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The federal sentencing guidelines were created to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities among similar defendants. This paper explores the impact of increased judicial discretion on racial disparities in sentencing after the guidelines were struck down in United States v. Booker (543 U.S. 220 [2005]). Using data on the universe of federal defendants, I find that black defendants received 2 months more in prison compared with their white counterparts after Booker, a 4 percent increase in average sentence length. To identify the sources of racial disparities, I construct a data set linking judges to defendants. Exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges, I find that racial disparities after Booker were greater among judges appointed after Booker, which suggests acculturation to the guidelines by judges with experience sentencing under a mandatory-guidelines regime. Prosecutors also responded to increased judicial discretion after Booker by charging black defendants with binding mandatory minimum sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a rational choice model of parole release, a color-blind parole board seeking to minimize violations would release all prisoners below a certain risk threshold. To test this prediction, we extend the outcome-test methodology used in assessing discrimination in police searches. We overcome the inframarginality critique by taking advantage of strategic timing of release: within each racial group, violation rates are equalized for a given sentence length. We use the National Corrections Reporting Program data, which record all parole-release decisions in the United States. We find that violation rates are consistently higher for African American parolees, a result not consistent with a parole board bias against African Americans. This conclusion is robust to a variety of tests, including ruling out postrelease discrimination. Evidence on the timing of release suggests a policy aimed at limiting racial disparities in time served rather than in violation rates, which favors fairness over efficiency. [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.

The authors discuss the role of health professionals in addressing s tructural racism and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, relative to the fatal shooting of an African American man named Philando Castile in Minneapolis, Minnesota by a police officer. They mention the disproportionate use of lethal force by U.S. law-enforcement officers against African American communities, highlighting the need to understand and accept the racist roots of the U.S. in addressing structural racism.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) was a landmark civil rights ruling, in which the Supreme Court held that private racial covenants could not be enforced by the state to evict black buyers of "restricted" homes. Fair housing scholars have generally dismissed or downplayed the practical effects of Shelley, since other forms of housing discrimination remained very powerful. Using spatial lag models and detailed geographic data on the location of covenants and patterns of intra-urban black migration, we compare the role of Shelley with other forces shaping mid-century neighborhood change. We find that Shelley precipitated white-to-black neighborhood transitions after 1948 and changed the nature of the dual housing market in important ways. We also show that increased black mobility produced a sharp increase in intra-black economic segregation during the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 focuses on the eradication of the racial and socioeconomic segregation in African American communities in the U.S. through the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provision (AFFH) of the Fair Housing Act (FHA). Topics discussed include the incentives for regional collaboration under the proposed rule of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the history of racial segregation and the social dimension of the FHA. The role of the HUD under the AFFH provision is also discussed.

During the past few decades, punitive crime policies have led to explosive growth in the United States prison population. Such policies have contributed to unprecedented incarceration rates for Blacks in particular. In this article, we consider an unexamined relationship between racial disparities and policy reform. Rather than treating racial disparities as an outcome to be measured, we exposed people to real and extreme racial disparities and observed how this drove their support for harsh criminal-justice policies. In two experiments, we manipulated the racial composition of prisons: When the penal institution was represented as “more Black,” people were more concerned about crime and expressed greater acceptance of punitive policies than when the penal institution was represented as “less Black.” Exposure to extreme racial disparities, then, can lead people to support the very policies that produce those disparities, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

Although the hospitality industry is a major employer in New Zealand, hospitality work is frequently portrayed as temporary, physically hard, stressful and badly paid. This paper is based on a New Zealand study that explored why people remain in a hospitality career, rather than why they leave. At the core of the research was the intersectional research paradigm which examined how the analytically distinct, yet interlinking, socially ascribed categories of age, gender, ethnicity and class influence career choices and decisions to remain in a hospitality career. The 'correct' way to implement an intersectional approach remains contested and confusing in spite of its increasing popularity. The aim of this paper is to show how the uncovering of symbolic norms as part of an adapted multi-level intersectional analysis (Winker & Degele, 2011) enabled the norms of hospitality work and the social structures affecting the career progression of workers within the sector to become visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 explores the relationship between blackness and capitalism in the U.S. Topics discussed include the chaos caused by the reactionary corporate advocacy group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the localism of states' promulgation of anti-African-American laws, and the post-industrial security state. Also discussed is the downsizing of democracy by the information industrial complex.

The author discusses the civil rights issues emerging on death penalty in Louisiana. Topics discussed include the history of capital punishment in the state, the overrepresentation of African-American citizens in the state criminal justice system, and legal challenges on electrocution as an unconstitutional method of execution.

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.

The historical scholarship on black-on-white rape has focused mainly on the oppression of black men and firmly cast white women only as false accusers. While radically politicized groups like communists in the 1930s and civil rights activists in the 1950s deployed the trope of the lying white woman to defend black men accused of rape, by the mid-twentieth century the mainstream culture began to embrace this rhetoric. I am interested in how a new consensus was, formed around this rhetoric and what that meant for movements that organized for justice around sexual violence. In this article, I use the Giles-Johnson case, an instance of alleged black-on-white sexual violence, to examine how white mainstream America embraced the trope of the lying white woman at this time. This article challenges the assumptions of the false claim and begins to examine the complex interplay of racialized and sexualized constructions in cases of black-on-white rape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

In this essay, the author traces the origins of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney's decision in the case Scott v. Sandford, in which he essentially declared that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens, to his opinion as U.S. Attorney General on a diplomatic matter between the U.S. and Great Britain regarding the rights of black British sailors. He argued to U.S. President Andrew Jackson that the sailors did not have rights the needed to be respected by Anglo-American treaties.

The article focuses on the issue of legitimacy through analyzing the objection of racial bias and arbitrariness in capital punishment. It highlights the Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp and explores how the capital sentencing procedure in Georgia is racially biased against African Americans. It discusses the reasons why death penalty should be suspended through demonstrating the injustice of illegitimate authority.

Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, low-skilled African Americans face substantial inequalities in income and employment, relative to non-blacks in the U.S. In this article we draw upon theoretical insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and Gunnar Myrdal to explain empirical inequalities for blacks in labor markets and the U.S. criminal justice system. We argue that Du Bois and Myrdal class and caste models help account for much of the racial disparities found in the empirical research on the criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African American and white defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, in which race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, which includes felony cases from Cook County, Illinois, we find statistically significant between-judge variation in incarceration rates, although not in sentence lengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the challenges of racial discrimination in U.S. death penalty administration. It mentions the case Furman v. Georgia which was decided in an atmosphere perfused with concern on race bias in such penalty especially in Southern States. It also notes an empirical data showing the enforcement of death sentences on African-Americans than on white defendants which presented a risk subjected to discrimination.