Social Movements & the Law

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. Doris Marie Provine's engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism--a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.

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Land Acknowledgment Resources

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-a-vis employers. Along with the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization, American workers alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judgeshave dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor ofemployees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer.Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. As the employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas showin Unequal, though, our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favorsemployers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware ofhow the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination remains fairly common in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employmentdiscrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.

From ASU Library: “The ASU Library acknowledges the 22 Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries.” Thus begins the Arizona State University Library’s first Indigenous land acknowledgement – a five-sentence, 116-word statement about the place that the library and the university have inhabited for more than a century. “The statement represents the ASU Library’s intentions […]

"On June 1, 1981, two young activists, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, were murdered in Seattle in what was made to appear like a gang slaying. But the victims' families and friends suspected they were considered a threat to the dictatorship of Phillippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his regime's relationship to the United States. But how could they prove it up against such powerful, and ruthless, adversaries? In SUMMARY EXECUTION attorney and author Michael Withey describes his ten-year battle for justice for Domingo and Viernes that he fought because "They killed my friends." Follow along as he embarks on a long and dangerous investigation and into the courtroom to obtain convictions of three hitmen, and then prove in U.S. federal court that Marcos was behind the assassinations. If so, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a foreign head of state would be held liable for the murder of American citizens on U.S. soil. However, to accomplish this Withey and his legal team, working with the victims' families and friends, would have to defeat concerted efforts by the murderers, and those who hired them, to cover-up their crimes and obstruct justice. Then they'd have to overcome numerous obstacles including exposing the perjured eyewitness testimony of an FBI informant, uncovering the brutal murder of an accomplice who was being sought to turn state's evidence, and working around the failure by local authorities to prosecute the Marcos operative who planned the murders.

A conservative activist who led the campaign against affirmative action in college admissions is suing two major law firms for fellowships that they offer to increase diversity in the legal profession.

Our Impact Report captures some of the highlights and significant achievements of our work, providing a glimpse into the comprehensive impact we are making. We are proud of the accomplishments featured, knowing they reflect only a portion of the full scope of our efforts.

""Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer's Life in the Battle for Change" combines Michael Tigar's wry legal and societal observations with his analysis of landmark civil rights and international justice cases on which he, as an attorney, worked . The result is a narrative that blends law, history, and progressive politics"--

More than 70 years later, Lacks' family is finally being financially compensated for her involuntary contributions to medicine.

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

President to sign proclamation on Tuesday for monuments across three sites honoring Black teen who was lynched in 1955

"The standard public debate over the Fourteenth Amendment goes something like this. Critics of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment over the last several decades believe that the Court has used the Amendment's provisions for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" as open-ended vehicles for judicial policymaking, whether on abortion or gay marriage or a host of other issues. Indeed, it is difficult for someone sympathetic to the result in the 2015 gay marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges to read the Court's opinion and get the feeling that what the Court is doing is law. The case was decided under the rather nebulous concept "substantive due process," the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment's injunction that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law is not merely about process as its terms might suggest, but also about "substance"--Namely, that the clause protects unwritten, unenumerated fundamental rights or prohibits arbitrary and oppressive legislation"--

The Purpose The Mansfield Rule is a structured certification process designed to ensure all talent at participating law firms and legal departments have a fair and equal opportunity to advance into leadership. Mansfield is focused on broadening the talent pool for consideration, including those historically underrepresented in the legal profession, to facilitate transparent leadership pathways.  Read More...

When artist Richard Phillips carefully hangs watercolor paintings in his home, he becomes mentally transported into the nature scenes that appear on his canvas.

"The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971. Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated "the concentration camp law" and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America. Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist"--The publisher's description

Agents of change: Community efforts to overcome racial inequities is an editorial series created in collaboration with Report for America, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that highlights how local initiatives address racial inequalities through grassroots approaches.

America is in the midst of a police officer shortage. Agencies of all sizes are struggling to fill open positions.

"The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a road map for how to achieve this lofty goal; it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path towards the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967). Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a simple school desegregation case in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit was filed that would lead to the Lee decision. As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the United States executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabama's official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South"--

Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona (DPAA) is a non-profit educational organization working to inform the public about the injustices surrounding the death penalty and the criminal punishment system. DPAA consists of volunteers from around the State of Arizona organized into the Northern, Central, and Southern regions of the state.

"This authoritative overview of election redistricting at the congressional, state legislative, and local level provides offers an overview of redistricting for students and practitioners. The updated second edition pays special attention to the significant redistricting controversies of the last decade, from the Supreme Court to state courts"--

Chauvin was stabbed and seriously injured by another inmate inside a federal prison in Tucson, Ariz., according to officials.

Fred Korematsu, Iva Toguri (alias Tokyo Rose), Japanese Peruvians, and five thousand Americans who renounced their citizenship under duress: Rebel Lawyer tells the story of the key cases pertaining to the World War II incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and the trial attorney who defended them. Wayne Collins made a somewhat unlikely hero. An Irish American lawyer with a volatile temper, Collins s passionate commitment to the nation's constitutional principles put him in opposition to not only the United States government but also groups that acquiesced to internment such as the national office of the ACLU and the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League. Through careful research and legal analysis, Charles Wollenberg takes readers through each case, and offers readers an understanding of how Collins came to be the most effective defender of the rights and liberties of the West Coast s Japanese and Japanese American population. Wollenberg portrays Collins not as a white knight but as a tough, sometimes difficult man whose battles gave people of Japanese descent the foundation on which to construct their own powerful campaigns for redress.

A compelling study of a subtle and insidious form of racial inequality in American law and culture. Why does racial equality continue to elude African Americans even after the election of a black president? Liberals blame white racism while conservatives blame black behavior. Both define the race problem in socioeconomic terms, mainly citing jobs, education, and policing. Roy Brooks, a distinguished legal scholar, argues that the reality is more complex. He defines the race problem African Americans face today as a three-headed hydra involving socioeconomic, judicial, and cultural conditions. Focusing on law and culture, Brooks defines the problem largely as racial subordination-"the act of impeding racial progress in pursuit of nonracist interests." Racial subordination is little understood and underacknowledged, yet it produces devastating and even deadly racial consequences that affect both poor and socioeconomically successful African Americans. Brooks addresses a serious problem, in many ways more dangerous than overt racism, and offers a well-reasoned solution that draws upon the strongest virtues America has exhibited to the world.

Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.--Publisher description.

On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikîkî. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within three weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questions about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed attorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials "raced" Fukunaga to death--first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colorblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for revenge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that undergirded Hawai'ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunaga case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a racial paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.

The essays in this volume illuminate a central paradox in the post-colonial West: race remains a potent index of social, economic and political inequality even while racial discrimination has become unlawful, even anathema. The standard account of this paradox is that racial discrimination and inequality are unfortunate vestiges of the past, which an enlightened legal system is now engaged in extirpating. These essays reveal a different story: equality law preserves racial inequality even while denouncing it. The authors show how in country after country, legal rules define racism so narrowly and make racial discrimination so difficult to prove that inequality persists despite its symbolic extinction. This ground-breaking volume of English-language essays, aimed at academics and researchers, shows how critical race theory, an analytic approach developed in the United States, can shed light on the workings of race in political-legal systems as diverse as South Africa, New Zealand, France and Latin and South America.

"Law school coursebook on law and the Japanese internment"--

Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize "An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another. "An admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book."--New York Times Book Review "This book should be a standard for all law students."--Boston Globe

Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.