Law and Race Commons^™

How To Get Away With Discrimination: The Use Of Algorithms To Discriminate In The Internet Entertainment Industry, Sumra Wahid

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In July 2021, Ziggi Tyler posted a video on TikTok, a popular video sharing platform, where he expressed his frustration with being a Black content creator on TikTok. The video showed Ziggi typing phrases such as “Black Lives Matter” or “Black success” into his Marketplace creator bio, which the app would immediately flag as inappropriate content. However, when Ziggi replaced those words with “white supremacy” or “white success,” no inappropriateness warning appeared. Although a TikTok spokesperson responded to the video clarifying that the app had mistakenly flagged phrases without considering word order, Ziggi refused to let an algorithm absolve TikTok …

Interracial Coalition Building: A Filipino Lawyer In A Black-White Community, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is in the midst of a political and cultural war around race and demography that goes to the heart of America’s self-definition as a nation of immigrants. Heeding Eric Yamamoto’s four-part prescription for interracial cooperation via the conceptual, the performative, the material, and the reflexive, this Essay draws from the author’s own experience as an Asian- American volunteer attempting to serve and lead a traditionally African-American civil rights organization in a predominantly white, rural town in Pennsylvania. Three lessons emerge from this experience. When volunteering, it is important to answer the call to serve even when in …

Get Out: Structural Racism And Academic Terror, Renee Nicole Allen

Faculty Publications

Released in 2017, Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed film Get Out explores the horrors of racism. The film’s plot involves the murder and appropriation of Black bodies for the benefit of wealthy, white people. After luring Black people to their country home, a white family uses hypnosis to paralyze victims and send them to the Sunken Place where screams go unheard. Black bodies are auctioned off to the highest bidder; the winner’s brain is transplanted into the prized Black body. Black victims are rendered passengers in their own bodies so that white inhabitants can obtain physical advantages and immortality.

Like Get …

Integration & Transformation: Incorporating Critical Information Literacy And Critical Legal Research Into Advanced Legal Research Instruction, Courtney Selby

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Legal research is not a separate and distinct endeavor from legal analysis and advocacy. These activities are inextricably intertwined in the practice of law. Few would suggest that advocacy includes the process of applying rules to situations in a vacuum without reference to context and consequences. Yet we often see this assumption about the legal research process. Many students presume that conducting legal research is a neutral endeavor, and that when done properly, it delivers the universe of relevant authorities to the researcher. This essay is about my experience integrating critical perspectives into an existing advanced legal research course …

High Anxiety: Racism, The Law, And Legal Education, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

Conspicuously absent from the United States’ ongoing discourse about its racist history is a more honest discussion about the individual and personal stressors that are evoked in people when they talk about racism. What if they got it wrong? The fear of being cancelled - the public shaming for remarks that are deemed racist - has had a chilling effect on having meaningful conversations about racism. What lost opportunities!

This paper moves this discussion into the law school context. How might law schools rethink their law school curricula to more accurately represent the role systemic racism has played in shaping …

The Empty Promise Of The Fourth Amendment In The Family Regulation System, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

Each year, state agents search the homes of hundreds of thousands of families across the United States under the auspices of the family regulation system. Through these searches—required elements of investigations into allegations of child maltreatment in virtually every jurisdiction—state agents invade the home, the most protected space in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Accordingly, federal courts agree that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to family regulation home searches. But almost universally, the abstract recognition of Fourth Amendment protections runs up against a concrete expectation on the ground that state actors should have easy and expansive access to families’ homes. Legislatures …

Judge Frankel’S Fifty-Year-Old Invitation To Reconstruct Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

America was a different place at the time Judge Marvin Frankel penned his now-famous text Criminal Sentences: Law without Order in 1973. Richard Nixon was the U.S. president. The Vietnam War was ending. The Watergate scandal was unfolding. There was much to grab the public’s attention, and criminal sentencing was not a national or international headline. Just two years earlier, President Nixon had declared a war on drugs and targeted drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” but it would be over a decade before punitive mandatory minimum drug sentences would become our sentencing norm. At the time of …

Thompson V. Clark And The “Reasonable” Policing Of Marginalized Families, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

This Article uses the experience of Larry Thompson, the plaintiff in Thompson v. Clark, 142 S. Ct. 1332 (2022), to examine the absence of privacy for poor families, particularly poor Black, Latinx, and Native families, in the United States. Mr. Thompson may end up remembered in legal history as a victor, as the Supreme Court lowered the barriers to bringing malicious prosecution claims and reinstated Mr. Thompson’s own previously dismissed malicious prosecution claim. Yet before securing this victory, Mr. Thompson lost a slew of other Fourth Amendment claims against the police. Mr. Thompson’s claims arose from state agents’ warrantless …

Investing In Abolition, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

This Article situates the prison within a broader macro-financial trend, what I call “community capture.” As private equity firms have consolidated the market for carceral services, they have also gained control over other essential social infrastructure, like housing and healthcare. By layering debt, fees, and aggressive profit expectations over companies or assets that provide for basic needs, their strategies intensify the economic pressures communities face. These strategies rely on various forms of coordination and legal protection from contestation. To demonstrate this process in the context of mass incarceration, this Article tells the story of Securus, a dominant carceral service company …

White Supremacy From The Bench, Vida B. Johnson

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Judges make important decisions in millions of cases a year across the country. Unlike other institutional players and unlike parties and their attorneys, judges are the only players in our adversarial legal system that are by design ostensibly neutral, impartial, and without bias.

