Race Rights and the Law Blog

By Alexander Gray January 11, 2023 The Student Scholar Fund has been a catalyst for impactful projects, supporting passionate individuals in their pursuit of fighting for equity. Let's delve into the stories of four of our outstanding summer 2023 grantees and the remarkable projects they undertook. Sommer Blair: Addressing Whiteness in Churches Project Overview: Sommer's project, titled "How…

As the U.S. Supreme Court considers challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Asian Americans find ourselves in a precarious position.  Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the organization bringing these challenges, operates deceptively.  At the outset of the cases, it contended that “a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision essentially forbids […

On Monday, October 31, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in both Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina. [1] These cases are the latest challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at the nation’s elite universities. And they may be the last. Given the composition of the Court, it appears…

On August 24, 2022, President Biden announced a three-part strategy to address the U.S. student debt crisis. [1] First, cancellation of up to $10,000 for borrowers who earned less than $125,000 per year, with an additional $10,000 available for Pell grantees. Second, providing relief to borrowers by fixing the well-known problems with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program and cutting…

The AALS Section on Minority Groups (SOMG) is inviting submissions for its next annual Works-in-Progress/New Voices (WIPs) session at the AALS 2023 Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting will be held in person from Wednesday, January 4, 2023, through Saturday, January 7, 2023 in San Diego, California. The SOMG will focus its annual WIPs session on current topics addressing inequitable legislation…

New piece from the American Bar Association's State of Criminal Justice 2022 entitled, Prison Transfers and Mootness Doctrine: Disappearing the Rule of Law in Prison. Here is a summary: Access to the legal system does not come easily for people in prison. There are administrative procedures that must be exhausted; federal legislation like the Prison Litigation Reform Act disadvantages prisoner-…

This new piece, Muslims in American Prisons: Advancing the Rule of Law through Litigation Praxis is up at SSRN.com. Here is the abstract: Islamic ideas about justice and equality directly informed the development of prison law jurisprudence in the United States. Since the early 1960s, when federal courts began to hear claims by state prisoner-petitioners, Muslims began to look to courts to…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s overruling of the landmark case Roe v. Wade rightfully triggered a national debate about the role of religion in public life, women’s right to control their reproductive lives, and the racially disparate impact of state prohibitions on abortion. The Center for Security, Race and Rights hosted a conversation by legal scholars Asifa Quraishi, Cynthia Soohoo and Sahar Aziz…

(review of Carissa Byrne Hessick's Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal (2021)).   “Why does our system pressure innocent people into pleading guilty?” (P. 5) When people think about how the criminal justice system works, they might think about a trial in a courthouse, with a judge, jury, lawyers, and a defendant trying to beat the case. While this might have been the…

The Michigan Journal of Race and Law published a volume that reflects on the impacts of 9/11, twenty years later. The volume includes a range of topics, including critical race theory, state sponsored radicalization, Muslim ban, terrorism litigation, and imprisonment of Muslims.