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This Note explores the relationship between contractual parties in the credit market, as shaped by debt capitalism, through a brief history of slavery, peonage, and credit/debt legislation. Debt capitalism is a racially exclusionary system — stemming from slavery — in which asset acquisition, facilitated by working to pay debt, (1) is a requirement for inclusion in the economic market, and (2) has a disparate impact on excluding Black Americans from wealth building given their bargaining power position. Over time, debt capitalism shifted from using Black enslaved people as primary sources of labor and collateral to indebting freed Black Americans. Currently, debt capitalism continues to extract labor and interest from Black Americans in particular through different forms of debt peonage. I highlight what I call modern student debt peonage through the story of the Greenes, a couple who filed for bankruptcy and claimed that the U.S. Department of Education owed them reparations in the form of student debt cancellation. By exploring predatory consumer bankruptcy practices and the strengths and weaknesses of the Greenes’ claims in the context of the socio-political and economic subordination of Black Americans by the U.S. government, this Note debunks the idea that a student loan is a valid enforceable contract signed by equal parties. The Note supports policy proposals for student debt relief, such as full debt cancellation, bankruptcy reform, and abolishing the current student debt complex. This Note encourages the use of an alternative framework for negotiating and defining credit relationships, which relies on a more equitable understanding of opportunity. This alternative framework could mobilize debt relief policies that reduce the Black-white wealth gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The murder of George Floyd sparked renewed advocacy around racial justice. However, many Americans responded defensively to the increasingly widespread recognition of systemic racism and police brutality against Black Americans. Backlash to increased calls for racial justice manifested in the passage of anti-critical race theory bills by multiple states, the enactment of the Patriotic Education Commission by President Trump, and other efforts to quell recognition of racial inequality in the United States. These emblematic events demonstrate the consequences of the United States failing to fully acknowledge and atone for its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Drawing from case studies that have implemented transitional justice schemes, this Note argues for the adoption of a responsive, holistic transitional justice scheme by the federal government. Such an approach, this Note contends, will position the United States on a path to achieving lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality. To achieve this end, the Note recommends amending the Constitution, establishing a commission on truth and history, re-examining the way we teach history in schools, and providing reparations. Thus, the Note offers a novel contribution to the literature on reparations and racial justice by demonstrating the efficacy of pairing reparations and a truth and history commission with education policy and constitutional amendments. The path to achieve transitional justice goals in the United States will be a long one, but as this Note demonstrates, this approach presents a viable means of fully achieving these goals. Discussing holistic transitional justice in the United States and developing strategies within this framework lay the first bricks in the path to achieve lasting justice, reconciliation, and equality in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes ("HERS"), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states' higher education's harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes and reveals the myriad ways in which higher education redress statutes now serve as tools for aiding in the erasure of the higher education industry's culpability and complicity in slavery, degradation, and discrimination toward Black people. As such, this Article shows the growing hostility toward Black people's contribution to the higher education industry and states' unwillingness to offer redress efforts inclusively, broadly, and robustly. This Article serves as a platform for recognizing Black people's harm and hurt and the degree to which that recognition has been undermined by the states' disparate treatment of their humanity. Lastly, this Article proffers recommendations to activists, legislators, and other relevant stakeholders regarding the enforcement and promulgation of more comprehensive and inclusive higher education redress statutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current law enforcement practices--including efforts to address sex trafficking--disproportionately harm Black people. This Article proposes that front-end criminal justice reforms to reduce the criminalization of poverty, reform racially biased police practices, and increase police accountability could mitigate the disparate impact that policing has on Black individuals being sex trafficked. Aligning anti-sex trafficking efforts with criminal justice reform would prioritize the prevention of sex trafficking as well as the protection of people who experience trafficking, while seeking to prosecute traffickers with less collateral harm to Black individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author examines the laws in Florida that allegedly suppress African Americans' right to vote, particularly the provisions of the Florida Statute section 98.0751 mandating felons to pay all their legal financial obligations to regain their voting rights. Also cited is the reason why the U.S. Eleventh Circuit allegedly erred in its ruling reversing a district court's decision stating that the section's poll tax provision violated the 24th constitutional amendment.

