Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Voices Of Latinidad: A Truth And Reconciliation Movement To Preserve Latino And Latina History, J.S. Onésimo (Ness) Sándoval

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

This chapter began as a quest to tell the story of Latinidad in Nebraska. It is not meant to be a historical account of Latinos or Latinidad, nor a socioeconomic analysis. Instead, it has evolved into an accessible narrative highlighting the accomplishments of Latinos in Nebraska. The accounts and data presented serve as a public testimony and starting point for discussions that acknowledge Latinos’ presence. These accounts were not designed as an academic treatment for scholarly work but aim to inspire future scholars to research the lives and accomplishments of Latinos in Nebraska. Latinos have long been an integral part …

Native Americans, Part Ii, Kevin Abourezk

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s – aimed at abolishing legalized racial segregation and discrimination across the United States – found expression in Nebraska in many ways. From college protests to marches in Lincoln, the movement found a home within the youth and counterculture communities of Lincoln and Omaha. But less known is the way the movement impacted Native American populations, especially those in remote Nebraska communities. “Just as young Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans across the nation were learning the lessons of the black experience of the 1960s and expressing their identity as they sought to …

Contributors And Acknowledgments For Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Paul A. Olson, M. Dewayne Mays, Gabriel Bruguier, Kevin Abourezk, Preston Love, Jr., with Adam Fletcher Sasse, Heather Fryer, Sharon Ishii-Jordan, Emira Ibrahimpašić, and Julia Reilly

Acknowledgements

Frontmatter And Foreword To Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska, Bill Arfmann

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Covers, Table of Contents, and Foreword:

There is much to understand about the history of Nebraska and how the past shapes the present. This book attempts to bring into clearer focus the triumphs and trials of five broad groups whose lives have often been overlooked when the state’s history is told. The authors know some of this history of racism firsthand: Most of them have lived as people of color in Nebraska. They’ve experienced “the good, the bad and the ugly” that makes up our state story. We encourage educators, scholars and family historians to continue to dig, to document …

Introduction To Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska, M. Dewayne Mays, Paul Olson

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Nebraska has made racism a way of life through most of its history. It is still the way of life for many. In 2020, a Nebraska columnist wrote the following about Nebraska: “[T]he issues stemming from racism can seem like foreign concepts, confined to the larger cities (or the American South) and relics of a distant past.”2 The column goes on to show that these issues were not confined to large cities or to the South; they rested on our back door in Nebraska. Yet, one often heard back as far as one could remember that Nebraska is not and …

A History Of African Americans In Nebraska, Preston Love Jr., Adam Fletcher Sasse, Le Clara Gilreath, Portia Love, Heather Fryer

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Black people have been present in Nebraska from its earliest days as a U.S. territory. The first U.S. Census of Nebraska, conducted in 1860, counted eighty-one Black people who, together, formed .28 percent of the young territory’s 28,841 residents. That number grew to 3,443 Black residents in 1900, representing 3.5 percent of the 102,555 residents of the state of Nebraska. The number and location of Black Nebraskans varied greatly through the twentieth century, comprising 13.7 percent of the state’s population in 1940 and 11.8 percent in 2020. Although African Americans have been relatively small in numbers, the historical record reflects …

Exclusion From The Good Life: The Impact Of Anti-Asian Racism On Asian Nebraskans, Heather Fryer, Sharon Ishii-Jordan

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

To understand how Americans of Asian descent experienced, adjusted, and overcame negative experiences in Nebraska, recognizing the external forces on their lives is paramount. The experiences of Asians in their diaspora across the U.S. and Nebraska during a 150-year span have been shaped by both external (global and domestic) and internal (personality and resilience) factors. The presence of stereotypes specifically targeted toward Asian Americans due to exotic imaginings, pseudoscience, and economic fears, in addition to the images created by national media, gave rise to society’s acceptance of stereotypes. These external factors contributed to a belief that continues to this day …

Fighting For Fairness Where It's Needed Most 09-22-2025, Jane Govednik

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Center For Civil Rights And Critical Justice And Fred T. Korematsu Center For Law And Equity In Support Of Petitioners, Jessica Levin, Melissa Lee, Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic, Fred T. Korematsu Center For Law And Equality

Center for Civil Rights and Critical Justice Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Scholars For The Advancement Of Children’S Constitutional Rights In Support Of Defendants-Appellants: Roy V. Darren Patterson Christian Academy, Catherine Smith, Tanya M. Washington, Robin Walker Sterling, Jeremiah Chin, Sara S. Hildebrand

Scholarly Articles

Amici are scholars of children and the law, education law, family law, and anti-discrimination law. Amici draw this Court’s attention to the harms that four-year-olds in the LGBT community – LGBT children and children with LGBT parents – would bear should state-funded religious schools be granted a license to discriminate against them. An exemption to the Colorado Universal Preschool Program’s equal opportunity requirement would allow plaintiffs to discriminate against these children and raise unfair barriers in their paths to a high-quality education. An exemption would also inflict dignitary, psychological, and familial harms upon an entire class of young people – …

