Law and Race Commons^™

Criminalization As Governance In The American Racial State, Charlton C. Copeland

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Different Class Of Care: The Benefits Crisis And Low-Wage Workers, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

When compared to other developed nations, the United States fares poorly with regard to benefits for workers. While the situation is grim for most U.S. workers, it is worse for low-wage workers. Data show a significant benefits gap between low-wage and high-wage in terms of flexible work arrangements (FWAs), paid leave, pensions, and employer-sponsored health-care insurance, among other things. This gap exists notwithstanding the fact that FWAs and employment benefits produce positive returns for employees, employers, and society in general. Despite these returns, this Article contends that employers will be loath to extend FWAs and greater employment benefits to low-wage …

Aggressive Encounters & White Fragility: Deconstructing The Trope Of The Angry Black Woman, Trina Jones, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Faculty Scholarship

Black women in the United States are the frequent targets of bias-filled interactions in which aggressors: (1) denigrate Black women; and (2) blame those women who elect to challenge the aggressor’s acts and the bias that fuels them. This Article seeks to raise awareness of these “aggressive encounters” and to challenge a prevailing narrative about Black women and anger. It examines the myriad circumstances (both professional and social) in which aggressive encounters occur and the ways in which these encounters expose gender and racial hierarchies. It then explores how the intersectional nature of Black women’s identities triggers a particularized stereotype …

The American Death Penalty Decline, Brandon L. Garrett, Alexander Jakubow, Ankur Desai

Faculty Scholarship

American death sentences have both declined and become concentrated in a small group of counties. In his dissenting opinion in Glossip v. Gross in 2014, Justice Stephen Breyer highlighted how from 2004 to 2006, "just 29 counties (fewer than 1% of counties in the country) accounted for approximately half of all death sentences imposed nationwide." That decline has become more dramatic. In 2015, fifty-one defendants were sentenced to death in thirty-eight counties. In 2016, thirty-one defendants were sentenced to death in twenty-eight counties. In the mid-1990s, by way of contrast, over 300 people were sentenced to death in as many …

On Normative Effects Of Immigration Law, Emily Ryo

Faculty Scholarship

Can laws shape and mold our attitudes, values, and social norms, and if so, how do immigration laws affect our attitudes or views toward minority groups? I explore these questions through a randomized laboratory experiment that examines whether and to what extent short-term exposures to anti-immigration and pro-immigration laws affect people's implicit and explicit attitudes toward Latinos. My analysis shows that exposure to an anti-immigration law is associated with increased perceptions among study participants that Latinos are unintelligent and law-breaking. In contrast, Ifind no evidence that exposure to pro-immigration laws promotes positive attitudes toward Latinos. Taken together, these results suggest …

Disparate Impact In Big Data Policing, Andrew D. Selbst

Georgia Law Review

Data-driven decision systems are taking over. No
institution in society seems immune from the
enthusiasm that automated decision-making generates,
including-and perhaps especially-the police. Police
departments are increasingly deploying data mining
techniques to predict, prevent, and investigate crime.
But all data mining systems have the potential for
adverse impacts on vulnerable communities, and
predictive policing is no different. Determining
individuals' threat levels by reference to commercial
and social data can improperly link dark skin to higher
threat levels or to greater suspicion of having
committed a particularcrime. Crime mapping based
on historical data can lead to more arrests for nuisance
crimes …

How Top Law Schools Can Resuscitate An Inclusive Climate For Minority And Low-Income Law Students, Taifha N. Baker

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I would not wish my law school experience on my worst enemy. Georgetown University Law Center (GULC), my social-justice focused law school, has largely ignored the recent racially-motivated, legally-upheld killings of people of color and their effects on marginalized communities. As an African-American law student from a welfare-reliant household, GULC's silence has been especially painful because it suggests that my law school does not care about events that impact my community.

At each critical point of my first year in law school, GULC remained silent to the nationally recognized, racially-motived, and repeated police killings of unarmed African-American men. On …

The Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma: History, Influences, And Contemporary Setting Of The Choctaw Legal Structure, Austin C. Megli

Tribal Law Journal

The goal of this tribal profile is to provide an overview of the internal laws of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; to give a detailed emphasis on the tribe’s historic use of customary law, governance structures, enacted law, case law; and to examine how their internal law changed throughout history. By helping the reader become familiar with the history of Choctaw customary law and the contemporary structure of the Choctaw government, this profile will assist practitioners and academics in understanding the Choctaw Nation. Part I of this paper will describe the customary laws of the Choctaw Nation. Part II of …

If Trees Could Lobby They Would Be People Too: The Environmental And Cultural Benefits Of Granting Legal Personality To Nature, M. Alexis Volner

Tribal Law Journal

In the Western culture today, the environment is perceived as a source for goods and resources. However, this perspective has resulted in serious environmental degradation and a real threat to our species’ survival. To combat these problems there must be a radical shift in the Western culture’s conception of nature.