Despite the constitutional guaranty of trial by a fair and impartial jury, racial bias has long plagued juries of Black defendants. Although voir dire, the process of questioning potential jurors during jury selection, could help defendants identify racially biased jurors, courts have been largely unwilling to hold that defendants have a right to ask questions about race during voir dire. However, in State v. Crump, the Supreme Court of North Carolina held that Black male defendants involved in shootings with police do have this right. This Recent Development explores that holding and examines its future implications, ultimately arguing that the Crump holding can be used as a powerful tool to confront racial bias in juries. This Recent Development argues that, especially in an era where police brutality is well-known and well-documented, questions about race during voir dire will be most effective when they center on specific instances of racial bias and police brutality. By engaging in a frank conversation with potential jurors about their impressions of police interactions with Black people, attorneys can help secure their clients' constitutional right to an impartial jury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black people have long faced obstacles when attempting to access the freedom of mobility represented by the "open road." The phenomenon of "Driving While Black" is a manifestation of those obstacles. This Essay posits that the restriction of Black freedom through the racialization of space is the common thread that ties "Driving While Black" to the broader phenomenon of "Living While Black." It examines "Driving While Black" through a lens of spatial structural racism enforced by state-sanctioned police violence in the guise of the pretextual traffic stop and concludes that banning such policing practices is the remedy for "Driving While Black.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, written in connection with a symposium honoring Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory's twenty years on the bench, I place Judge Gregory's jurisprudence within the tradition of African-American political thought. I suggest that, at bottom, Judge Gregory has a leveling-up jurisprudence that seeks to interpret the Constitution in a way that ensures the least well-off in society are granted the same rights as the most privileged. This brand of democratic theorizing approximates a mainstream position by Black political theorists optimistically seeking to have the least well-off integrated into a fully equal society. By comparing and contrasting his work with other legal and political thinkers in this tradition, I sketch an example of how Judge Gregory uses his role in the judiciary to help shape an America that lives up to the ideals expressed in its founding documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates on racial inequalities in tbe criminal justice system focus on ofenders while neglecting tbe other side of tbe criminal equation-victims of crime. Such scholarly oversight is surprisinggiven the similarly deep racial disparities in tbe treatment of victims, mangested in diferent stages of the criminal justice system. Delving into tbeunderexplored territog of racialized victimization, this project bridges tbat gap and exposes tbe roots of the disparate treatment of Black victims in tbe American criminal justice system. These unprecedenteci times of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial tensions bring to tbe fore questions about governmental allocation of resources and emphasize. maybe more tban ever, tbe importance of going back to the roots of sucb a systematic institutional neglect. Through the ideal victim framework, I argue that from tbe early days of the victims' rights movement to the present, Black victims bave been considered non-ideal victims and, as sucb, unwortby of institutional and legal recognition. I further claim tbat tbe media bas bad an important role in such a social construction of the ideal white victim. I utilize a novel dataset spanning ten years of media coverage on homicide cases contrasted witb federal and state level crime statistics from Virginia, Washington. D.C. and Magland to offer empiricalsupport for tbis claim. J jind first. local news stories about white homicide victims are indeed more salient tban stories about Black homicide victims, and second, that Black victims are systematically underrepresented wbile white victims are overrepresented compared to true victimization rates. Tbis Article tbus exposes yet another dimension through which Black homicide victims are excised*om the public's consciousness as equal participants in tbe criminal process. More broadly, tbis Article calls for a discussion of the tight connections between the patterns through wbicb we think about race and crime and offers directions to advance conversations on bow to allow counter-narratives to enter tbe social discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 election showed the importance of faith in the democratic system and the ability for citizens to cast a ballot for federal, state, and local races. After the election, state legislatures will be redrawing federal, state, and local electoral districts. Those new districts will affect the voting rights of nearly every American. This Note examines Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has traditionally afforded minority group members the opportunity to challenge discriminatory electoral policies that thwart the ability "to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." This is an important avenue that minority group members can seek to remediate biased districting processes. Claims brought by one minority group at a time--such as a Black community suing to be a majority in a newly drawn electoral district after being discriminated against in the district drawing process--have been commonplace for several decades. But given the diversifying country, these standard challenges are becoming insufficient. A newer and more controversial theory pursued by litigants under Section 2 is the "aggregated claim"--which is a joint claim brought by two or more minority groups saying essentially, "We've been discriminated against collectively." This Note asks the question of whether aggregated claims are permitted under Section 2 and argues