Law and Race Commons^™

Zoning Reformed, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

It has been roughly a century since early advocates of zoning took notice of how crowded and congested housing conditions contributed to the spread of disease (including the then-recent H1N1 pandemic). The U.S. Supreme Court had just rejected on property rights grounds a city ordinance that expressly segregated neighborhoods by race. One hundred years later, the exposure of the weaknesses embedded in our system of public land use regulation during the crises of 2020 presents a unique and timely opportunity for serious consideration of major and minor adjustments to state statutes, local ordinances, and judicial decisions. This Article calls for …

Territorial Exceptionalism And The American Welfare State, Andrew Hammond

UF Law Faculty Publications

Federal law excludes millions of American citizens from crucial public benefits simply because they live in the United States territories. If the Social Security Administration determines a low-income individual has a disability, that person can move to another state and continue to receive benefits. But if that person moves to, say, Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands, that person loses their right to federal aid. Similarly with SNAP (food stamps), federal spending rises with increased demand—whether because of a recession, a pandemic, or a climate disaster. But unlike the rest of the United States, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, …

Amicus Curiae Brief: Private For Profit Incarceration Violates The 13th Amendment Of The United States Constitution, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Zoë Harris, Casey Bates, Natasha Cornell

Law Faculty Scholarship

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlawed chattel slavery in the United States following a violent Civil War and a chilling era of slavery conducted primarily in the nation’s southern states. In passing this Amendment, Congress included a clause that excepted a certain population from this general prohibition, namely, prisoners. In what has become known as the “punishment clause,” Section I of the Thirteenth Amendment states explicitly “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their …

Race & Policing In America Symposium Transcript

St. Thomas Law Review

The symposium was moderated by Professor andré douglas pond cummings of University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law.

Seeing Those We’Ve Rendered Invisible – A Clarion Call For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson, Jordan Thomas

Faculty Articles

Jonathan Rapping, Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice (Beacon Press 2020) In this brief review, we situate Rapping’s work among those demanding criminal justice reform, praise an unrelated bonus, and propose a friendly amendment to nudge his vision over the finish line of justice. It will not be enough to provide newly enabled and supported public defenders to those our systems consider indigent. We ought to provide them to us all.

Private Confederate Monuments, Jessica Owley, Jess Phelps, Sean W. Hughes

Articles

As public Confederate monuments finally begin to come down across the nation, we are seeing an emergence of Confederate monuments on private lands. The number of private Confederate monuments is increasing both with the construction of new monuments and, more significantly, the relocation of monuments from public land. This Article explains why private Confederate monuments are likely to be the next battleground over these controversial and troubling statues. Through ten detailed examples, we show how private Confederate monuments emerge and how communities are responding to them. The challenges related to monuments on private land are different than those on public …

Radical Reformation: Diverse Pathways To Attorney Licensure Will Yield A More Diverse Profession, Carla Pratt

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico And Constitutional Obligation, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.

Intersectional Feminism, Racial Capitalism, And The Covid-19 Pandemic, Fay Faraday

Articles & Book Chapters

A common narrative during the COVID-19 pandemic correctly observed that lockdowns which stripped public interactions to the bare minimum exposed the economic and social fault lines of Canadian society. Since March 2020, women— particularly racialized women in jobs with low pay—have disproportionately borne the brunt of the pandemic’s negative economic impacts. The fact that racialized women face systemic economic inequality and marginalization in Canada is not new. It is the structural foundation of an economy and sex-segregated labour market rooted in racial capitalism. The pandemic merely made the disparities impossible to ignore. At the same time, a reckoning with the …

(Im)Mutable Race?, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Courts rarely question the racial identity claims made by parties litigating employment discrimination disputes. But what if this kind of identity claim is itself at the core of a dispute? A recent cluster of “reverse passing” scandals featured individuals—Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug among them—who were born white, yet who were revealed to have lived as members of Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC) communities. These incidents suggest that courts will soon have to make determinations of racial identity as a threshold matter in disputes over employment discrimination and contract termination. More specifically, courts will have to decide whether …

Maybe Law Schools Do Not Oppress Minority Faculty Women: A Critique Of Meera E. Deo’S “Unequal Profession: Race And Gender In Legal Academia” (Stanford University Press 2019), Dan Subotnik

Touro Law Review

This essay tests Professor Meera Deo’s unsettling assertion that “implicit bias” in law schools is holding minority female and, to a lesser extent minority male, faculty back. It then presents her second, and more provocative claim, that minority faculty can generally offer better training in “solving complex problems.”

