Tracking anti-CRT efforts introduced at the local, state, and federal levels.

Lloyd Lionel Gaines applied to the University of Missouri School of Law in 1936. Despite an outstanding scholastic record, Gaines was denied admission based solely on the grounds that Missouri’s Constitution called for “separate education of the races.” Because Missouri had no public law school that admitted Black applications, state law required the state to pay Gaines’ tuition at public universities in Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska. Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) identified Gaines’ case as a good vehicle to begin the incremental process of challenging the ignominious precedent of “separate but equal” established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Together, they sued the University of Missouri seeking an order granting him admission to its Law School.

Policing data is vital to improving police accountability and transparency. In 2021, Arizona enacted a law requiring law enforcement agencies in the state to co

The emerging culture war over the holiday is misguided. In reality, Juneteenth celebrates one of the greatest triumphs of America and its founding principles.

Present-day courts, practitioners, and scholars continue to cite to and rely upon cases involving slavery and enslaved persons to construe, interpret, and apply

Accountability is a well-worn word in social justice circles. The three of us, one a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, one of us African-American, one of us white, have worked hard to figure out what accountability means to us as we attempt to walk our social justice talk. We have done this because we’ve seen too often how the concept of accountability gets (mis)used in interpersonal games of tit for tat, manipulations aimed at getting people to follow an agenda rather than reach for a shared vision. We know how challenging it is to build community-wide accountability when we are spinning in ever increasing dysfunctional circles personally.

The Florida St. Thomas University College of Law has recently rebranded to the Benjamin L. Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University in recognition of the prominent Black civil rights lawyer. Crump is a Florida State University College of Law graduate and has offices in California, Florida, and Washington, D.C. He is widely recognized […]

This Article offers a detailed portrait of the potentially negative systemic effects of the growth of autonomous vehicles on racial and economic justice in traf

A longstanding justification for the institution of property is that it encourages effort and planning, enabling not only individual wealth creation but indirec

Race, Slavery, & the Founders of Yale Law School An exhibition curated by Kathryn James and Fred Shapiro

Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of over ninety institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. These schools are focused …

Education Week summarizes where state policymakers are attempting to censor the way teachers talk about racism and gender.

This paper addresses “Orientalization,” which I define as the objectification of Asian women as the “Oriental Woman”—the stereotypical image of the Ex…

This article is written as a series of letters between a law professor and a medical doctor in reaction to the events surrounding the rise of the Black Lives Ma

In June of 2022, Michigan Department of Corrections (“MDOC”) made national news when NPR reported that non-English language dictionaries were banned in state pr

Victim Services in Colorado Examined From an Equity Perspective

The development of law is inextricably linked to matters of race and ethnicity. The stories of minority citizens--the texture of their lives, the prejudices they have endured, and their struggles for fair treatment--have been documented in the pages of legal opinions, as judges over the years have wrestled with fundamental questions of racial bias and inequality. Studying race, ethnicity, and the law is challenging for many reasons, not the least of which is the prime difficulty of defining what we mean by race. Even the choice of words used to identify minority individuals has social and political ramifications. How law functions to oppress and liberate minorities has been a longstanding topic in the field of sociolegal studies. Issues of race, ethnicity, and law have taken on new urgency in recent years, as affirmative action and reverse discrimination claims as well as reapportionment battles and racial hate speech cases have come before the courts. This special issue of Law and Human Behavior focuses on social science research on race, ethnicity, and the law. Articles in the special issue consider the influence of race and ethnicity on substantive law, legal processes, and crime and deviance, and illustrate the tensions and contradictions that pervade the law's treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. We conclude that taking race and ethnicity into account may force scholars to reconceptualize theories about law's impact and that a greater number of racial and ethnic minority scholars would enrich the field of sociolegal studies.

Buried within Adelante is evidence of a fleeting attempt at prison reform and oversight in Connecticut. Is history repeating itself?

This continuous publication journal is is the primary publication for peer-reviewed articles relating to all forms of coercive confinement, including imprisonme...

In 1968, almost 50 years ago, the Supreme Court validated, in a case called Terry v. Ohio (1968), a common police practice known as stop and frisk, so long as an officer could justify the action on the basis of a newly developed standard: reasonable suspicion. Today, policing agencies use stop and frisk prophylactically, stopping in some cities tens or even hundreds of thousands of people annually. These developments and the litigation around the strategy in New York City and elsewhere provide an opportunity to revisit Terry and to consider recent research in law and social science regarding stop and frisk. This review focuses on three issues: the evolution of legal doctrine pertaining to stop and frisk, arguments regarding the effectiveness of stop and frisk as a mechanism to control and reduce crime, and a delineation of the relevance of the theory of procedural justice to our understanding of the interleaving of the law and social science of stop and frisk.

Recent controversial interactions of police with the public have become an issue of important concern for public and governmental leaders, who have openly quest...

Blacks and whites in the U.S. disagree over police performance and differ on the causes of fatal encounters between blacks and police.

This article examines critical issues regarding criminal profiling, its misuse by law enforcement, and its utility to solve serious crimes with the technique, hereinafter known and called "Criminal Profiling". The specific issue under investigation is the misuse of criminal profiling in the United States, and its impact on African Americans, and other minorities. In that realm, a discussion and analysis of the importance of criminal profiling, the development of criminal profiling and, the misuse of criminal profiling as a critical issue in the 21st century are analyzed.

"What follows is an articulation of the five key policies that our experience and research reveal as the most critical to advancing public safety in America. Rather than a summary or laundry list, we offer these five recommendations as the fundamental next steps. Each makes the rest of the policies we have collectively endorsed easier, more likely, and more effective. In other words, these are the five steps that we believe can do the most work towards turning a just public safety system from a goal to a reality."

As we reflect on racism and anti-racism, the Roper Center continues to identify and make available all public opinion surveys of Black Americans in the Roper data archive. We highlight these surveys of Black Americans, dating back to 1945, to remember and amplify the voices of these individuals. We have also made available more than eight decades of public opinion data on how the U.S. public views Black America. These data provide historical insight into how racial attitudes have changed in the United States and how the public currently views topics such as police brutality, race relations, and social movements for racial equality. We are making all of this data, which can be accessed below, freely available to the public.

Author(s): Lawson, Madison | Abstract: In this argumentative research essay, the idea of an intersectional lens is used examine the class and race of women who are victims of police brutality. With stories of African-American women in low economic cities, it is clear that minority women are more likely to fall victim due to their neighborhood they live in and because of their stereotype of being weak. African-American women are being sexually assaulted and murdered by police and then never receive justice because the media, who can share the story often; however, their stories are never told. In this essay, stories of different types of police assault are told to elucidate the harsh reality that black women face in their own neighborhoods.