that they are. In particular, this Note examines the impact of a 2009 Supreme Court case, Bartlett v. Strickland, on the viability of aggregated claims, and makes a novel argument based on statutory interpretation that such claims should be permitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an African American male defendant tries to plea bargain an equitable justice outcome, he finds that the deep-rooted racial bias that casts African American men as dangerous, criminal and animalistic, compromises his justice rights. Plea bargaining has become the preferred process used to secure convictions for upwards of 97 percent of cases because of its efficiency. This efficiency, however, comes at a cost. The structure and process of plea bargaining makes it more likely that the historical racial bias that exists against African American male defendants will taint the negotiation process and justice outcomes. The racial profiling by the police, the presumption of guilt rather than innocence for African American men, the prosecutor's discretion when charging the defendant, and the justice negotiation's speed all contribute to the harsher negotiated sentences that African American male defendants receive compared to white male defendants accused of similar crimes. These racially tainted outcomes threaten the integrity of our justice system, and the core of our democracy. This Article traces the origins of racial bias in plea bargaining by chronicling the historical relationship among three societal developments: slavery, the criminal justice system, and plea bargaining. The Article then explains how plea bargaining's structure, as it exists today, allows these historical racial biases to manifest and fester. Culling from the research of cognitive psychologists, dispute system design scholars, and anti-racism educators, this Article prescribes organizational and procedural reforms to unshackle plea bargaining from racial bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic racism in the United States is pervasive. It runs through every aspect of society, from healthcare to education. Changing all of the parts of society touched by racism is necessary; however, this Article does not provide a cure for systemic racism. It seeks to address a byproduct of this racism: police brutality. Over and over, headlines broadcast the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police--why has nothing changed? This Article argues that meaningful reform requires trust in U.S. law enforcement, which can only be achieved by holding police accountable and deterring misconduct. To do so, this Article proposes reconsidering police licensing to guarantee more thirdparty, unbiased oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, "Don't get it twisted--the criminal justice system ain't broke. It's working just the way it's supposed to." This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community's interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about interdicting crime. From its inception in the nineteenth century, organized policing served the social, political, and economic priorities of empowered groups, from supporting Southern agrarian capitalist interests by imposing de facto slavery on emancipated Blacks to bolstering Northern industrialization by oppressing immigrant laborers. Afterward, police forces grew in response not to spikes in gardenvariety crimes but to political campaigns and cultural anxieties. And today, it remains contested whether current policing practices--especially street policing--function to alleviate, rather than exacerbate, crime problems. While policing's crime-reduction success is questionable, one obvious, tremendous success has been its control of race, space, and place. Police draw blue lines around Black neighborhoods--just as banks drew their red lines--designating them as high-risk, pathological spaces. Police use aggressive stop and frisks, intense surveillance, and military-style home raids to keep the people in their spatial and social place. Brutality is the business of policing, reinforced in recruitment, training, and practice. I conclude that because racialized brutality is integral to policing, reformers should not primarily focus on incarcerating specific bad cops who draw headlines. The "bad apple" narrative casts racist violence as individual and deviant, rather than institutional and structural, and undermines the current promising, if glacial, movement toward dismantling policing as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Furman v. Georgia, capital punishment jurisprudence has equipped decisionmakers with increased structure, guidance, and narrowing in death sentencing in an effort to eliminate the arbitrary imposition of death. Yet, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful given the wide discretion built into capital sentencing which allows for prejudice, bias, and racism to persist. Juries continue to sentence a disproportionately high number of defendants who have been convicted of murdering white victims to death. As a result, death sentencing schemes tend to undervalue Black murder victims' lives. Any effort to eliminate the disparity must center on the undervaluation of Black lives. This Article suggests that the next challenge to the death penalty should be on equal protection grounds based on the undervaluation of Black lives. It highlights that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended, in part, to extend the equal protection of the laws to Black victims of crime. The Article then explores the pitfalls of other race-based challenges to the death penalty. And demonstrates that a challenge based on disparities in capitally prosecuting white and Black victim cases could end capital punishment. The Article concludes with a road map for what a challenge based on the undervaluation of Black lives would look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the constitutional foundation of Black Lives Matter which goes beyond more than racial justice. Topics discussed include the connection between the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Black Lives Matter movement, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to individual states, and the benefits of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment to police officers under disciplinary action.

