Law and Race Commons^™

The Right To Violence, Sean Hill

Utah Law Review

Scholars have long contended that the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. This monopoly is considered essential for the state to assure the safety and security of its citizens. Whereas public officers have the broadest authority to deploy violence, in order to make arrests or to inflict punishment, private citizens allegedly have severe restrictions on their use of force. Specifically, the state is said to only authorize private violence when civilians face an imminent threat of unlawful force or when civilians are attempting to prevent a crime.

Yet the state explicitly authorized private violence against enslaved people …

Her Seat At The Table: A Phenomenological Study Exploring The Lived Experiences Of Black Women Education Policymakers, Vickey R. Silas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This transcendental phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of Black women leaders as education policymakers to understand the essence of their journey to leadership positions and the impetus behind their decision-making. Despite progress, Black women remain marginalized and underrepresented in policymaking leadership roles and decision-making spaces (Griffin et. al, 2013). They face challenges that are intersectional like gender and race. My research question was what are the lived experiences of Black women education policymakers and how do these experiences impact their decision-making? While employing a transcendental phenomenological approach, I acknowledged my biases through reflexivity and bracketed them while also …

Critical Race Theory & The Need To Have A Race Perspective In Public Service Law, Cardozo Public Service Scholars Program

2023–2024 Flyers

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu School Of Law Launches Institute For Race And The Law And Celebrates Champions For Justice 3-22-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Champions For Justice 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Free Exercise, The Respect For Marriage Act, And Some Potential Surprises, Mark Strasser

Cleveland State Law Review

Congress recently passed the Respect for Marriage Act to assure that certain marriages would remain valid even if the Supreme Court were to overrule past precedent and hold that the Constitution does not protect the right to marry a partner of the same sex or of a different race. However, the Act, as written, may not offer protection for certain same-sex or interracial marriages and may open the door to the federal protection of plural marriages, congressional intent notwithstanding, because of the Court’s increasingly robust free exercise jurisprudence.

A New Private Law Of Policing, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Brooklyn Law Review

American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but functionally hostile to Black, female, poor, and other marginalized Americans? From the liberal midcentury onward, social justice advocates have treated these spaces as fundamentally public and fully remediable via public law equity commands. This article takes a broader view. It urges a tort law revival in …

(How) Can Litigation Advance Multiracial Democracy?, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Can rights litigation meaningfully advance social change in this moment? Many progressive or social justice legal scholars, lawyers, and advocates would argue “no.” Constitutional decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court thwart the aims of progressive social movements. Further, contemporary social movements often decenter courts as a primary domain of social change. In addition, a new wave of legal commentary urges progressives to de-emphasize courts and constitutionalism, not simply tactically but as a matter of democratic survival.

This Essay considers the continuing role of rights litigation, using the litigation over race-conscious affirmative action as an illustration. Courts are a key …

A New Private Law Of Policing, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Faculty Publications

American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but functionally hostile to Black, female, poor, and other marginalized Americans? From the liberal midcentury onward, social justice advocates have treated these spaces as fundamentally public and fully remediable via public law equity commands. This article takes a broader view. It urges a tort law revival in …

Expanding The Ban On Forced Arbitration To Race Claims, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (“EFASASHA”) in March 2022, it signaled a major retreat from the Supreme Court’s broad enforcement of agreements to force employees and consumers to arbitrate discrimination claims. But the failure to cover protected discriminatory classes other than sex, especially race, tempers any exuberance attributable to the passage of EFASASHA. This Article prescribes an approach for employees and consumers to rely upon EFASASHA as a tool to prevent both race and sex discrimination claims from being forced into arbitration by employers and companies. This approach relies upon procedural …

The South Will (Not) Rise Again: The Religion Of The Lost Cause Meets The Politics Of Confederate Monument Removal, Jonathan C. Augustine

University of Richmond Law Review

According to the Supreme Court of the United States’ rulings in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum and Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., there is a fundamental difference between government speech, where a governmental entity expresses its own political views on its property, and private speech on government property wherein the government only facilitates a place for private actors to speak. One key difference is the anticipated duration of the “speech.” No matter how long-winded an individual orator might be, at some point, the orator will become fatigued and stop. Thus, even when speaking on government property, …

Black Women's Voter Emancipation In Slavery's Afterlife, Carla Laroche

University of Richmond Law Review

On March 1, 2024, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Vestiges of the Confederacy: Reckoning with the Legacy of the South. Professor Carla Laroche delivered the presentation transcribed below, which has been edited for clarity and cohesion. The University of Richmond Law Review was honored to host her and is thrilled to publish her engaging discussion on Black women’s voter emancipation.

