Faculty Bibliography
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According to King: "All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. [...]King insists on distinguishing his disobedience of law from that of his antagonists: "In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. FOUR YEARS AFTER King wrote "Letter from Birmingham Jail," the Supreme Court upheld King’s conviction for contempt of court even if the injunction he violated was itself illegal. When Justice Potter Stewart quipped in the case, Walker v. City of Birmingham, that "respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law," he sided with those who feared that protest had gotten out of hand; who believed that assertions of individual conscience had degenerated into egotistical pretensions; who held that talk of civil disobedience threatened to unleash chaos, and that attraction to King and sympathy for the sufferings of African Americans had tempted too many to abandon conventions that are crucial to stability in a large, complex, conflicted polity.
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More from Randall Kennedy Among the prominent commentators whose ideas are under attack are Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist who was the main figure behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project; Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Columbia University and UCLA law professor who is the most sophisticated and articulate expositor and representative of critical race theory (CRT); and ibram Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. According to Rufo, "critical race theory is the perfect villain." According to Sen. Ted Cruz, the anti-CRT campaign is an uprising by ordinary, patriotic Americans who are learning belatedly that their local schools, infiltrated by CRT thinking, are teaching that "America is fundamentally racist, that all white people are racists... [and] that whites and blacks hate each other and have to hate each other." According to Sen. Josh Hawley, "Critical Race Theory has no business being taught in Missouri [or presumably any other] classrooms."
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On May 17, 2019, Brown v. Board of Education attained that notable landmark in American life—the age of sixty-five. One of the Supreme Court’s most esteemed decisions became a senior citizen. Brown is a ruling that people tend to think they know even if they have not actually read it. This contributes to a fate that often bedevils celebrities. Observers project their yearnings upon Brown, neglecting its particularities. They sanctify Brown, make it an icon, and invoke its constitutional authority to impose preferred policies. Liberals have done this, and so, too, have conservatives.This essay contains five Parts. Part I defines what I mean by Brown. Part II recalls its painful birth and traumatic childhood. Then, Part III rejects prominent claims said to be justified by Brown. Next, Part IV rebuts frequently heard charges of “betrayal,” noting that the Supreme Court, throughout Brown’s adulthood, has never retreated from the invalidation of segregation in public schooling. Finally, Part V asserts that we should acknowledge Brown’s limits and, renouncing ancestor worship, look to ourselves to fashion fresh ideas that suitably address the new challenges we face.
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If the slur is mentioned in key court decisions, it should not be taboo in law schools.
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Is it wrong for professors to quote epithets — especially “nigger” and "fag" — in class or other educational settings? This question has often been in the news in recent years, both as to law schools and as to other departments. This article discusses the matter, building on a closely related practice: how judges and lawyers deal with epithets in litigation and opinion writing.
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents By Isabel Wilkerson Random House Late in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson recounts a conversation in 2018 with fellow journalist Taylor Branch on the state of race relations in America. The outcome of the 2020 presidential election offers an ambiguous answer. [...]the Trumpist Republican Party gained seats in the House of Representatives and seems likely to hold on to its majority in the Senate. [...]there exists a library of books exposing the centrality of racial slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the depredations of Jim Crow segregation, the resistance to the civil rights movement, and the persistence of the race line. The offense she mines most deeply is slavery, noting that "[t]he vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure."
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Is it wrong for professors to quote epithets — especially “nigger” — in class or other educational settings? This question has often been in the news in recent years, both as to law schools and as to other departments. This article discusses the matter, building on a closely related practice: how judges and lawyers deal with epithets in litigation and opinion writing.
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Jon Meacham highlights the late civil rights leader’s determination and decency.
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Contracting often facilitates happiness. It enables us to do things we would otherwise be unable to do and thus to live more fully, richly, enjoyably. We enter into contracts constantly, often with little consciousness about legal consequences. Typically we become self-conscious only when a problem arises. Our course will mainly be about problems arising from contracting. It is largely an exploration of contract pathology.
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The article examines that in the U.S. people of all backgrounds, but especially people of color, are menaced by police violence. Topics include reports that the circumstances of George Floyd's death have been effectively covered up and buried even with the evidence at hand, securing a conviction and appropriate punishment is by no means guaranteed; and considered that several people are on streets associated with the pandemic and law enforcement.
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Kent Garrett describes the frustration of being one of only a few students of color.
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Ibram X. Kendi writes of being influenced by racist ideas — and how to get rid of them.
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President Obama’s senior adviser recounts her life and journey to the White House.
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Randall Kennedy, Derrick Bell and Me (Mar. 8, 2019).
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This paper describes Professor Derrick Bell’s life in the law, assesses his writings, appraises his struggles at Harvard Law School, and recounts his relationship with a colleague, Randall Kennedy, for whom he was a mentor, friend, and adversary.
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Randall L. Kennedy, How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce, 65 Chron. Higher Educ., Feb. 8, 2019, at A44.
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What should we focus upon in marking the 50th anniversary of this somber landmark? I suggest three things: the particulars of King's achievements as a liberal dissident; the trying circumstances he faced at the end of his life; and the virtues of his principal strategy and aim-coalition politics in the service of a decent, egalitarian, multiracial society. At the end of his career, then, King found himself assailed from the right and the left, from those who resented him for challenging pigmentocracy effectively, from those who alleged (mistakenly) that the civil rights movement had changed little on the ground, from those who complained that he had shown too little gratitude and loyalty to LBJ, and from those who charged that he did not adequately condemn American society. A vivid instance is the claim that King opposed affirmative action and kindred efforts to assist racially identified groups. On this side of the Second Reconstruction, having enjoyed for a generation the benefits won with heart-rending sacrifice by King and company, it is all too easy to forget or overlook that prior to the invalidation of de jure segregation, governments could lawfully separate people on a racial basis (which almost always meant consigning people of color to inferior facilities); that prior to the Civil Rights Act, people of color could lawfully be excluded from "private" public accommodations, work sites, hospitals, and unions; that prior to the Voting Rights Act, black voting was openly and brutally nullified by chicanery and violence in many places, including the very state-Alabama-that black voters recently rescued from the clutches of Roy Moore; that prior to Loving v. Virginia in 1967, all of the states of the former Confederacy made it a felony for blacks and whites to intermarry.
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Recent conflicts on campus have featured as antagonists proponents of racial justice versus proponents of civil liberties. Many in both camps identify as liberals. A dose of recollection might help dissipate this avoidable and politically destructive strife.
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A great many Americans, especially African Americans, are in a mood of despair upon witnessing a president of the United States winking at neo-Confederates, neo- Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen, and doing everything in his power to expunge the achievements of his predecessor, a man who came to be known less for his race than for his decency, dignity, and honor. Far too little notice, for example, was given to the remarkable May 19 speech by Mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining the decision of the New Orleans municipal government to remove from places of public honor three monuments celebrating Confederate generals and one celebrating the violent overthrow of the state's multiracial Reconstruction government. Folks numbering in the millions and of all complexions are selfconsciously engaging in countless acts of protest: marching, organizing study groups, volunteering legal expertise, donating money to institutions dedicated to the preservation of threatened values-the NAACP, the ACLU, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice-and resolving in numberless diverse ways to become more active, informed, influential.
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The article discusses the history and legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court case Walker v City of Birmingham, particularly its significance to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jim Crowism in Alabama under then-governor George Corley Wallace.
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