In his memoirs, Chief Justice Earl Warren singled out the redistricting cases as the most significant decisions of his tenure on the Court.1 A review of the changes redistricting introduced in Georgia supports Warren's assessment. Not only have the obligations to equalize populations across districts and to do so in a racially fair manner transformed the makeup of the state's collegial bodies, Georgia has provided the setting for multiple cases that have defined the requirements to be met when designing districts. Other than the very first adjustments that occurred in the 1960s, changes in Georgia plans had to secure approval from the federal government pursuant to the Voting Rights Act. Also, the first four decades of the Redistricting Revolution occurred with a Democratic legislature and governor in place. Not surprisingly, the partisans in control of redistricting sought to protect their own and as that became difficult they employed more extreme measures. When in the minority, Republicans had no chance to enact plans on their own. Beginning in the 1980s and peaking a decade later, Republicans joined forces with black Democrats to devise alternatives to the proposals of white Democrats. The biracial, bipartisan coalition never had sufficient numbers to enact its ideas. After striking out in the legislature, African-Americans appealed to the U.S. Attorney General alleging that the plans enacted were less favorable to black interests than alternatives offered by the coalition. Every iteration, save for the plans drawn in the 1960s and 2011, bore the marks of what the Department of Justice (DOJ) believed necessary to secure equal treatment of African-Americans. As will become clear in the course of this Article, the DOJ's perspective has changed over time. This Article is arranged chronologically and examines each of the major rounds of redistricting. Aside from adjusting for population shifts, which remain constant, a different concern or theme dominated each round. In the 1960s, Georgia and other states were like individuals who had begun flexing long-ignored muscles as they set about adjusting lines that had gone unchanged for decades. In the 1970s, as the need for redistricting merged with demands from the Voting Rights Act, pushback occurred as it did in the many other aspects of racial interaction as the nation finally began to take seriously its commitment to equality. A decade later, Georgia encountered a DOJ that had precise quantitative goals for what was necessary to provide African-Americans an opportunity to elect their preferences. In the 1990s, DOJ incorporated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into its preclearance reviews and demanded that Georgia enhance the number of majority-black districts and that it maximize the black percentage in those districts. The turn of the new century found the generations-long Democratic control of Georgia slipping away and the majority party pulled out all the stops desperately trying to cling to power. Democratic efforts could not withstand the tide of partisan realignment and court challenges so that in 2011 Republicans sat at the computer terminals and redistricted Georgia. Republicans attempted to maximize their control over the legislature by devising plans that might produce super-majorities with two-thirds of the seats in each chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does media exposure to salient criminological events exacerbate racialized perceptions of injustice? We examine whether closely following media coverage of the fatal encounter of George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin moderates racial and ethnic differences in opinion surrounding the event and the U.S. criminal justice system. Our analysis addresses several key aspects of the case: Whether Zimmerman would have been arrested sooner if Martin had been white, whether respondents felt Zimmerman's acquittal was justified, and whether there is racial bias against African Americans in the criminal justice system. Relying on national opinion surveys before and after Zimmerman's trial verdict, our findings support the racial gradient thesis by demonstrating that sustained exposure to racialized framing of the incident in the media affects Hispanics the most and hardens entrenched attitudes among African Americans relative to whites. The analysis supports the continuing relevance of the mass media in attitude formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 2016 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit case North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory which deals with voter identification laws and the court's determination that certain provisions in North Carolina's 2013 election reform law violate a ban against discriminatory intent under section 2 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. State-sanctioned voter disenfranchisement is assessed, along with the legal rights of black (African) Americans.

