Abstract Across the country, students of color face daily threats of arrest, exclusion, and violence at the hands of school police officers. Whether deemed threatening, defiant, or hypersexualized, Black students, in particular, pay a heavy price to access their right to free public education. Despite victories in dismantling educational carcerality since the mid-2000s, efforts to formally remove...
The War on Higher Education
Abstract Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts...
Presuming Disparate Treatment: A Solution to Title VII’s Doctrinal Puzzle of Accent Discrimination
Abstract In Professor Mari Matsuda’s article Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction, Professor Matsuda identifies a doctrinal puzzle in the courts’ approach to accent discrimination cases: Courts recognize that accent discrimination can be a form of national origin discrimination, yet courts are overly deferential to employers’ claims...
From Redlining to Greenlining
Abstract For generations, marginalized communities have been impacted by discriminatory land use, zoning, and property valuation policies, from redlining in the 1930s to the siting of undesirable land uses that persists today. Because of these policies, marginalized communities are forced to contend with low property values, substandard infrastructure, and increased health risks. The very same...
Redefining Progress: The Case for Diversity in Innovation and Inventing
Abstract This Article makes the empirical and legal case for redefining the concept of patent “progress” to include the promotion of a diversity of innovators and inventors, and not just innovation. Based on a survey of the empirical literature, it details four plausible mechanisms by which diverse innovators improve innovation: novelty, non-obviousness, (overcoming) conflict, and numerosity. It...
Mass Surveillance as Racialized Control
Abstract Incarceration has become the norm for those who assert their innocence. A staggering number of defendants are incarcerated prior to the adjudication of their cases—a reality that has become a central paradox of an American criminal justice system which holds axiomatic the presumption of innocence. Recent attempts to address pretrial mass incarceration through bail reform and the COVID-19...
Bringing Visibility to AAPI Reproductive Care After Dobbs
Abstract Dobbs’ impact on growing AAPI communities is underexamined in legal scholarship. This Essay begins to fill that gap, seeking to bring together an overdue focus on the socio-legal experiences of AAPI communities with examination of the effects of reversing Roe and Casey on women of color. It does so by prompting a research agenda that connects diverse AAPI women’s experiences, abortion...
Can CRT Save DEI?: Workplace Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Shadow of Anti-Affirmative Action
Abstract Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd—culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously...