Law and Race Commons^™

Supporting Social Movements: A Brief Guide For Lawyers And Law Students, Jim Freeman

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

In recent years, there has been a surge in grassroots organizing and activism, creating new possibilities for advancing social, racial, gender, and economic justice. As a result, lawyers now have a rare opportunity to help create powerful and sustainable social movements by supporting, strengthening, and amplifying these on-the-ground efforts. However, there is a long history of would-be "movement lawyers" who have inadvertently undermined many promising grassroots-led initiatives. This article summarizes, from a practitioner's perspective, the essential elements of effective movement lawyering and how they can help to avoid the mistakes of the past and promote transformative social change.

Habermas, The Public Sphere, And The Creation Of A Racial Counterpublic, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas documented the historical emergence and fall of what he called the bourgeois public sphere, which he defined as “[a] sphere of private people come together as a public . . . to engage [public authorities] in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” This was a space where individuals gathered to discuss with each other, and sometimes with public officials, matters of shared concern. The aim of these gatherings was not simply discourse; these gatherings …

Blinding Prosecutors To Defendants' Race: A Policy Proposal To Reduce Unconscious Bias In The Criminal Justice System, Shima Baughman, Sunita Sah, Christopher T. Robertson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Racial minorities are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States. This disparity is unlikely to be due solely to differences in criminal behavior. Behavioral science research has documented that prosecutors harbor unconscious racial biases. These unconscious biases play a role whenever prosecutors exercise their broad discretion, such as in choosing what crimes to charge and when negotiating plea bargains. To reduce this risk of unconscious racial bias, we propose a policy change: Prosecutors should be blinded to the race of criminal defendants wherever feasible. This could be accomplished by removing information identifying or suggesting the defendant’s race from police dossiers shared …

The Blinding Color Of Race: Elections And Democracy In The Post-Shelby County Era, Sahar F. Aziz

Faculty Scholarship

Decades after passage of the historic Voting Rights Act, so much has changed. And yet, so much remains the same.

Racial minorities are registering to vote and turning out at the ballot box in record numbers. However, they remain under-represented in local elected positions and virtually excluded from national and state political office. Latinos, for example, are the largest racial minority in the U.S. at approximately 17% of the population, but only 3.3% of elected offices are held by Latinos. In states that until recently were covered by the Voting Rights Act (VRA), such as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, …

Identity Property: Protecting The New Ip In A Race-Relevant World, Philip Lee

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

This Article explores the relatively new idea in American legal thought that people of color are human beings whose dignity and selfhood are worthy of legal protection. While the value and protection of whiteness throughout American legal history is undeniable, non-whiteness has had a more turbulent history. For most of American history, the concept of non-whiteness was constructed by white society and reinforced by law—i.e., through a process of socio-legal construction—in a way that excluded its possessor from the fruits of citizenship. However, people of color have resisted this negative construction of selfhood. This resistance led to the development …

Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced And Underprotected, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, Jyoti Nanda

Faculty Scholarship

For girls, as with boys, the failure to receive a high school diploma often places individuals on a pathway to low-wage work, unemployment, and incarceration. The imposition of harsh disciplinary policies in public schools is a well-known risk factor for stunted educational opportunities for Black and Latino boys. Such punishments also negatively affect their female counterparts, as do other conditions in zero-tolerance schools. Yet, the existing research, data, and public policy debates often fail to address the degree to which girls face risks that are both similar to and different from those faced by boys.