The years 2014 to 2016 likely will go down as a significant if not watershed period in the history of U.S. race relations. Police killing of African Americans has engendered further conversations about race and policing. Yet, in most of the discussions about these tragic deaths, little attention has been paid to a significant dimension of the police violence problem: the legalization of racial profiling in Fourth Amendment law. This legalization of racial profiling is not a sideline or peripheral feature of Fourth Amendment law. It is embedded in the analytical structure of the doctrine in ways that enable police officers to force engagements with African Americans with little or no basis. The frequency of these engagements exposes African Americans not only to the violence of ongoing police surveillance, contact, and social control but also to the violence of serious bodily injury and death. Which is to say, Fourth Amendment law facilitates the space between stopping black people and killing black people. This Article demonstrates precisely how by employing a series of hypotheticals to reveal the ways in which the extraordinary violence police officers often use against African Americans can grow out of the ordinary police interactions Fourth Amendment law empowers police officers to stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The law largely has overlooked one of the most important sociological developments of the last half century: a sharp decline in residential segregation. In 1970, 80 percent of African Americans would have had to switch neighborhoods for blacks to be spread evenly across the typical metropolitan area. By 2010, this proportion was down to 55 percent and was continuing to fall. Bringing this striking trend (and its causes) to the attention of the legal literature is my initial aim in this Article. My more fundamental goal, though, is to explore what desegregation means for the three bodies of civil rights law--housing discrimination, vote dilution, and school segregation--to which it is tied most closely. I first explain how all three bodies historically relied on segregation. Its perpetuation by housing practices led to disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act. It meant that minority groups were "geographically compact,"as required by the Voting Rights Act. And it contributed to the racially separated schools from which segregative intent was inferred in Brown and its progeny. I then argue that all of these doctrines are disrupted by desegregation. Fair Housing Act plaintiffs cannot win certain disparate impact suits if residential patterns are stably integrated. Nor can claimants under the Voting Rights Act satisfy the statute's geographic compactness requirement. And desegregating homes usually result in desegregating schools, which in turn make illicit intent difficult to infer. Lastly, I offer some tentative thoughts about civil rights law in a less racially separated America. I am most optimistic about the Fair Housing Act. "Integrated and balanced living patterns" are among the statute's aspirations, and it increasingly is achieving them. Conversely, I am most pessimistic about the Voting Rights Act. One of its objectives is minority representation, which is threatened when minorities are politically distinctive but spatially dispersed. And a mixed verdict seems in order for school desegregation law. Rising residential integration eventually should produce rising school integration. But it has not done so yet, and even when it does, this improvement may not reach schools'other racial imbalances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of the role of law in racial divisions among the U.S. working class. Emphasis is given to topics such as the exclusion of African Americans from labor associations, racial solidarity during the Reconstruction era, the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court against black organization in cases such as United States v. Cruikshank, and the labor organizing efforts of groups like the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor.

The article discusses biases in relation to the claim that America's antidiscrimination law restricts equality as of 2016, and it mentions author Alan David Freeman's article "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine" which appears in a 1978 issue of the journal. Several historic rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court are examined, along with a sharing economy and the legal rights of African Americans and black people in America.

This case comment analyses the appropriateness of the 60/40 written/oral weighting of the promotional exams challenged by Briscoe. The plaintiff claimed that the oral exam had less disparate impact on African Americans, was a better way to access candidates' ability and hence should be weighted more. The comment shows that when more weight is given to the oral exam, the number of African American promotions 'increases', but the number of Hispanic promotions and the total number of minority promotions 'decreases'. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that for most of the written/oral weightings, including the one advocated by the plaintiff, the number of African Americans who would be promoted to lieutenant remains the same, supporting district court's conclusion that the weighting used by the City did not have disparate impact on African Americans 'as a race'. In addition, the comment illustrates that even though the oral exam had less disparate impact on African Americans, it had 'more' disparity on Hispanics. Considering minority candidates as a whole group, the disparities of the oral and the written exams were about the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common narrative about African Americans' quest for social justice and Civil Rights during the Twentieth Century consists, largely, of men and women working through organizations to bring about change. The typical list of organizations includes, inter alia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What are almost never included in this list are African American collegiate-based fraternities. However, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, a small group of organizations emerged and were founded on personal excellence, the development and sustaining of fictive-kinship ties, and racial uplift. Given these organizations' almost immediate creation of highly functioning alumni chapters in cities across the United States, members of these organizations, who were college graduates, could continue their work in actualizing their respective organizations' ideals. One such organization, founded at Howard University in 1914, was Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. This article explores the history of this fraternity's, and its members', involvement in African Americans' quest for social justice and racial equality in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional public safety responses to crime involve interactions with the criminal justice system. However, recent killings by police of unarmed black men, women, and children have led to a national dialogue on the fundamental strategy of public safety. The narrative of "Black Lives Matter" offers a new framework for policymakers, activists, practitioners, and other stakeholders to think about a public safety strategy that is not solely defined by arrests and admissions to prison. This essay provides an overview of evidence-based approaches for public safety interventions that exist outside of law enforcement interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the U.S. Animal Welfare Act fails to protect animals adequately. Topics discussed include the discrete staging of dogfighting inside unoccupied buildings of basements and the emergence of puppy mills which aim to increase animal output in the pet industry. The difference in punishment for these two actions under the law and the law's greater impact on the African American community are mentioned.

