Race Rights and the Law Blog

The following is an excerpt from a blog that originally appeared on the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog. You can read the entire post here: ______________________ The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has provoked numerous discussions about the future direction of the Supreme Court and Justice Scalia’s impact as a jurist. While many focus on his ardent (and sometimes contradictory)…

Thanks to everyone who contributed to and read the essays in last week's 2016 online symposium for Alternative Constitution Day. As the essays have shown, and as current events remind us, the concerns around creating Alternative Constitution Day (and the space ACD creates for discussion of the social and legal issues important to the goal of a reconstituted United States) are present and…

Narrative and the Transforming Power of Alternative Constitution Day The power of Alternative Constitution Day lies in its celebration of narrative. Narrative is our most basic cultural currency, our “tool for giving meaning to experience or observation.” The holy books of the three most prominent monotheistic religions are written in parables. We spend hours binge-watching television shows. We…

We Are Still Only Partially Constituted The Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution was the basis on which the Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared that “separate but equal” in public accommodations was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, after hitting a high water mark in the early 1990s, American public schools are, by some measures, more segregated today than they were in 1968. Of the…

Special thanks to Atiba Ellis and Nancy Leong for their invitation. My note is inspired by my favorite law review article, Anthony Farley’s The Black Body as Fetish Object. I use fetish object as a reification of racial relations. My focus is upon the most important of racial relations – racial violence against Black bodies. From the wealth of genealogical materials, my first exemplary narrative…

I'm a rule of law specialist. I have a book on the subject that will be on shelves in a few days, the Rule of Law in the Real World. One of the most important things my book concludes is that the rule of law is about the reciprocal and collective self-defense of the people against the power of those who wield the state's monopoly over violence: we can only force them to do so within the law if we…

Personhood and the U.S. Constitution The idea of personhood has been and continues to be a contested concept in American law. There are modern struggles to expand personhood beyond its current boundaries – perhaps extending it to animals, trees, robots, or fetuses. The substance of personhood also continues to change as increased recognition of corporate personhood has restructured how we think…

Rethinking “We” “We the People…” These are the first three words of the Constitution for the United States of America. No three words have held more power as an implied promise of democracy and, simultaneously, proven furthest from the truth. In saying “We the People,” and the words that followed, the Founding Fathers declared a government that spoke for every man, woman, and child who resided…

The Beauty of Constitution Day Constitution Day mandates that virtually every college and university in the United States create programs to discuss and explore the Constitution. The topic is usually left up to the speaker and the institution. I have probably given 25 or 30 such talks. The majority have been on slavery, race, and the Constitution. Often I talk about how slavery was so deeply…

Speaking of Equality Alternative Constitution Day provides an opportunity to reflect on the defects in the Constitution of 1789 as well as in the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791. Of course there is much to admire in our founding documents. But we cannot ignore the reality that the Constitution was drafted by wealthy white property-owning men who owned and in some instances raped slaves, and who…