When Class Competed With Race And Lost: An Origin Story Of The Political Marginalization Of The Poor, Bertrall L. Ross Ii

University of Richmond Law Review

On March 1, 2024, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Vestiges of the Confederacy: Reckoning with the Legacy of the South. Professor Bertrall L. Ross II delivered the presentation transcribed below, which has been edited for clarity and cohesion. The University of Richmond Law Review was honored to host him and is thrilled to publish this transcript of his thoughtful discussion.

Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Fordham Law Review

This colloquium asks us to consider how social change is influencing the legal profession and the legal profession’s response. This Essay applies these questions to organizing around criminal injustice and the response from public defenders. This Essay surfaces the work of four innovative indigent defense organizations that are engaged with and duty-bound to the communities they represent. I call this “community responsive public defense,” which is a distinct model of indigent defense whereby public defenders look to their clients and their clients’ communities to help shape advocacy, strategy, and representation.

Methodologically, this Essay relies primarily on qualitative interviews with leaders …

(How) Can Litigation Advance Multiracial Democracy?, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Fordham Law Review

Can rights litigation meaningfully advance social change in this moment? Many progressive or social justice legal scholars, lawyers, and advocates would argue “no.” Constitutional decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court thwart the aims of progressive social movements. Further, contemporary social movements often decenter courts as a primary domain of social change. In addition, a new wave of legal commentary urges progressives to de-emphasize courts and constitutionalism, not simply tactically but as a matter of democratic survival.

This Essay considers the continuing role of rights litigation, using the litigation over race-conscious affirmative action as an illustration. Courts are a key …

Rereading Pico And The Equal Protection Clause, Johany G. Dubon

Fordham Law Review

More than forty years ago, in Board of Education v. Pico, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a school board’s decision to remove books from its libraries. However, the Court’s response was heavily fractured, garnering seven separate opinions. In the plurality opinion, three justices stated that the implicit corollary to a student’s First Amendment right to free speech is the right to receive information. Thus, the plurality announced that the relevant inquiry for reviewing a school’s library book removal actions is whether the school officials intended to deny students access to ideas with which the officials disagreed. …

Prior Racist Acts And The Character Evidence Ban In Hate Crime Prosecutions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The killing of unarmed African-American Ahmaud Arbery and others ignited a wave of public outrage and re-focused attention on race and the criminal justice system. During the recent federal hate crimes proceedings for Arbery’s death, the prosecution introduced evidence relating to the alleged past racist acts of the defendants. This type of evidence may be seen as highly probative and desperately needed to do justice in hate crimes cases. On its face, however, such type of evidence appears to be inadmissible owing to the well-known—but little understood— evidentiary ban on character evidence prescribed in Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) and …

Deny, Defund, And Divert: The Law And American Miseducation, Janel A. George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Racial inequality in public education is not inevitable, it is constructed. The law has been elemental in crafting racial inequality in public education. In this Article, I posit that lawmakers seeking to entrench racial inequality in and through public education do so by enacting laws designed to deny Black children access to education, defund public schools disproportionately attended by Black children, and divert many Black educators away from the public education system. This Article draws a through-line between laws enacted to prevent desegregation in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling—an era known as massive resistance—and recently …

Cardozo’S Race And The Law Course Offerings Give Students A Unique Chance To Learn About How To Be An Anti-Racist Future Lawyer, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

In fall of 2021, Cardozo Law announced new initiatives and expanded course offerings to acknowledge and work to eradicate systemic racism by ensuring that Cardozo graduates are culturally competent and well-educated on issues of discrimination. Since then, the law school has remained steadfast in its commitment to educating students in ways that center black, indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC).

Can We Really Be The Change We Wish To See? The Inherent Limitations Of Citizen Suits In Remedying Environmental Injustice Under The Clean Air Act, Alexandra M. George

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.