A problem in Black Studies research is that important journals in the field are not evaluated by standard journal ranking systems. Because the opportunity is limited in being able to publish in the field of Black Studies, there has always been an effort on the part of Blacks to start their own journals. Therefore the ideas of credibility and trustworthiness are inextricably linked to Black Studies journals. This article focuses on two approaches for creating evaluative systems for these journals. The first approach takes "academic excellence and social responsibility," the defining tenets of the 1970s Black Studies movement, as the basis for investigating the academic journals in Black Studies. The second approach proposes to measure Black Studies journals impact in a manner comparable to the assessments used to rank mainstream disciplinary journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a preclearance provision in the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) which is designed to protect all American citizens, especially African Americans, from being denied the right to vote. Voter disenfranchisement and U.S. federal antidiscrimination laws are mentioned, along with targeted reforms of the nation's electoral process on both the national and state levels. Several constitutional challenges to the VRA are examined, including Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.

We collect a new dataset on capital punishment in the United States and we propose a test of racial bias based upon patterns of sentence reversals. We model the courts as minimizing type I and II errors. If trial courts were unbiased, conditional on defendant's race the error rate should be independent of the victim's race. Instead we uncover 3 and 9 percentage points higher reversal rates in direct appeal and habeas corpus cases, respectively, against minority defendants who killed whites. The pattern for white defendants is opposite but not statistically significant. This bias is confined to Southern states. (JEL J15, K41, K42) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses organizational responsibility for workplace-related racial and sexual harassment in America as of 2014, and it mentions the testimony of several African-American workers in a race discrimination lawsuit against the Turner Industries Group LLC industrial construction and fabrication firm. Employee exploitation claims are examined, along with American corporate and labor laws. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigations are also assessed.

The impediments to property acquisition and market success among African Americans are a significant area of inquiry in legal scholarship. The prevailing narrative on the historical relationship between Blacks and property is overwhelmingly focused on loss. However, in the political science, economics, and sociology literatures there is a countervailing narrative of successful property acquisition and retention among what might be termed a "market dominant" subset of migrant Blacks. The most successful subset of Black property owners in the United States today are descendants of Black migrants who were enslaved outside the United States. These free Black migrants, overwhelmingly British subjects originating from the West Indies, are largely invisible in the legal scholarship. Questions have arisen in other disciplines about what differentiated this subset of Black people. Why was their experience of property ownership so different? Debates in the sociology, political economy, and political science literature have often focused on what Francis Fukuyama has controversially termed "cultural questions," namely, the view that early West Indian migrants--like Korean or Japanese migrants--possessed a particular set of cultural traits that were distinctly well suited to asset acquisition. This Article focuses on a far more prosaic rationale, contending that the success of West Indian migrants may be rooted in the early grant of what I term "de facto property and contract rights" to West Indian slaves, which allowed their freedmen descendants to become the largest independent Black peasantry in the Americas. Between 1880 and 1924, U.S. immigration officials may have inadvertently selected for propertied migrant "types" when admitting immigrants. Through their own historical exposure to property and contract rights frameworks in the West Indies, as well as internal communal networks which supported informal banking schemes, these Blacks were particularly well placed to take advantage of opportunities for home and business ownership upon arrival in the United States. The broader point is that there is a glaring omission amidst the "cultural" controversy: What about law? I use the term "law" in this context as it is used by many proponents of new institutional economics, as a proxy for an institutional framework that supports property acquisition, regardless of whether this framework is formal (state-supported) or customary. Moreover, the law and economics scholarship has focused extensively on institutional frameworks that allow certain religious and ethnic groups to dominate particular sectors, such as Orthodox Jews in the diamond industry or Koreans in the grocery sector. The insights of this literature allow us to interrogate whether Black West Indians had early access to institutions that facilitated contracting and property ownership and if so, whether this institutional history might contribute to their long-term asset acquisition patterns. The question necessarily arises: Why would we think of Black migrants any differently from the way we think of other ethnic and religious minorities who have been successful asset acquirers? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. criminal laws and the reported accuracy of verdicts involving America's criminal justice system as of 2014, focusing on mandatory minimum punishments, bipartisanship, and various "truth in sentencing" regimes. Racial disparities are addressed in relation to punishment rates for drug crimes involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine. The U.S. Fair Sentencing Act, the legal rights of African American defendants, and the stop and frisk police technique are examined.

An essay on the speech 'I have a dream' delivered by American activist and leader Martin Luther King, Junior at the March on Washington, that was called for civil and economic rights for African Americans on August 28, 1963, is presented. Topics discussed include religious themes in King's speech, the speech's connection connections between religion and socially conscious law reform, and impact of the speech on the civil right movement.