This silence about at-risk girls …

Welcome To The Village: An Analysis Of How St. Louis County Occupancy Permit Schemes Perpetuate Segregation And Violate The Constitution, Zachary Schmook, Lauren Verseman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

"Law Is Coercion": Revisiting Judicial Power To Provide Equality In Public Education, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is an attempt to start a conversation about where we find ourselves in the plight to help our most challenged public schools. It is not intended to be a comprehensive solution to the problem, but rather a hard look at how, after decades of many efforts, we are further away from the equal education contemplated by the United States Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This article does not desire to simply cast blame for the failures of our children, but to send a reminder that, as Frederick Douglass would say, we can hardly …

Gendering The Compliance Agenda: Feminism, Human Rights And Violence Against Women, Megan Louise Pearce

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that while the due diligence standard in international human rights law has been a significant step forward in addressing violence against women, it has not yet delivered real change. The gap between legal promise and reality persists, and the article contends that addressing this gap requires integrating feminist insights into compliance theories. By applying feminist critiques to these theories, the article seeks to illuminate why the due diligence standard has been ineffective in eliminating violence against women and to highlight areas for future research.

The Collapse Of The House That Ruth Built: The Impact Of The Feeder System On Female Judges And The Federal Judiciary, 1970-2014, Alexandra G. Hess

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Good Faith Discrimination, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's current doctrinal rules governing racial discrimination and affirmative action are unsatisfying. They often seem artificial, internally inconsistent, and even conceptually incoherent. Despite a long and continuing history of racial discrimination in the United States, many of the problems with the Supreme Court's racial jurisprudence stem from the Court's willingness to view the current distribution of societal resources as establishing a colorblind, race-neutral baseline that can be used to make equality determinations. As a result, the current rules are as likely to facilitate racial discrimination as to prevent it, or to remedy the lingering effects of past discrimination.

The “Social Magic” Of Merit: Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In The English And Welsh Legal Profession, Hilary Sommerlad

Fordham Law Review

The discourse of merit is central to the “boundary” practices deployed by the white male elite of the English legal profession to exclude outsiders. The official discourse of government and regulatory body reports presents merit as an objectively verifiable and quantifiable property, synonymous with “excellence,” the salience of which in the recruitment process is indicative of the modernization of the profession. In this form it is mobilized to deflect criticism of the slow progress toward diversity. Critical interrogation of the discourse of merit reveals that it operates rather differently as a key structuring principle of the profession. The alternative meaning …

Naming Men As Men In Corporate Legal Practice: Gender And The Idea Of “Virtually 24/7 Commitment” In Law, Richard Collier

Fordham Law Review

This Article seeks to reframe and turn the conversation about gender equity in the legal profession on its head, taking up Hannah Brenner’s recent call to reconceptualize problems and rethink solutions around gender equity in the profession. It does so by moving beyond the frame of the retention of women and exploring selected aspects of the gendered practices of men in relation to this notion of the ideal legal professional in large transnational “city” law firms. The Article traces how particular ideas about men and gender are, on closer examination, implicated in a broader recasting of lawyer professionalism within the …

Reconsidering Legal Regulation Of Race, Sex, And Sexual Orientation, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Always Already Suspect: Revising Vulnerability Theory, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Martha Fineman proposes a post-identity "vulnerability" approach that focuses on burdens we all share; this article argues that theory needs to incorporate recognition of how invisible privileges exacerbate some people's burdens. Vulnerability theory is based on a recognition that we are all born defenseless, become feeble, must fear natural disasters, and might be failed by social institutions. It thus argues for a strong state that takes affirmative steps to insure substantive equality of opportunity. While vulnerability theory might help explain and remedy situations like Hurricane Katrina, it also might be susceptible to an argument that racial profiling is a necessary …

The Diversity Challenge: Exploring The 'Invisible College' Of International Arbitration, Susan Franck

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

As diversity can affect the perceived legitimacy of a state’s dispute resolution system and the quality of judicial decisions, diversity levels in the national bench and bar have been an area of transnational concern. By contrast, little is known about diversity of adjudicators and counsel in international arbitration. With a lack of accurate, complete, and publicly available data about international arbitrators and practitioners, speculation about membership in the “invisible college” of international arbitration abounds. Using data from a survey of attendees at the prestigious and elite biennial Congress of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration permitted one glimpse into the …

Still Fighting After All These Years: Minority Voting Rights 50 Years After The March On Washington, Deborah N. Archer

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Police Violence And Ferguson: (En)Racing Criminal Procedure, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.