Race Rights and the Law Blog

On December 28, a Grand Jury of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, declined to indict Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann for the shooting of Tamir Rice. Tamir's story represents the near immunity police officers have for using deadly force, and I for one pledge to insure that the future lawyers I teach know his story and know how the system, by design, failed him. The failure of a grand jury to indict in…

The New York Times recently published a provocative op-ed “Black Tape at Harvard Law School” by Professor Randall Kennedy. The op-ed triggered a lively conversation among legal academics, including the following response by Professor Eric Miller. I read Professor Kennedy’s op-ed and I thought it was a challenging and thought-provoking piece, much in line with his equally thought-provoking…

During last week’s oral arguments in Fisher v. Texas, Justice Scalia stated, “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”   The reaction to Scalia’s comments was swift and stinging. Justice Scalia’s…

  Much ink has been spilt about the racism in the Trump campaign for president. There is little doubt that his candidacy and quick rise in the polls are tied to clearly racist statements and polices. It’s also no secret that at least since the Nixon administration, the GOP has relied on racist memes to motivate its base. But the most troubling question is not why the Republican Party tolerates…

Below is an announcement for a call for participation in the conference, "Slavery: Past, Present and Future" to be held this May in Prague, Czech Republic. I attended the first global meeting last year at Oxford University, UK, and it proved to be a provocative, thoughtful, and engaging gathering. If your work might fit the broad theme of the conference, I recommend you submit an abstract. The…

Guest Blog by Benjamin G. Davis, Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law The news recently reported "Race War Plot Leads to Five Arrests on Federal and State Charges." This kind of domestic terrorism has an old pedigree in this country that forms part of the national security concerns of America. Yet, these types of cases are not highlighted in the national security space unless…

First Donald Trump went after the Mexicans; then he went after Black Lives Matter; then the Bushes; then the Syrian refugees; then Muslims in general... he says he'd round up eleven million people and forcibly remove them from the country He says we should torture people whether it works or not. he thinks we should consider closing down mosques, and is open to considering requiring Muslims to…

The 2016 Southeast/Southwest People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference at by Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU) College of Law (Orlando, FL) welcomes papers and works-in-progress for our conference on February 25 ­ 27, 2016. The conference theme is ³Power and Authority² in Promoting Justice for All. The deadline for submissions is December 4, 2015. For information about…

 "The portraits of black professors, the ones that bring me and so many other black students feelings of pride and promise, were defaced. Their faces were covered with a single piece of black tape, crossing them out of Harvard Law School’s legacy of legal scholarship."     I can't be more eloquent than Michele Hall, Harvard 2L, in this photo essay about what happened at Harvard Law School today…

Most of us like to think that we would have been the ones sheltering Jews fleeing the Holocaust, that we would not have joined the crowds on the town square watching the lynchings of Black people, that we would not have cheered the internment of Japanese Americans and then purchased their farms for pennies on the dollar. But we should remember that economically stressed Germans scapegoated…