The article discusses racial discrimination in America in relation to the U.S. Supreme Court's reported treatment of the nation's Voting Rights Act of 1965, focusing on American constitutional law, the rights of black Americans, and the requirement that certain jurisdictions in the U.S. must seek approval from the nation's Department of Justice prior to altering voting procedures. The author argues that American states should be required to disclose alterations of voting rules or practices.

An essay is presented on equal protection and the executive branch in America as of August 2013, focusing on the U.S. Congress, the Thirteenth Amendment to the nation's Constitution, and efforts to restrict racial discrimination in the U.S. The legal rights of African Americans are addressed, along with America's Reconstruction and the election of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Republicans and Democrats in the 1800s are examined, along with popular votes and the electoral college.

There is no doubt that the United States were not created as a purely democratic state. On the one hand, it established basic rules and principles of democratic government such as free elections, sovereignty of the nation, fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals or independent judiciary. All of these principles were, however, enjoyed only by the part of American society: free elections were guaranteed for white men, excluding women and blacks; sovereignty belonged to the nation, i.e. white women and men, because slaves were not considered citizens; fundamental rights and freedoms were guaranteed only for whites; institutional independence of the judicial branch did not prevent the system from injustice towards the blacks. Furthermore, one of the most important values of democratic society, equal protection of law, was absent in the original constitutional document of 1787, as well as the provisions of Bill of Rights. The clause became part of U.S. constitutional reality yet in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted, as a direct result of social and political changes caused by the civil war. After introducing the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery, the government took a step forward by making all citizens equal in 1868 and by providing black Americans with suffrage rights in 1870. For former slaves it meant a milestone step in their fight to destroy the social and political boundaries which limited their basic rights and freedoms. However, before the above mentioned events took place, the period of injustice and exploitation occurred with the U.S. Supreme Court in the middle of social and political tensions. The main purpose of the article is to show the changing attitude of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to the social and political status of African-Americans. This attitude influenced historical and contemporary social relations among the American society proving one of the most controversial aspects of U.S. democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his famous and controversial article Towards Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law Professor Herbert Wechsler addressed the legitimacy of judicial review and the standards to be followed in interpretation, and declared that courts must issue principled decisions resting on reasons "that in their generality and their neutrality transcend any immediate result that is involved." Focusing on the United States Supreme Court's seminal Brown v. Board of Education decision, Wechsler argued that the Court's ruling was not a principled decision meeting his standard of neutrality. This article examines Neutral Principles and Wechsler's critique of Brown. More specifically, the article (1) argues that the "neutral principle" concept is indeterminate and oxymoronic, (2) focuses on and responds to Wechsler's position that there was a point in Plessy v. Ferguson's observation that if state-mandated separation of the races stamped African Americans with a "badge of inferiority" it was "solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it"; and (3) demonstrates that Wechsler preferred, not a neutral principle applicable to racial discrimination claims, but a non-neutral freedom-of-association principle (an innovation of the Civil War period) that ignored the asymmetrical meaning of segregation and the differences between inclusion and exclusion and served as a justification for the segregationist status quo. In addition, the article submits that Wechsler's neutral principles approach and critique of Brown has contemporary relevance and importance, as illustrated by certain aspects of the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars and political leaders denounce racism as the cause of disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. All players in this system have been blamed, including the legislators who enact laws that disproportionately harm blacks, police who unevenly arrest blacks, prosecutors who over-charge blacks, and judges who fail to release and oversentence black Americans. Some scholars have blamed the police and judges who make arrest and release decisions based on predictions of whether defendants will commit future crimes, claiming that prediction leads to minorities being treated unfairly. Others complain that racism results from misused discretion. This Article explores where racial bias enters the criminal justice system through an empirical analysis that considers the impact of discretion and prediction. With a close look at the numbers and consideration of factors ignored by others, this Article confirms some conventional wisdom but also makes several surprising findings. This Article confirms what many commentators have suspected--that police arrest black defendants more often for drug crimes than white defendants. It also finds, contrary to popular belief, that there is little evidence to support the belief that drugs are linked to violent crime. Also, judges actually detain white defendants more than similarly-situated black defendants for all types of crimes. The important and surprising findings in this Article challenge long-held conventions of race and help mitigate racial disparity in criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]