Regarding the former claim, Deo explains that minority women are not hired according to fair standards, not welcomed when they are hired, and not fairly evaluated for promotion. In addition, she argues that minority women professors are abused by their students. Because Deo barely tries to substantiate the second claim, it is …

Racism, Incorporated: Ramos V. Louisiana And Jogging While Black, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

There is more to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ramos v.
Louisiana than its holding requiring unanimous state jury verdicts via the
incorporation doctrine. The underlying debate among the Justices in Ramos
about the salience of race in the law is a window into the current cultural
moment. After identifying the racial debate underlying the Justices’ views in
Ramos, this Essay shows how the same pattern emerges in our social and
legal debates around vigilante policing of Black Americans, including a
close-up look at the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Social psychology
teaches us that society stereotypes …

Testing Privilege: Coaching Bar Takers Towards "Minimum Competency" During The 2020 Pandemic, Afton Cavanaugh

Faculty Articles

The year 2020 was challenging for the bar exam. The longstanding argument that the bar exam is not a fair measure of the minimum competence of someone to practice law was cast into harsh relief and the truth-that the bar exam tests the privilege of its examinees-became startlingly apparent. Not only did 2020 kick off with a devastating global pandemic, but we also saw the rage against systemic racial injustice reach a boiling point just as we were charged with staying in our homes to avoid contracting COVID-19. With a pandemic raging, overt White supremacy on the rise, and racial …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

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 …

Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons For The Gig Economy, Yvette Butler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow …

Antiracism, Reflection, And Professional Identity, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills, Eduardo R.C. Capulong

Faculty Law Review Articles

Intent on more systematically developing the emerging professional identities of law students, the professional identity formation movement is recasting how we think about legal education. Notably, however, the movement overlooks the structural racism imbedded in American law and legal education. While current models of professional development value diversity and cross-cultural competence, they do not adequately prepare the next generation of legal professionals to engage in the sustained work of interrupting and overthrowing race and racism in the legal profession and system. This article argues that antiracism is essential to the profession’s responsibility to serve justice and therefore key to legal …

Climate Lawyers As Movement Lawyers (And Vice Versa), Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In April 2020, the American Society of International Law (ASIL) launched an initiative to foster conversations within and beyond ASIL on the connections between climate change and virtually all other areas of international law. This essay for the ASIL Proceedings is based on a presentation delivered at the April 2021 ASIL Annual Meeting.

The essay examines the link between climate change and racial subordination from the dawn of the fossil fuel-based world economy to the present and the complicity of international law in these converging injustices. It discusses the counterhegemonic uses of international law by environmental justice movements in the …

Race In America 2021: A Time To Embrace Beauharnais V. Illinois?, Steven A. Ramirez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Hate crimes and racially motivated violence spiked in the United States over the past few years. Our foreign adversaries seek to inflame racial divisions in our nation and turn American against American. This now forms a major threat to our national security and domestic tranquility. Indeed, in light of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, the costs of our festering racial hierarchy now threaten our constitutional republic. The soaring costs of the American racial hierarchy now demands aggressive legal response. This Essay demonstrates that the process of racial formation undergirding the hierarchy relies upon group libel to propagate racial …

A Reflection On Integration, Neil G. Williams

Faculty Publications & Other Works

I wrote this essay in December 2019, shortly after attending the 2019 LatCrit Conference in Atlanta. I grew up in Atlanta during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s into the early 1970s. Attending the 2019 LatCrit Conference brought back memories of my experiences as part of the earliest waves of black students sent to integrate Atlanta's historically all-white high schools. In the intervening years, too many elementary and high schools in America remain segregated (or, in many instances, only nominally integrated) as broad swaths of America have abandoned the commitment to ensuring that our young people …