Faculty Bibliography
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The US Supreme Court's intervention into the presidential election created a new right to uniform treatment in ballot counting. Some critics of the Court's intervention are sidestepping the sobering reality of the situation: that the Court majority acted in bad faith and with partisan prejudice.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, Adoption , 17 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 57 (2001).
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In this essay, originally delivered as part of the David C. Baum Memorial Lecture Series on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights at the University of Illinois College of Law, Professor Randall L. Kennedy examines the use of the word "nigger" as a problem in the law. He argues that while use of the "N-word" should be limited, it should not be eradicated. He believes that “erasing it altogether would, among other things, destroy a significant part of our cultural heritage that is used in positive as well as negative ways.” Finally, Professor Kennedy posits that "nigger" may be undergoing a transformation to a "term of derision... [affixed] to targets regardless of race."
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Randall Kennedy, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2000, Book Review, at 8 (reviewing John H. McWhorter, Losing the Race Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000)).
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Randall L. Kennedy, Outrage on the Court, Am. Law., Feb. 2000.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Thurgood's Coming, Am. Law., Dec. 1999, at 94.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Repeating Our Mistakes, Am. Law., July 1999, at 147.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Mr. Civil Rights, New Republic, Apr. 5, 1999, at 38 (reviewing Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (2000)).
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Kennedy reviews "Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary" by Juan Williams.
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Randall L. Kennedy, The Clerkship Question and the Court, Am. Law., Apr. 1999, at 114.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Cast a Cautious Eye on the Supreme Court, in Covering the Courts: Free Press, Fair Trials & Journalistic Performance (Robert Giles & Robert W. Snyder eds., 1999).
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No racial group has been more solidly supportive of President Clinton than black Americans. The best explanation for blacks' widespread and enthusiastic support of Clinton is the perception that he has been supportive of them.
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This special series of feature articles in this journal hopes to rekindle critical discussion of integration by examining whether it remains, thirty years after the end of the civil rights era, a desirable goal and a viable political strategy. The seven essays that follow do not claim to cover every aspect of the subject, or to represent all points of view within today's political spectrum. One conceive of this as a discussion within the journal's extended family, focused on questions essential to a modem assessment of integration. Although racial discourse in America has increasingly moved away from the bipolar categories of white and Afro-Americans, these essays address the experience of African-Americans and how fully American society lives up to its professed creed of equal rights and opportunities for all.
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"Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy" by Stephen L. Carter and "The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue" by Deborah Tannen are reviewed.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Justice Thomas and Racial Loyalty, Am. Law., Sept. 1998, at 91.
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Randall L. Kennedy, A Forgettable Memoir, Am. Law., July-Aug. 1998, at 16 (reviewing Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography (1998)).
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One concrete way of measuring the extent to which people affiliated with different social groups are full and equal members of this nation is to ask whether a person associated with that group could plausibly be elevated to the highest office in the land. The added difficulties, solely on the basis of race or gender, that an African-American or female presidential candidate faces, regardless of that person’s talents, are a testament to the extent to which this society is still marked by racism and sexism. One might take some minimal comfort, though, in recognizing that their difficulties are the consequence...
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Randall L. Kennedy, Supreme Court as Teacher: Lessons from the Second Reconstruction, in The Supreme Court and American Constitutionalism (Bradford P. Wilson & Ken Masugi eds., 1998).
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In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Comment and Discussion on Hate Crimes/Hate Speech, in Speech and Equality: Do We Really Have to Choose? (Gara LaMarche ed., 1996).
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The Supreme Court case of Oyama v. California (1948) involved an application of the California Alien Land Law in the mid-1940s. This law prohibited aliens ineligible for American citizenship from owning or transferring agricultural land. Barred from owning agricultural property himself, Oyama purchased land for his son, Fred Oyama, a US citizen by birth. California claimed the purchases were a fraudulent evasion of the Alien Land Law and pursued an escheat of the lands. The majority opinion invalidated the statute as applied. Justice Frank Murphy, in a 24-page concurrence, places the case in context of the history of anti-Japanese racism and notes the manifold ways in which that bigotry manifested itself in the legal controversy.
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Randall L. Kennedy, No: Drawing Racial Lines Has a Toxic Effect On Society, 81 A.B.A. J. 37 (1995).
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Examines the jury's verdict to acquit African American sport celebrity O. J. Simpson of criminal charges. Difficulty of interpreting the decision of the jury because its members are not required to give reasons for the conclusion they reach on the trial; Exploration of several notions that can help in understanding the jury's verdict.
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Randall L. Kennedy, A Response to Professor Cole's "Paradox of Race and Crime", 83 Geo. L.J. 2573 (1995).
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Crime is widely perceived as a major blight that decreases happiness, productivity, and security in the United States. Defining crimes and protecting people from criminality are central tasks that we assign to the state. Like many social ills, crime afflicts African- Americans with a special vengeance. African-Americans are considerably more likely than whites to be raped, robbed, assaulted, and murdered. Many of those who seek to champion the interests of African-Americans, however, wrongly retard efforts to control criminality. They charge that the state, at least in its role as administrator of criminal justice, is now (as it has been historically) an instrument of racist oppression. In all too many instances, these allegations are overblown and counterproductive; they exaggerate the extent of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and detract attention from other problems of law enforcement that warrant more consideration. What such critiques ignore or minimize is that the main problem confronting black communities in the United States is not excessive policing and invidious punishment but rather a failure of the state to provide black communities with the equal protection of the laws. Although this failure often stems from a pervasive and racist devaluation of black victims of crime, ironically, a substantial contributing cause is a misguided antagonism toward efforts to preserve public safety.
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Randall L. Kennedy, Tocqueville and Racial Conflict in America: A Comment, 11 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 145 (1994).
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