Law and Race Commons^™

U.S. Race Relations And Foreign Policy, Susan D. Page

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

It is easy for Americans to think that the world’s most egregious human rights abuses happen in other countries. In reality, our history is plagued by injustices, and our present reality is still stained by racism and inequality. While the Michigan Journal of International Law usually publishes only pieces with a global focus, we felt it prudent in these critically important times not to shy away from the problems facing our own country. We must understand our own history before we can strive to form a better union, whether the union be the United States or the United Nations. Ambassador …

Medical Violence, Obstetric Racism, And The Limits Of Informed Consent For Black Women, Colleen Campbell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Essay critically examines how medicine actively engages in the reproductive subordination of Black women. In obstetrics, particularly, Black women must contend with both gender and race subordination. Early American gynecology treated Black women as expendable clinical material for its institutional needs. This medical violence was animated by biological racism and the legal and economic exigencies of the antebellum era. Medical racism continues to animate Black women’s navigation of and their dehumanization within obstetrics. Today, the racial disparities in cesarean sections illustrate that Black women are simultaneously overmedicalized and medically neglected—an extension of historical medical practices rooted in the logic …

Asian Americans And Pacific Islanders And The Prison Industrial Complex, Raymond Magsaysay

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Recent uprisings against racial injustice, sparked by the killings of George Floyd and others, have triggered urgent calls to overhaul the U.S. criminal “justice” system. Yet Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), the fastest-growing racial group in the country, have largely been left out of these conversations. Identifying and addressing this issue, I intercalate AAPIs into powerful, contemporary critiques of the prison industrial complex, including emergent abolitionist legal scholarship. I argue that the model minority myth, an anti-Black racial project, leads to the exclusion of AAPIs in mainstream and critical studies of crime and carcerality. I begin the intervention by …

Learning From Experience: Comparing Legal Approaches To Foreign Bribery And Modern Slavery, Hannah Harris, Justine Nolan

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The article examines two distinct regulatory frameworks addressing global corruption and human rights issues: the criminal law approach to foreign bribery and the disclosure-based approach to modern slavery in supply chains. It argues that while the foreign bribery framework, exemplified by laws like the FCPA and the UK Bribery Act, relies on strict criminal liability, the modern slavery framework, as seen in laws like the Australian and UK Modern Slavery Acts, focuses on disclosure with limited enforcement mechanisms. The article proposes integrating elements of experimental governance, such as penalty defaults and stakeholder collaboration, to enhance the effectiveness of both frameworks …

Of Protest And Property: An Essay In Pursuit Of Justice For Breonna Taylor, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2020, Louisville police officers fatally shot Breanna Taylor in her apartment while executing a no-knock warrant. There was great outrage over the killing of the innocent woman, and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron led an investigation of the officer-involved shooting.

Activists protested in Louisville after Taylor's killing, and when Cameron's investigation appeared stalled, these activists even conducted a sit-in on Cameron's front lawn. They demanded immediate justice for Taylor. Cameron sharply responded, lecturing the activists on how to achieve justice. He contended that neither trespassing on private property nor escalation in tactics could advance the cause of justice. …

The Quotidian And Constitutive Practice Of Police Brutality Against Indigenous People, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine Sherene Razack gives voice to the settler colonial violence perpetrated against Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo women who was shot and killed by Austin Shipley. Shipley, a white male police officer, claimed he was trying to apprehend her for alleged shoplifting. The article, which is brilliantly and compellingly written (as is typical of all of Professor Razack’s work) makes several claims. Most centrally, however, she asserts that racial terror – a violence done at both structural and individual levels – is at the very heart of the …

Is It Actually Violence? Framing Technology-Facilitated Abuse As Violence, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

When discussing the term “Technology-Facilitated violence” (TFV) it is often asked: “Is it actually violence?” While international human rights standards, such as the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, have long recognized emotional and psychological abuse as forms of violence, including many forms of technology-facilitated abuse, law makers and the general public continue to grapple with the question of whether certain harmful technology-facilitated behaviors are actually forms of violence. This chapter explores this question in two parts. First, it reviews three theoretical concepts of violence and examines how these concepts apply to technology-facilitated …

Transforming Restorative Justice, Jennifer Llewellyn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

From the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/Times Up and Indigenous reconciliation and decolonisation movements, the systemic and structural failures of current social institutions around the world have all been brought to our collective consciousness in poignant, painful and urgent ways. The need for fundamental social and systemic transformation is clear. This challenge is central to the work of dealing with the past in countries undergoing transition and in established democracies confronting deep structural inequalities and injustices. Rooted in lessons from the application of restorative justice across these contexts, this article suggests that grounding restorative justice …

Race And The First Amendment: A Compendium Of Resources, Solomon F. Worlds, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

This article provides summaries of law review articles and books that consider the complex relationship between racial justice and free speech. It seeks to assist law students, legal scholars, judges, and practitioners to think more deeply about the intersection between these critically important values. It describes scholarship that views these values as complementary, but also scholarship that views them as conflicting.