Unfortunately, that legal fiction is not fact. Some judges do hold racial biases. A judge in Texas used racial slurs to describe Mexicans in his state in 2020. Also in 2020, a white judge in Louisiana referred to a deputy and a court clerk by the N-word, and the same year, a white Colorado judge also used …

The New Orleans Transformation: Foster Care As A Rare, Time-Limited Intervention, Josh Gupta-Kagan, Christopher Church, Melissa Carter, Vivek Sankaran, Andrew Barclay

Lewis & Clark Law Review

This Article offers an initial evaluation of one reformed child protection system—New Orleans, Louisiana—and describes how a system that dramatically reduces the number of children in foster care might look. This system shows how a major metropolitan area can shrink its daily population of children in foster care to the low double digits, which would correspond to a reduction of the national daily foster care population by about 360,000. This reduction was mostly due to sending children home—usually to the homes from which they were removed—within days or weeks of removal, raising questions about the necessity of the original removal. …

Making Red Lives Matter: Public Choice Theory And Indian Country Crime, Adam Crepelle

Lewis & Clark Law Review

American Indians are victims of violence at higher rates than members of any other racial group. Nevertheless, Indian victims receive little media attention. Aside from the prevalence of violence against Indians, the violence is unique because of the rules governing Indian country law enforcement. Tribes, absent compliance with federally mandated procedural safeguards, cannot prosecute non-Indian criminals. While state or federal law enforcement have jurisdiction over reservation crimes involving non-Indian perpetrators, they often fail to respond. Hence, non-Indians know they can target Indians with little fear of reprisal. This Article argues the rules governing Indian country crimes were not designed to …

Fighting For Whiteness In Ukraine, Marissa Jackson Sow

Law Faculty Publications

Teri McMurtry-Chubb’s Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy offers groundbreaking insights into the gendered economic hierarchies internal to the body politic of whiteness through its examination of the limitations that plantation overseers’ contracts in the American Deep South placed on their ability to exercise the proprietorship and contracting authority prerequisite to white identity. This Essay uses the Ukrainian campaign to be recognized as a liberal white nation, and formally become a member of the West, as a contemporary case study of how whiteness remains hegemonized and subject to the ability …

(Re)Building The Master's House: Dismantling America's Colonial Politics Of Extraction And Exclusion, Marissa Jackson Sow

Law Faculty Publications

On February 10, 2021, and in the days thereafter, liberal American commentators showered Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett with superlatives and praise due to her masterful takedown of former President Donald Trump during his impeachment trial for incitement of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot. Referring to a picture of Plaskett wearing a knee-length blue dress with draped sleeves, the political strategist (and daughter of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi) Christine Pelosi took to Twitter to note that “[n]ot all superheroes wear capes. This one does!”

Plaskett is one of many Black Americans who has done the hard work of cleaning up …

Pathways To Liberty: What Colonial, Antebellum, And Postbellum Education Can Teach Us About Today, Danielle Wingfield

Law Faculty Publications

Education is a critical part of nation-building. More specifically, it can also be a powerful pathway to liberty and a tool for disseminating knowledge. However, historically it has been used to subjugate and censor vulnerable groups like women, socio-economically disadvantaged persons, as well as men of color. Therefore, to avoid subordinating members of such minoritized groups and suppressing uncomfortable historical facts, advocates must continually evaluate the purpose and method of education. Such persistent monitoring can provide a basis for constructive reform of public education in the United States. Such reform must also consider changing social conditions.

Presently, for example, public …

Allow Me To Transform: A Black Guy’S Guide To A New Constitution, Brandon Hasbrouck

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. By Elie Mystal.

Mothers In Law, Melissa Murray

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. By Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

America Is Watching, But Are They Listening?, Nancy Kartos

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note examines the persistent issue of violence against Black people, particularly at the hands of police, and how social media has become a significant factor in hindering accountability. It draws historical parallels between past racial violence, such as lynchings during the Jim Crow era, and contemporary police brutality, highlighting how social media amplifies yet polarizes public discourse. The analysis critiques the legal system's failure to hold police accountable, with a focus on the doctrine of qualified immunity, and explores how political polarization exacerbates the problem. The note ultimately argues that without addressing these systemic and technological challenges, meaningful reform …

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, And Social Justice In The Curriculum, In The Classroom, And In The Courtroom, Nicole P. Dyszlewski, Diana Hassel

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Changemakers: Elevating Conversations Around Indigenous Peoples' Rights, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.