Law and Race Commons^™

Liberty And Justice For All?: A Pathfinder On The Use Of Lyrics As Evidence In Civil And Criminal Trial, Stephanie Washington

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

A Tale Of Two Cities: Interpreting Racial Disparity In Enforcement Of Stay-At-Home Orders & Social Distancing Rules In New York, 55 Uic L. Rev. 485 (2022), Sarah Hopkins

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racial Capitalism: Complexities With Enforcing Corporate Commitments To End Racial Injustice, 55 Uic L. Rev. 519 (2022), Natè Simmons

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?, Ngozi Okidegbe

Connecticut Law Review

Jurisdictions are increasingly embracing the use of pretrial risk assessment algorithms as a solution to the problem of mass pretrial incarceration. Conversations about the use of pretrial algorithms in legal scholarship have tended to focus on their opacity, determinativeness, reliability, validity, or their (in)ability to reduce high rates of incarceration, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities within the pretrial system. This Article breaks from this tendency, examining these algorithms from a democratization of criminal law perspective. Using this framework, it points out that currently employed algorithms are exclusionary of the viewpoints and values of the racially marginalized communities most …

Rise Of Police Unions On The Back Of The Black Liberation Movement, Ayesha Bell Hardaway

Connecticut Law Review

Police unions have garnered the attention of the media and some scholars in recent years. That attention has often focused on exploring the seemingly inexplicable and routine power police unions have to shield problem officers from accountability. This Article shows that police union power did not surreptitiously arrive on the doorsteps of American cities. Instead, collective bargaining rights for law enforcement began to gain firm footing during the 1960s as white Americans remained committed to preserving their place in the nation’s racial hierarchy as it related to housing, jobs, education, and entertainment. Existing legal scholarship has successfully highlighted the depth …

Black Women & Women's Suffrage: Understanding The Perception Of The Nineteenth Amendment Through The Pages Of The Chicago Defender, Tamar Anna Alexanian

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Susan B. Anthony once famously stated, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” The racism of many early suffragettes has been well documented and discussed; Black suffragettes and other suffragettes of color were, at best, relegated to the margins of the movement and, at worst, scorned and turned away by white suffragettes. Moreover, part of white suffragettes’ strategy for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was based on racist appeals to white men; white suffragettes claimed that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment …

Locked Up And Locked Down In The Land Of Free: A Look At The United States' Prisons And Covid-19'S Disproportionate Effect On Black Americans' Right To Health, Zachary Parrish

American University International Law Review

The United States is infamous for having a large percentage of its population in prison. Each year since 2002, the United States has reported a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world. Another unfortunate but widely prevalent issue that the United States has is systemic racism. The combination of the United States’ struggles with systemic racism and mass incarceration makes for a disproportionately devastating impact on Black Americans. As a result, Black Americans make up a disproportionate amount of the prisoners that fill American prisons.

Citizenship, Race, And Statehood, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

This Article will discuss the interplay between citizenship, race, and ratification of statehood in the United States, both historically and prospectively. Part II will discuss the development and history of the Insular Cases and the creation of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine (“TID”), focusing on the Territory of Puerto Rico and how the issues of citizenship, race, and statehood have evolved in shadow of empire as a result. Part III will look back on the admission to the Union of New Mexico and Arizona—the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states—and discuss the substantial difficulties these territories had in getting admitted for statehood due …

Adaptive Rezoning For Social Equity, Affordability And Resilience, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I will show how the legacies of the institutional barriers to housing still persist to deprive many of the predicates for economic thriving and personal flourishing and how existing zoning philosophy cannot be justified by the need to protect health and safety. Righting the inequities of the past and of the present will require dismantling some of the institutions, apparently legitimate and well-meaning, but operating devilishly to create and perpetuate hardship and exclusion. This will require laying bare the institutions to reveal their ignoble essence. We need a radical overhaul of the historic zoning regime from one …

The Perils Of Private Prosecutions, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In Against Prosecutors, Bennett Capers proposes that we largely abandon the current system of public prosecutions and return to private prosecutions. His goal is to empower the victims of crime to make decisions currently made by public prosecutors—whether to bring charges, what the charges should be, and how the cases should be resolved.

Professor Capers’ goals are laudable. As he notes, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the criminal legal system is rife with unwarranted racial disparities. Professor Capers correctly notes that prosecutors play a substantial role in perpetuating these problems. However, his proposed …

Citizen's Arrest And Race, Ira P. Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I begin with a mea culpa. In 2016, I published an article about citizen’s arrest. The idea for the article arose in 2014, when a disgruntled Virginia citizen attempted to arrest a law school professor while class was in progress. I set out to research and write a “traditional” law review article. In it, I traced the origins of the doctrine of citizen’s arrest to medieval England, imposing a positive duty on citizens to assist the King in seeking out suspected offenders and detaining them. I observed that the need for citizen’s arrest lessened with the development of organized and …

On The Meaning Of Color And The End Of White(Ness), William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the history of the term “people of color” and its current status in a country struggling to overcome its racist origins. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other victims of state violence have generated profound anger, calls for action, and demands for dialogue. It is undoubtedly simplistic to assert that words matter. But accurate descriptions are essential for honest conversations, and words convey meanings beyond their syntax. In discussions about race and racial identity, the term “people of color” is routinely used as the antipode to the white community. …

Our Silence Will Not Protect Us . . . And Neither Will J. Edgar Hoover: Reclaiming Critical Race Theory Under The New Mccarthyism, Christina Hsu Accomando, Kristin J. Anderson

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

The right-wing attack against critical race theory is the latest manufactured panic designed to whip up supporters of a party beholden to Donald Trump. Since late 2020, hundreds of measures have been introduced across the U.S. to ban antiracism education, critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and any understanding of racism as systemic and embedded in U.S. history and law. While an understandable reaction of educators is to declare that they are not teaching critical race theory, our position is to reclaim critical race theory for the powerful lens it offers in understanding the history of the U.S., the protracted …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreward

Keynote Address, Justin Hansford

Seattle University Law Review

Keynote Address by Justin Hansford

Putting The Bar Exam On Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, And The Public Good, Scott Johns

Seattle University Law Review

Nothing to see here. Season in and season out, bar examiners, experts, supreme courts, and bar associations seem nonplussed, trapped by what they see as the facts, namely, that the bar exam has no possible weaknesses, at least when it comes to alternative licensure mechanisms, that the bar exam is not to blame for disparate racial impacts that spring from administration of this ritualistic process, and that there are no viable alternatives in the harsh cold world of determining minimal competency for the noble purpose of protecting the public from legal harms. All a lie, of course.

But rather than …

America To Me – A Public Nuisance Reparations Framework Through The Lens Of The Tulsa Massacre, 55 Uic L. Rev. 681 (2022), Kerri Gefeke

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

Redundant Leniency And Redundant Punishment In Prosecutorial Reforms, Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.