School "Safety" Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children, and low-income children. …

Citizens, Suspects, And Enemies: Examining Police Militarization, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Concern about the increasing militarization of police has grown in recent years. Much of this concern focuses on the material aspects of militarization: the greater use of military equipment and tactics by police officers. While this development deserves attention, a subtler form of militarization operates on the cultural level. Here, police adopt an adversarial stance toward minority communities, whose members are regarded as presumptive objects of suspicion. The combination of material and cultural militarization in turn has a potential symbolic dimension. It can communicate that members of minority communities are threats to society, just as military enemies are threats to …

Wage Theft Criminalization, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Over the past decade, workers’ rights activists and legal scholars have embraced the language of “wage theft” in describing the abuses of the contemporary workplace. The phrase invokes a certain moral clarity: theft is wrong. The phrase is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Increasingly, it has a specific content for activists, politicians, advocates, and academics: wage theft speaks the language of criminal law, and wage theft is a crime that should be punished. Harshly. Self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutors” have made wage theft cases a priority, and left-leaning politicians in the United States and abroad have begun to propose more criminal statutes …

Decolonizing Indigenous Migration, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

As global attention turns increasingly to issues of migration, the Indigenous identity of migrants often remains invisible. At the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, a significant number of the individuals now being detained are people of indigenous origin, whether Kekchi, Mam, Achi, Ixil, Awakatek, Jakaltek or Qanjobal, coming from communities in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. They may be leaving their homelands precisely because their rights as Indigenous Peoples, for example the right to occupy land collectively and without forcible removal, have been violated. But once they reach the United States, they are treated as any other migrants, without regard …

Introduction To The Symposium On The Impact Of Indigenous Peoples On International Law, S. James Anaya, Antony Anghie

Publications

No abstract provided.

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Publications

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …

Pandemic Emotions: The Good, The Bad, And The Unconscious —Implications For Public Health, Financial Economics, Law, And Leadership, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Pandemics lead to emotions that can be good, bad, and unconscious. This Article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how emotions during pandemics affect people’s responses to pandemics, public health, financial economics, law, and leadership. Pandemics are heart-breaking health crises. Crises produce emotions that impact decision-making. This Article analyzes how fear and anger over COVID-19 fueled anti-Asian and anti-Asian American hatred and racism. COVID-19 caused massive tragic economic, emotional, mental, physical, and psychological suffering. These difficulties are interconnected and lead to vicious cycles. Fear distorts people’s decision readiness, deliberation, information acquisition, risk perception, and thinking. Distortions affect people’s financial, health, and …

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In Voting, Ming H. Chen, Hunter Knapp

Publications

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This Essay describes several barriers facing immigrants and naturalized citizens that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers on the basis of immigrants and foreign-born voters having rights of semi-citizenship. By placing naturalization backlogs, voting restrictions, and reapportionment battles in the historical context of voter suppression, it provides a descriptive and normative account of the political misrepresentation of immigrants.

Getting Real About Procedure: Changing How We Think, Write And Teach About American Civil Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Environmental Law, Disrupted By Covid-19, Rebecca Bratspies, Vanessa Casado Peréz, Robin Kundis Craig, Lissa Griffin, Sarah Krakoff, Keith Hirokawa, Katrina Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J. B. Ruhl, Erin Ryan, David Takacs

Publications

For over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about systemic racial injustice have highlighted the conflicts and opportunities currently faced by environmental law. Scientists uniformly predict that environmental degradation, notably climate change, will cause a rise in diseases, disproportionate suffering among communities already facing discrimination, and significant economic losses. In this Article, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative examine the legal system’s responses to these crises, with the goal of framing opportunities to reimagine environmental law. The Article is excerpted from their book Environmental Law, Disrupted, to be published by ELI Press later this year.

When We Breathe: Re-Envisioning Safety And Justice In A Post-Floyd Era, Aya Gruber

Publications

10th Annual David H. Bodiker Lecture on Criminal Justice delivered on Wed., Oct. 21, 2020 at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.