The first step in this shift is to recognize the environment as a legal person. The United States should grant legal personality to all publicly owned lands containing sites held sacred by Indigenous peoples and establish a collaborative board to manage the sites to recognize Indigenous cultural rights and encourage …

"To Help, Not To Hurt": Justice Thomas's Equality Canon, Nicole Stelle Garnett, William S. Consovoy

Journal Articles

To comprehend Justice Thomas’s views on racial equality requires an understanding of how his life experiences influence his approach to questions of race and the law. Recurring themes in his opinions about racial equality include his belief that racial preferences stigmatize their beneficiaries, his concern that the prevailing notion that racial integration is necessary to black achievement is rooted in a presumption of racial inferiority, his worry that affirmative action efforts provide cover for the failure to address the urgent needs of disadvantaged Americans, and his knowledge that seemingly benign policies can mask illicit motives. Finally, Justice Thomas contends that …

Performative Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Broadly speaking, privacy doctrine suggests that the right to privacy is non-existent once one enters the public realm. Although some scholars contend that privacy ought to exist in public, “public privacy” has been defended largely with reference to other, ancillary values privacy may serve. For instance, public privacy may be necessary to make the freedom of association meaningful in practice.

This Article identifies a new dimension of public privacy, supplementing extant justifications for the right, by arguing that many efforts to maintain privacy while in “public” are properly conceptualized as forms of performative, expressive resistance against an ever-pervasive surveillance society. …

Firearms In The Family, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article considers firearms prohibitions for domestic violence offenders, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions and the larger, national debate about gun control. Unlike other scholarship in the area, it confronts the costs of ratcheting up the scope and enforcement of such firearms bans and argues that the politicization of safety has come at the expense of a sound approach to gun control in the context of intimate-partner abuse. In doing so, it expands scholarly arguments against mandatory, one-size-fits-all criminal justice responses to domestic violence in a direction that other critics have been reluctant to go, perhaps because of …

The Washington Redskins Case And The Search For Dignity, Victoria Phillips

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: For more than sixty years, Native American activists have been involved in discussions and protests over the appropriation and use of tribal references in sports names, logos, and mascots. During this same period, many of these uses have since been changed, driven by civil rights struggles and a growing awareness of the proven social harms and racism inherent in these references. Despite a gradual movement towards abolition and evolving signs of cultural understanding, many mascots invoking Native names and imagery persist today across professional, collegiate, and local school district sports. These mascots and team names, and the trademarks associated …

Laying The Foundation: The Private Rental Market And Affordable Housing, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The private rental housing market plays a critical, and often overlooked, role in shaping the lives of the poor and the surrounding community. This brief Article presents Matthew Desmond’s rich portrayal of low-income tenants and their landlords in his groundbreaking new book, Evicted, which shows how poor housing conditions and cycles of eviction impact poor families. The Article, which also draws upon Courtney Anderson’s work connecting housing instability with problematic student turnover at an elementary school, highlights the importance of story-telling. Without some sort of subsidy to cover the gap between the ability of the poor to pay for housing …

Race Liberalism And The Deradicalization Of Racial Reform, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasize the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices …

School Segregation And History Revisited, Alfred Avins

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Gift Supports Diversity Programming 12-15-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In case after case, prosecutors, judges and juries therefore still struggle to come up with a definition of slavery, looking for some set of criteria or indicia that will enable them to discern whether the phenomenon they are observing constitutes enslavement. In this definitional effort, contemporary jurists may imagine that in the past, surely the question was simpler: someone either was or was not a slave. However, the existence of a set of laws declaring that persons could be owned as property did not, even in the nineteenth century, answer by itself the question of whether a given person was …

Newsroom: Logan On Judicial Diversity 12-09-2016, Kate Nagle, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Identity Entrepreneurs, Nancy Leong

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In my previous article, Racial Capitalism, I examined the ways in which white individuals and predominantly white institutions derive value from non-white racial identity. This process of deriving value from identity results from intense social and legal preoccupation with diversity. And it results in the commodification of nonwhite racial identity, with negative implications for both individuals and society.

This Article builds on Racial Capitalism in three ways. First, as a foundation, it expands the concept of racial capitalism to identity categories more generally, explaining that individual in-group members and predominantly in-group institutions—usually individuals or institutions that are white, male, straight, …