Research & Academic Scholarship

"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."

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.

Victim Services in Colorado Examined From an Equity Perspective

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

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.

"Current attempts to correct historical discrimination by local and regional offices of the USDA have been met with charges of 'reverse discrimination'"

Compiled resources from Harvard Law Review.

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

Conversations about police reform in lawmaking and legal scholarship typically take a narrow view of the multiple, complex roles that policing plays in American society, focusing primarily on their techniques of crime control. This Article breaks from that tendency, engaging police reform from a sociological perspective that focuses instead on the noncriminal functions of policing. In particular, it examines the role of policing in the daily maintenance of racial residential segregation, one of the central strategies of American racial inequality. Unlike previous work that touches on these issues, this Article argues that police reformers and police leaders should adopt an anti-segregation approach to policing. It also offers legal frameworks and policy prescriptions that flow from an anti-segregation ethic in police governance.

"In June 1951 five African Americans Harvey E. Beech James L. Lassiter J. Kenneth Lee Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker enrolled in classes at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill ("Carolina Law")."

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity.

I initially set out to assemble this booklet in an attempt to form something of a comprehensive history of Asian American civil rights, but soon realized that our history cannot be smartly categorized by ethnicity and then chronologically listed and detailed. Our history is full of overlaps and parallel struggles. Our history is not neat. And to so many Asian Americans coming of age today, it is unfamiliar.

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

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 […]

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 …

On May 14, 2010, Sandra K. Soto served as the invited faculty speaker at the Convocation ceremony for the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.