Prosecutor Transparency Project: Racial Disparities Study (Washtenaw County, Michigan), Grady Bridges, J. J. Prescott

Law & Economics Working Papers

This report investigates and estimates racial disparities in prosecutorial decision-making in the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office (WCPO) from 2017 to 2022. The analysis relies on currently available data resources at the WCPO and examines decision-making at four different junctures in the prosecutorial process: 1) case approval (i.e., warrant authorization) and charge selection, 2) habitual-offender designation (under Michigan law), 3) plea bargaining, and 4) diversion and deferral opportunities. Racial disparities appear most visibly at the earliest stages of the criminal justice process, with People of Color substantially overrepresented in the warrant requests the WCPO receives from law enforcement. The data further …

Crj Moot: Wright V. Talamantes, Center For Rights And Justice, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

2025 Event Invitations

Carolyn Kubitschek (founding partner, Lasner & Kubitschek), Robert Mantel (Crowell and Moring), and Professor Alex Reinert will serve as moot judges for Michael Moore (Law Offices of Michael Garth Moore), an attorney who will be arguing an appeal in Wright v. Talamantes, a civil rights case in the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Wright involves the constitutionality of an intrusive strip search of a minor without parental consent.

An In-Depth Criticism Of Shaw V. Reno, Katherine M. Perez-Oviedo

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

If I have learned one thing from my semester taking Critical Race Theory, it is that the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly issued decisions that directly impede on remedial efforts to address past racial discrimination. When the question of “how can we use the law to instill social change?” is proposed in class discussion, it is difficult to imagine a world in which the Court would support the progressive measures suggested.

Narrative Drip And Other Metaphors For Data-Resistant Immigration Enforcement, Matthew Boaz

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Organizing For Abolition In Ice Custody, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes

Faculty Scholarship

The final Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) detainees were released from the Irwin County Detention Center in early September 2021.² A court did not order the end of ICE detention at Irwin. A social movement, led by people detained at Irwin, had a pronounced impact on the epistemological landscape and changed both normative principles and public opinion.³ Those detained at Irwin organized and acted to create new understanding of law and protect their rights in ways that courts and legislatures could not. This Essay tells the story of that demosprudential project; a dialectic between legal elites and people …

Predisposed: Race, Disability, And Death Investigations, Britney Wilson

Articles & Chapters

Disability, preexisting conditions, or underlying conditions might seem like uncontroversial factors to cite when determining an individual’s cause of death. However, many death investigators have also cited these conditions in deaths caused by state violence or neglect. For example, a 2021 study found that medical examiners cited sickle cell trait, a gene mutation, as a cause or significant factor in the deaths of forty-seven Black people who died in police custody in the past twenty-five years. Sickle cell trait is a relatively common and benign trait disproportionately found in Black people in the United States. It is also distinct from …

Not Colorblind, Kimberly West-Faulcon

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay criticizes the use of the term “colorblind” in reference to attacks on racial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. It argues it is inapt and unconscionably obtuse to use colorblindness terminology to selectively target inclusion-motivated race consciousness for automatic illegality. The Essay’s central project is to examine claims underlying attacks on racial inclusion policies such as the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit to expose the legal endgame that anti-DEI forces seek to make a centerpiece of America’s future. In so doing, it surfaces the differential scrutiny of race consciousness …

Doing Away With Racial Profiling In Policing Without Doing Away With The Rule Of Law, François Tanguay-Renaud

All Papers

Since the turn of the millennium, Canadian appellate courts have been investing increasingly systematic efforts in demystifying and curtailing racial profiling in policing. These judicial efforts have so far been focused on the application of the legal criteria for arrest and detention as well as their regulation under section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this article, I contend that this unidimensional approach is unsound and outline a corrective path forward. First, I argue that the prevailing judicial understanding of what racial profiling is and how it affects the lawfulness of arrests and detentions has the …

Constitutional Futurisms, Jeremiah Chin

Northwestern University Law Review

How do we reckon with the past? The Supreme Court’s recent embrace of originalism as a mode of constitutional analysis relies almost exclusively on a view of history and tradition that would bind us to an understanding of principles and ideals that legitimized the exclusion of minority voices. Cases such as New York State Pistol and Rifle Ass'n v. Bruen use flavors of originalism as a framework to define rights and governmental powers through their historical antecedents, but this broad standard of interpretation is notably absent in the Court’s recent discussions of histories and traditions of racism in the United …

Infrastructure Equality, Deborah N. Archer, Yuvraj Joshi

Northwestern University Law Review

The United States’ racialized geographies have left communities of color with systematically inferior essential infrastructure that perpetuates their social and economic exclusion. From roads, public transportation, and sewage systems, to banks, high-speed internet, and high-quality public schools, people and communities of color have limited access to the fundamental infrastructure necessary to lead socially and economically vibrant lives. This Essay introduces “infrastructure equality” as a unifying framework to address the critical intersection of physical, social, and legal infrastructures that feed racial inequality. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, it argues that infrastructure—the interconnected and vital system of physical structures, networks, and social institutions—should …