Center for the Study of Race and Law

Research
For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. government authorized and invested heavily in segregation and racial inequality. Often it did so through... MORE
We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic risk assessments as an aid to judicial discretion in felony sentencing. We find that judges'... MORE
The purpose of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to those who drafted it and those who worked for nearly a century to see it ratified, is women’s... MORE
Many jurisdictions determine real property taxes based on a combination of current market values and the recent history of market values, introducing... MORE
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can... MORE
Peremptory strikes, and criticism of the permissive constitutional framework regulating them, have dominated the scholarship on race and the jury for... MORE
Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of criminal misdemeanor law enforcement, including the impact of public-order policing on... MORE
This article addresses a significant challenge to federal Indian law currently emerging in the federal courts. In 2013, the Supreme Court suggested... MORE
On August 11 and 12, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia — the home of the University of Virginia and this law journal — played unwitting host to two... MORE
Justice Thomas’s dissent in Flowers v. Mississippi has been met with disdain in the popular press. In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin declared Justice... MORE
In August 2017, hundreds of white supremacists came to Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly to protest the city council’s decision to remove a... MORE
Since the end of Reconstruction, the criminal jury box has both reflected and reproduced racial hierarchies in the United States. In the Plessy era,... MORE
This Article seeks to provide the most comprehensive national-level empirical analysis of misdemeanor criminal justice that is currently feasible... MORE
In my response to reviews by Christopher Agee, Christopher Schmidt, Karen Tani, and Laura Weinrib, I explain some of the challenges of writing... MORE
This chapter presents the view that discrimination is wrong when and because it is demeaning. In order to demean, an action must both express... MORE
This chapter resurrects, conceptualizes and defends an old account of why disparate impact discrimination sometimes wrongs its victims. In Local... MORE
What drives administrative officials to enforce the Constitution—or not? This Article recovers a forgotten civil rights struggle that sheds light on... MORE
The phenomenon of implicit bias is much discussed but little understood. This article answers basic conceptual and empirical questions about... MORE
Disputes, disagreement, ambiguity, and ambivalence have marked the law of affirmative action since it came to prominence in the Civil Rights Era,... MORE
The Supreme Court’s initial decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, cast great doubt upon affirmative action in higher education. Fisher I... MORE
What causes black infants to die at two to three times the rate of white infants and what can be done to address those causes? For decades, every... MORE
A philosophical battle is being waged for the soul of Equal Protection jurisprudence. One side sees discrimination as a comparative wrong occurring... MORE
Constitutional theorists in the United States once believed courts could protect politically disfavored minorities from the excesses of democracy.... MORE
This study compared two forms of accountability that can be used to promote diversity and fairness in personnel selections: identity-conscious... MORE
Due to concerns about the willingness and ability of people to report their attitudes accurately in response to direct inquiries, psychologists have... MORE
Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek (2015) present a reanalysis of the meta-analysis by Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard and Tetlock (2013) that examined... MORE
This symposium essay summarizes our ongoing ethnographic research on corporate board diversity, discussing the central tension in our respondents’... MORE
This essay challenges the three related claims embedded within Professor Ackerman’s assertion that the distinctive wisdom of Chief Justice Warren’s... MORE
Of the many audiences for Richard Brooks and Carol Rose’s Saving the Neighborhood, the one I will talk about today, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the... MORE
This Article describes the results from fifty-seven interviews with corporate directors and a limited number of other persons (including... MORE
There are at least two competing ways of understanding when laws or other actions by governments wrongfully discriminate. On one view, the wrong... MORE
It is not always easy to identify a new field or a new paradigm for an old field. It can creep up on you - a book here or an article there. But there... MORE
This article reports a meta-analysis of studies examining the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit measures of... MORE
Judicial interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause have undergone a major transformation over the last fifty years. A Supreme Court once... MORE
Equal educational opportunity remains elusive within the United States. The nation’s education landscape reveals that too often students’ backgrounds... MORE
Can religion or race ever be the basis for legitimate government policies? For several decades, constitutional law concerning both religion and race... MORE
The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines restrict judicial discretion in part to reduce unwarranted racial disparities. However, judicial discretion may also... MORE
In this article, we report the results of a series of interviews with corporate directors about racial, ethnic, and gender diversity on corporate... MORE
In this Article, we report and analyze the results of forty-six wide-ranging interviews with corporate directors and other relevant insiders on the... MORE
The authors reanalyzed data from a set of studies — J. D. Heider and J.J. Skowronski (2007) — that explored links between the race IAT and... MORE
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education held that separate education facilitates were “inherently unequal.” After tolerating... MORE
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 that the racial classifications used... MORE
Goluboff’s essay describes the critical role played by individuals bringing cases through organizations like the NAACP or other avenues to the state... MORE
There are at least two different historical approaches to constitutional interpretation. The first is what constitutional scholars most readily... MORE
Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism. This... MORE
Biases in judgment and decision-making often arise at the level of first-order thoughts. If these initial thoughts are not overridden by second-order... MORE
The ethnic and gender make-up of corporate boards has been the subject of intense public and regulatory focus in many countries, including the United... MORE
During World War II, the lawyers of the NAACP considered the problem of discrimination in employment as one of the two most pressing problems (... MORE
In recent decades, the study of race has achieved increasing prominence in the legal academy. Legal scholarship on race, including but not limited to... MORE
Underlying the debate over affirmative action and reparations for black Americans is a dispute about the extent to which American society is... MORE
In the Michigan affirmative action cases, the Supreme Court not only reaffirmed the result of the 1978 decision in Board of Regents of the University... MORE
This paper explores the constitutional implications of race-neutral affirmative action, i.e., governmental efforts to pursue affirmative action goals... MORE
Court reformers continue to debate over efforts to select juries more diverse than are typically achieved through existing procedures. Controversial... MORE
The purpose of this Note is to question whether racial matching by courts and child-placement agencies serves the best interests of Black children.... MORE