Law and Race Commons^™

Impurity And Immigration: The Case Of Pro-Biafran Igbo Activists In Japan, Nnamdi M. Jogwe

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

The Case Of Antonio Beaver, Logan D. Barron

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

The case of Antonio Beaver, a 31-year-old African American man that was affected by the collapse of the suspects identification by the detectives with the composite sketch, the Eyewitness Misidentification, and the lack of fingerprint and DNA identification technology. Antonio Beaver was convicted of First-degree Robbery in 1997 and was in Missouri prisons until 2007 when he was exonerated by DNA and fingerprint evidence, that was taken from crime scene.

2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote Lecture, Madiba Dennie

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Objectivity: The Problem Of Pretext In The Fourth Amendment, Monu S. Bedi

Indiana Law Journal

Pretextual encounters continue to erode the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Simply put, a police officer can act on personal bias or animus as long as the search or seizure is deemed “objectively reasonable.” Numerous scholars (e.g., Bennett Capers, Gabriel Chin, and David Harris) have critiqued this objective standard, contending it perpetuates discriminatory practices, particularly against communities of color. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself suggested that the Court might need to reconsider the legal precedent she helped establish. More recently, Orin Kerr has also argued that the Court’s reliance on objective determinations is inconsistent with …

Backlash: How Racial Justice In Higher Education Is Being Trumped By Politics, Aaron N. Taylor

AccessLex Institute Research

This article discusses contemporary social and political backlash to racial justice and how it has overshadowed and flouted higher education antidiscrimination law and principles of racial justice. The first three parts chart the evolution of U.S. Supreme Court precedent in higher education affirmative action cases. Part I interrogates the Court’s fallacious detachment of affirmative action from its racial justice origins in Defunis and Bakke. Part II discusses how the Grutter majority tacitly departed from Bakke, using the vague concept of critical mass to seemingly empower schools to engage in affirmative action as a racial justice tool. Part III explains how …

Child Support Factory: Racist History, Harm, And Unconstitutionality Of The Child Support System's Contractual Operations, Daniel L. Hatcher

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Within America’s justice institutions, the child support system has become a business. The intended mission of aid has been traded and abdicated through contractual deals to churn vulnerable families into factory-like revenue operations. Juvenile and family courts across the country have partnered through countless intertwined interagency contracts with human service agencies, prosecutors, attorneys general’s offices, probation departments, and policing offices—all aimed at generating revenue from impoverished children and parents rather than serving their best interests. The resulting child support factory is vast, harmful, unconstitutional, unethical, and grew from a racist history that devastated Black families, and still operates with starkly …

Antitrust, Vampires And Bloody Acquisitions, Theodosia Stavroulaki

Fordham Law Review

Private equity has rapidly seized control of large swaths of the U.S. healthcare system. This Essay argues that its takeover is not a story of efficiency or innovation but one of extraction. Drawing on a substantial body of research, it shows that private equity acquisitions are associated with rising healthcare costs, inferior care, reduced access to essential services, and deteriorating working conditions for physicians and nurses—harms that fall most heavily on marginalized communities.

These outcomes are not accidental. They stem from the private equity business model, which relies on leveraged buyouts, aggressive cost cutting, and roll-up strategies designed to generate …

1981, Carliss Chatman

Washington and Lee Law Review

42 U.S.C. § 1981 should have solved a pervasive problem in American capitalism—when white economic interests do not converge with the contract rights of Black people, they are excluded from the market in a way that causes systemic harm. This Article proposes that the failure to enforce 1981 in the past may render it more harmful than beneficial in the present climate of retrenchment. The realities of racism combine with the lack of economic interest convergence to make combatting contract inequality on a contract-by-contract basis legally precarious, nearly impossible to properly evaluate, and difficult to economically incentivize. This is in …

Not Just A Castle In The Sky: A Legal Remedy For Race-Based Takings In Virginia, Michaela R. Hill

William & Mary Law Review

Part I will address federal and state statutes and case law surrounding physical takings and the eminent domain power. Part I will also discuss Virginia’s history of racial discrimination in housing, the Shoe Lane Community in Newport News, and CNU’s expansion into the neighborhood for the elimination of blight. Part II will present the first prong of this Note’s three-pronged approach to correcting Virginia’s abuse of its eminent domain power to take residential properties: adopting stricter statutory blight standards. Part III will present the second prong: a new formula for calculating increased just compensation. Part IV will outline the third …

Fixing Forty Years Of Failure: Objective Solutions To Batson’S Subjective Shortfalls, Katherine E. Donoghue

Cardozo Law Review

It is a sunny afternoon in rural Georgia. A young Black man goes for a jog. On his route, he crosses the train tracks and heads into a predominantly White neighborhood. As his sneakers rhythmically hit the pavement, he hears the rev of a pickup truck behind him. Shortly after, he hears a second truck. The young jogger picks up his pace, but so do the trucks. The trucks chase him and eventually surround him. Two White men get out with shotguns. One stands ready, barrel raised. The other approaches the jogger and fires a bullet into his chest.

