Scott Devito, Kelsey Hample, Erin Lain

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates …

Reclaiming Equality: How Regressive Laws Can Advance Progressive Ends, Jonathan P. Feingold

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ethnically Segmented Markets: Korean-Owned Black Hair Stores, Felix B. Chang

Indiana Law Journal

Races often collide in segmented markets where buyers belong to one ethnic group while sellers belong to another. This Article examines one such market: the retail of wigs and hair extensions for African Americans, a multi-billion-dollar market controlled by Korean Americans. Although prior scholarship attributed the success of Korean American ventures to rotating communal credit, this Article argues that their dominance in ethnic beauty supplies stems from collusion and exclusion.

This Article is the first to synthesize the disparate treatment of ethnically segmented markets in law, sociology, and economics into a comprehensive framework. Its primary contribution is to forge the …

Disaggregating Slavery And The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade as peremptory norms, customary international law prohibitions and crimes, humanitarian law prohibitions, and non-derogable human rights. Human rights bodies, however, focus on human trafficking, even when slavery and the slave trade—and not human trafficking—are enumerated within their mandates. International human rights law has conflated human trafficking with slavery and the slave trade. Consequently, human trafficking has subsumed the slave trade and, at times, slavery prohibitions, increasing perpetrator impunity for slavery and the slave trade abuses and denying full expressive justice to survivors.

This Article disaggregates slavery from the slave trade and slavery …

Responding To Abolition Anxieties: A Roadmap For Legal Analysis, Jamelia Morgan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of We Do This ’Til We Free Us. By Mariame Kaba.

Free-Ing Criminal Justice, Bennett Capers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America. By Sara Mayeux

Truth And Reconciliation: The Ku Klux Klan Hearings Of 1871 And The Genesis Of Section 1983, Tiffany R. Wright, Ciarra N. Carr, Jade W.P. Gasek

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Over the course of seven months in 1871, Congress did something extraordinary for the time: It listened to Black people. At hearings in Washington, D.C. and throughout the former Confederate states, Black women and men—who just six years earlier were enslaved and barred from testifying in Southern courts—appeared before Congress to tell their stories. The stories were heartbreaking. After experiencing the joy of Emancipation and the initial hope of Reconstruction, they had been subjected to unspeakable horror at the hands of white terrorists. They had been raped and sexually humiliated. Their children and spouses murdered. They had been savagely beaten …

Unqualified Immunity And The Betrayal Of Butz V. Economou: How The Supreme Court Quietly Granted Federal Officials Absolute Immunity For Constitutional Violations, Patrick Jaicomo, Anya Bidwell

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Qualified immunity has been the subject of well-deserved scorn in recent years as a legal mechanism that shields government officials from constitutional accountability. But its shadow has hidden another mechanism that provides an unqualified immunity from constitutional accountability. That de facto absolute immunity extends to federal officials in all but a vanishingly few contexts where claims are still permitted under the 1971 Supreme Court decision Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics. But it was not always that way. In its 1978 decision Butz v. Economou, the Supreme Court permitted Bivens claims to proceed against …

Bringing History Home: Strategies For The International Repatriation Of Native American Cultural Property, Alec Johnson

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The theft of Native American cultural items has been ongoing since Europeans began to colonize the Americas. As a result, millions of Native American artifacts are now located outside the borders of the United States. Native American tribes have long sought international repatriation—the return of these cultural objects to their tribal owners. Unfortunately, many countries have been unsupportive of repatriation attempts and Native Americans seeking the return of their cultural items face nearly insurmountable barriers in foreign courts. The U.S. government has a moral imperative to assist Native American tribes in these repatriation efforts. The debate over repatriation is defined …

School District Secession In Mobile County, Alabama: A Case Study Of Adaptive Discrimination And Threats To Multiracial Democracy, Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Duty To Rescue In The Digital Age: A Comparative Analysis, Cameron Kellett

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The article advocates for the enactment of state legislation establishing a duty-to-rescue doctrine, arguing that the absence of such a legal duty leads to preventable harm and undermines societal solidarity. It critiques the arbitrary nature of the special relationship exception under current law and proposes Minnesota's duty-to-rescue statute as a model for reform. The analysis emphasizes that requiring bystanders to provide reasonable assistance, without endangering themselves, is both feasible and morally justifiable, as it aligns with human tendencies to help others in distress.

Sex Work Is Real Work: The Implications Of U.S. Strippers Winning The Right To Unionize, An International Comparative Study, Katherine Fustich

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note examines the landmark NLRB decision in *Nolan Enterprises*, which granted U.S. strippers the right to unionize by classifying them as employees rather than independent contractors. This ruling has significant implications for labor rights in the sex work industry, both domestically and internationally. The analysis compares this development with international perspectives from the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands, highlighting the challenges and opportunities for sex worker unionization and the broader implications for labor movements globally.

Abortion, Sterilization, And The Universe Of Reproductive Rights, Melissa Murray

William & Mary Law Review

In recent years, a new narrative associating reproductive rights with the eugenics movement of the 1920s has taken root. As this narrative maintains, in the 1920s, Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of the modern birth control movement, joined forces with the eugenics movement to market family planning measures to marginalized minority communities.

Although the history undergirding this narrative is incomplete and misleading, the narrative itself has flourished as the debate over the continued vitality of reproductive rights has unfolded in the United States. Indeed, in just the last three years, a member of the United States Supreme Court and a number …

How Racism Persists In Its Power, Deborah N. Archer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Fire Next Time. By James Baldwin.

Community Lawyering In Resistance To Neoliberalism, Jeena Shah

Michigan Law Review

A Review of An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles. By Scott L. Cummings.

Shining A Bright Light On The Color Of Wealth, A. Mechele Dickerson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It . By Dorothy A. Brown.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Hostile Shores: Racial Exclusion Laws And The West Coast, Brendan Williams

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article examines the historical and ongoing racial exclusion laws on the West Coast, focusing on California, Oregon, and Washington. It argues that despite their progressive reputation, these states have a legacy of discriminatory laws targeting Chinese, Black, and Japanese populations, which has led to enduring racial inequities that persist today.

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

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming Equality: How Regressive Laws Can Advance Progressive Ends, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Since the fall of 2020, right-wing forces have targeted Critical Race Theory ("CR T') through a sustained disinformation campaign. This offensive has deployed anti-CRT rhetoric to justify a host of "Backlash Bills" designed to chill conversations about race and racism in the classroom. Concerned stakeholders have assailed these laws as morally bankrupt and legally suspect. These responses are natural and appropriate. But challenging a bill's moral or legal mooring is insufficient to counter a primary purpose of this legislative onslaught: to further erode, within our public discourse and collective consciousness, the ability to distinguish between racism and antiracism. To meet …

Why Do You Care About My Hair? A Proposal For Remedying Hair Discrimination In The Workplace On A Federal Level, Grayson Moronta

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dedication: Center On Asian Americans And The Law, Kamala Harris

Fordham Law Review

Asian American history has been defined by attorneys and activists who have fought to ensure that Asian Americans are recognized as Americans— not as the “other,” not as “them,” but as “us.” From their efforts to fight against the Chinese Exclusion Act, to correcting the wrongs of the Japanese-American incarceration, it is essential that we learn about the role of Asian Americans and the law. Accordingly, I write to recognize the historic launch of the Center on Asian Americans and the Law at Fordham University School of Law—the first of its kind in the country. Its founding is both timely …