Law and Race Commons^™

Stories Of Teaching Race, Gender, And Class: A Narrative, Brenda V. Smith

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Essay arises out of the keynote speech that I gave at the New England Clinical Conference at Harvard Law School in November 2015. The conference theme was, “Teaching Race, Gender and Class: Learning from Our Students, Communities and Each Other.” The primary planners and hosts for the conference were clinical teachers and programs in the Northeast, but participants came from around the country to talk about the importance of addressing race, gender and class in this moment of black lives mattering. They wanted to talk about the way that these issues of race, gender and class had always been …

Frontlines: Policing At The Lexus Of Race And Mental Health, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

he last several years have rendered issues at the intersection of race, mental health, and policing more acute. The frequency and violent, often lethal, nature of these incidents is forcing a national conversation about matters which many people would rather cast aside as volatile, controversial, or as simply irrelevant to conversations about the justice system. It seems that neither civil rights activists engaged in the work of advancing racial equality nor disability rights activists recognize the potent combination of negative racialization and mental illness at this nexus that bring policing practices into sharp focus. As such, the compounding dynamics and …

Special Education Law And Practice: Cases And Materials (2016), Deborah N. Archer, Richard D. Marsico

Books

Special Education Law and Practice is an experientially-focused casebook that also serves as a reference for attorneys who practice special education law and anyone interested in learning about the special education process. The casebook covers substantive special education rights, racial disparities in special education, discipline, procedural protections, federal court litigation, remedies, and attorneys' fees. Each chapter begins with a problem, rich in facts and law, that places the student in the position of an attorney trying to resolve a problem for a client using that chapter's materials. Comprehensive notes expand the areas covered by featured cases.

2016-2017 Course Development Grants For Uf Graduate Students, Anju K. Davidson

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

No abstract provided.

2016-2017 Course Development Grants For Uf Faculty, Anju K. Davidson

Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events

No abstract provided.

Is Gay The New Asian?: Marriage Equality And The Dawn Of A New Model Minority, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

In this Article, Professor Chang analyzes the historic role of family in the politics of exclusion in the United States, evaluates the ways in which the stereotyping of Asian Americans as a model minority has perpetuated these politics, and warns against the possibility of a similar fate for gay and lesbian Americans. As a model minority, Asian Americans have been set as a standard against which other minority groups, particularly African Americans, are measured. Around the same time Asians were being extolled for their hard work and family values, Congress released the Moynihan report on the problem of broken families …

Economic Inequality And College Admissions Policies, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

As economic inequality in the United States has reached unprecedented heights, reformers have focused considerable attention on changes in the law that would provide for greater equality in wealth among Americans. No doubt, much benefit would result from more equitable tax policies, fairer workplace regulation, and more generous spending policies.

But there may be even more to gain by revising college admissions policies. Admissions policies at the Ivy League and other elite American colleges do much to exacerbate the problem of economic inequality. Accordingly, reforming those policies may represent the most effective strategy for restoring a reasonable degree of economic …

Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …

A Demographic History Of Federal Judicial Appointments By Gender And Race: 1789-2016, Jonathan K. Stubbs

Law Faculty Publications

This article briefly surveys the constitutional and statutory foundation for the creation of the federal judiciary. It also furnishes data, by sex and race, of the appointment of federal judges to courts of general jurisdiction during each presidential administration from September 24, 1789, through April 11, 2016. Thus, Part I describes the pace of diversification of the federal judiciary. While data regarding other attributes of judges (such as their socioeconomic status) exist, extensive analysis of such characteristics falls outside the parameters of this preliminary analysis. Nonetheless, the Article notes in passing that, since 1989, during each presidential administration, the majority …

Diversity Without Integration, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

The de facto racial segregation pervasive at colleges and universities across the country undermines a necessary precondition for the diversity benefits embraced by the Court in Grutter — the requirement that students partake in high-quality interracial interactions and social relationships with one another. This disjuncture between Grutter’s vision of universities as sites of robust cross-racial exchange and the reality of racial separation should be of great concern, not just because of its potential constitutional implications for affirmative action but also because it reifies racial hierarchy and reinforces inequality. Drawing from an extensive body of social science research, this article explains …

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 9) (2016), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Bakke To The Future: Affirmative Action After Fisher, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Further Thoughts On Race, American Law, And The State Of Nature: Advancing The Multiracial Paradigm Shift And Seeking Patterns In The Area Of Race And Law, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In his article, the author seeks to use philosophical theory - state of nature theory - as a way to understand American law and issues of race. This project, consistent with a recent trend in legal scholarship, seeks to uncover hidden meanings in law through historical analysis, cultural critique, or philosophical contemplation.

The author argues that there is a tendency for the dominant group to relate to racial minorities as if they were in the state of nature - i.e., a tendency to act as if they were in a situation without legal or moral constraints. The article examines this …

Owning Red: A Theory Of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group of the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents make contemporary headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within a historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands, artifacts, bodies, religions, identities, and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian …

Guns And Drugs, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article argues that the increasingly prevalent critiques of the War on Drugs apply to other areas of criminal law. To highlight the broader relevance of these critiques, this Article uses as its test case the criminal regulation of gun possession. This Article identifies and distills three lines of drug war criticism and argues that they apply to possessory gun crimes in much the same way that they apply to drug crimes. Specifically, this Article focuses on: (1) race- and class-based critiques; (2) concerns about police and prosecutorial power; and (3) worries about the social and economic costs of mass …

Rationed Justice, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

In the United States, "equal justice under law" is at the very forefront of our American justice system. "Equal justice" is meant to guarantee equal access to the justice system. "Equal access to the judicial process is the sin qua non of a just society." Many Americans, however, do not have any access to the justice system, never mind that of equal access. "Equal justice" has not reached the nation's indigent, or even many of our moderate-income citizens.