That …

False Conflict: Colorblindness And Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act, W. Kerrel Murray

Fordham Law Review

If friends and foes of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 agree on one thing, it is the irrepressible conflict between section 2’s attention to race and constitutional colorblindness. They’re wrong. Rightly understood, section 2’s design is remarkably compatible with colorblind constitutionalism’s letter and spirit.

To show how, this Article first returns to section 2’s origins and the preexisting approach its text codifies. That approach had an underappreciated ethos: When intentional discrimination’s effects sufficiently distort a political system, an electoral rule’s results might impugn its unconstitutionality, even if the rule had been adopted without discriminatory purpose. Drawing …

The Racial Implications For Black Claimants At The Federal Arbitration Act's Centennial, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

On February 12, 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law an Act to make arbitration agreements "valid, irrevocable, and enforceable," no person could have expected that this new statute would ever apply to claims by Black litigants. A century later, that law, now referred to as the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), has evolved to encompass disputes involving a broad array of claimants and processes where businesses enforce pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate. In examining whether Black claimants (businesses, consumers, and importantly, workers) may benefit from using arbitration, this Article investigates how the FAA, as enacted, never intended to address their …

(Mis)Judging Suspicion, Sherri Lee Keene

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court decided Illinois v. Wardlow, a Fourth Amendment case that allowed the high-crime nature of a location to be considered in determinations of whether there was reasonable suspicion to support a police stop. In making these determinations, courts rarely acknowledge the role that race can play in decisions that factor in the nature of a location as context. Yet even when the race of a defendant is not mentioned, high-crime area designations can act as a proxy for race inviting racial bias into courts’ analyses. Reasonable suspicion analysis involves the interpretation of a suspect’s …

Lessons Learned From Global Responses To Criminal Abortion Laws, Cynthia Soohoo

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Asking Hospitals To Do Their Share, Kimberly Mutcherson

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Law's Limits: Abortion And The Social Determinants Of Health, Maya Manian

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Abortion, Power And The Future Of Healthcare, Elizabeth Kukura

Fordham Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Lowering Of The Lowered: The ‘Spectacular’ Construction Of ‘Humiliation’ In The Indian Prevention Of Atrocities Act 1989, Ashna Singh

National Law School of India Review

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is the only law in India that explicitly recognises caste-based insults or hate speech as an offence. In doing so, it captures the distinctive harm of such speech as humiliation. This article focuses on Section 3(1)(r) of the Act and argues that this recognition is significantly qualified by the “public view” requirement. Drawing on socio-political scholarship on humiliation, I show that judicial interpretation of this requirement has produced an extra-legislative condition of spectacularity. Courts tend to read caste-based humiliation through the paradigm of visible, overt, and collective atrocity, …

Child Welfare Upholds Black Family Separation While Denying Essential Constitutional Protections, Samantha Nichol

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This note examines the refusal to expand constitutional protections to include proceedings concerning child welfare. A system that largely mirrors and works in tandem with the criminal system, which enjoys robust constitutional safeguards. Important to the analysis of the rejection of these protections is an acknowledgement that child welfare, or welfare more broadly, is a system that upholds racial power structures and a tradition of family separation. Just as the overincarceration of Black people has been acknowledged by legal scholars to be a particular badge and incident of slavery, the child welfare system should also be critiqued as a system …

The Private Prison Problem: Finding Pathways To Justice In HawaiʻI, Nathan Lee

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

This article considers the many obstacles in place to challenging private prison operation. Given decades of meaningful scholarship and legal activism on the “private prison problem”, it is puzzling that successful challenges to privatized incarceration remain elusive. This article seeks to introduce the lengthy and tragic history of Hawaiʻi’s use of out of state private prisons, stretching from 1995 to the present. For 30 years, people have been sent thousands of miles from home, effectively banished. Worse, Hawaiʻi has failed to take appropriate action to implement oversight or to bring individuals back home. Moreover, despite Hawaiʻi’s prominent involvement in private, …