Beyond Reparation: Affirmative Action As A Solution For Disparate Representation, Suny Cardenas-Gomez

Student Research

This essay provides support for Affirmative Action policy from the perspective that both supporters and opponents want merit-based evaluations. Disparate representation and prejudice-driven discrimination, however, make this impossible. Affirmative Action gives minorities the opportunity to change their representation in certain fields, therefore changing the way they are perceived, and eventually dissipating existing race-based discrimination in the evaluation process.

Confronting The Carceral State, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Police Terror And Officer Indemnification, Allyssa Villanueva

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

Police accountability has quickly pressed to the forefront of national conversations and subsequently, the national political agenda. Increasing prevalence of excessive and lethal use of force by police officers induced this attention. President Obama convened a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, after the Department of Justice conducted several pattern and practice investigation of misconduct following the high‐profile deaths of unarmed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Their deaths both resulted in no criminal charges against responsible officers. Civil suit was the only option left for officer accountability. This Note addresses the use of 42 U.S.C. §1983 as the common civil …

The Obergefell Marriage Equality Decision, With Its Emphasis On Human Dignity, And A Fundamental Right To Food Security, Maxine D. Goodman

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

Today, the welfare rights movement has faltered. However, the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision, with its emphasis on human dignity, lends hope to the notion that the Court should also acknowledge a right to food security. This Article identifies the role human dignity has served in the Court’s constitutional analysis to acknowledge and protect, for example, rights to privacy, to travel, to be heard, to self‐representation, to marry, to speak freely, and to preserve bodily integrity. According to the Court, these rights are all a part of liberty. Arguably, and as FDR said, “[i]f, as our Constitution tells us, …

Integrate And Reactivate The 1968 Fair Housing Mandate, Courtney L. Anderson

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 (“FHA”) was created to eliminate discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing, and to mandate affirmative actions be taken to develop fair housing throughout the United States. Numerous scholars and practitioners have lamented both the failure of the FHA to enforce its sections calling for government entities to affirmatively further fair housing, and the narrow interpretation of the FHA. This narrow interpretation has effectively rendered the FHA useless when a plaintiff claims that environmental ills have reduced the value and livability of homes, because these “non‐housing” claims are too far removed from …

La Gran Lucha: Latina And Latino Lawyers, Breaking The Law On Principle, And Confronting The Risks Of Representation, Marc‐Tizoc González

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

In a time when people in the United States have been taking to the streets en masse to protest unjust socio‐legal conditions like police brutality and the draconian enforcement of immigration laws, the time is ripe to reconceptualize what it means to break the law on principle. Twenty five years ago, Harvard Law Dean Martha L. Minow conceptualized “the risks of representation” for lawyers whose clients “entertain breaking the law as one of their strategies for achieving social change.” Responding substantively to Minow’s ideas, Houston Law Professor Michael A. Olivas presented three case studies to illuminate the risks of nonrepresentation, …

Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Over the past two years, US citizens have heard a great deal about diversity as it relates to race in general, and African Americans in particular. A string of deaths of unarmed African American men at the hands of white police officers has galvanized the nation’s attention. When Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri in August, 2014, there was a considerable amount of discussion about the gross underrepresentation of African Americans on the police force and among local politicians. Many observers believed that a racially-homogenous police force and the homogeneity among political leaders partially explained the …

We Built It And They Did Not Come: Using Governance Theory In The Fight For Food Justice In Low-Income Communities Of Color, Deborah N. Archer, Tamara Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

Food deserts and food insecurity have received considerable attention from various stakeholders, such as state and local governments, community organizations, and private sector institutions. These stakeholders have sought to overcome food insecurity by turning food deserts into oases by providing “access” to fresh, healthy food. However, many of their solutions—building supermarkets and sponsoring farmers markets—have missed the mark. Residents of food deserts did not flock to grocery stores to purchase fruits andvegetables. As a result, many stakeholders blame the residents of food deserts for their own predicament, lamenting, to paraphrase Field of Dreams, “we built it but they did not …

A New Proposal To Address Local Voting Discrimination, Cody Gray

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Publications

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 a …

Class-Based Affirmative Action, Or The Lies That We Tell About The Insignificance Of Race, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

This Article conducts a critique of class-based affirmative action, identifying and problematizing the narrative that it tells about racial progress. The Article argues that class-based affirmative action denies that race is a significant feature of American life. It denies that individuals - and groups - continue to be advantaged and disadvantaged on account of race. It denies that there is such a thing called race privilege that materially impacts people’s worlds. Moreover, this Article suggests that at least part of the reason why class-based affirmative action has been embraced by those who oppose race-based affirmative action is precisely because it …

Australians' "Right" To Be Bigoted: Protecting Minorities' Rights From The Tyranny Of The Majority, Jillian Rudge

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia’s few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of …

Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Values And Assumptions In Criminal Adjudication, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Response to Andrew Manuel Crespo's Systemic Facts: Toward Institutional Awareness in Criminal Courts proceeds in two Parts. In Part I, I argue that Crespo presents a compelling case for the importance of systemic factfinding to the task of criminal court judges. If, as a range of scholars has argued, criminal courts are increasingly serving a quasi-administrative function, then shouldn’t they at least be administrating accurately? Systemic Facts provides a novel account of how — with comparatively little institutional reform — courts might begin to serve as more effective administrators. However, in Part II, I also argue that Crespo’s account …