Kahn on Mask Bans As Expressions of Memory Politics in the US

Robert Kahn, University of St. Thomas School of Law (MN), has published Mask Bans As Expressions of Memory Politics in the United States. Here is the abstract.

Mask laws have a lengthy history in the United States, one primarily, but not exclusively tied up with the Ku Klux Klan. They also are an instance of memory politics. In particular, mask bans complicate Nikolay Koposov’s distinction between narrow, self-centered memory politics (society casting itself as a victim), and broad, universalistic memory politics (society recognizing its past crimes). Sometimes, as in the Reconstruction Era, mask bans sent inculpatory or universal messages, albeit weak ones. By the 1920s, the mask bans protected Southern elites and by the 1950s, they partially exculpated the regime of segregation by focusing attention on the Klan as uncouth, cowardly, and unworthy defenders of a “progressive” South still deeply invested in segregation and White supremacy. As such, mask bans show that memory laws are sometimes used as tools of moral distancing, something also on display in recent attempts to anoint Antifa as the new Klan by “unmasking” it.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Inniss on Slavery at Princeton @AuntieFeminist @SMULawSchool

Lolita Buckness Inniss, Southern Methodist University School of Law, has published ‘A Southern College Slipped from Its Geographical Moorings’: Slavery at Princeton at 39 Slavery & Abolition 236 (2018). Here is the abstract.

While slave-owning students at Princeton rarely constituted a majority of students, they were often a large plurality of the students in the antebellum period. Because of Princeton's historic role in educating southerners, it has sometimes been referred to as the most southern of the Ivy League schools. So many students from the United States South enrolled at Princeton during the first several decades of the college that one observer wrote that one might take Princeton for a ‘Southern college slipped from its geographical moorings.’ This article explores the extent to which and whether Princeton behaved like a southern institution in its speech and actions concerning slavery and emancipation.

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

Simard on Slavery's Legalism: Lawyers and the Commercial Routine of Slavery @WillametteLaw

Justin Simard, Willamette University College of Law; Northwestern University; American Bar Foundation; has published Slavery's Legalism: Lawyers and the Commercial Routine of Slavery at 37 Law and History Review 571 (2019). Here is the abstract.

Elite southern lawyers professed and demonstrated commitment to a vision of legal practice and decisionmaking that they shared with their northern colleagues, even as legal arguments over slavery and secession played out contentiously in politics and the courts. This vision was rooted, not in commitments to slavery, free labor, or economic development but rather in legalism, characterized by commitment to legal rules and reasoning, and legal practice, distinguished by dedication to routine commercial work. Insulated from many of the political and economic conflicts of the antebellum era, a national legal culture allowed southern lawyers to serve as economic intermediaries between North and South. This article examines this culture through a study of the career of the Georgia lawyer E.A. Nisbet. During his legal education, time on the Georgia Supreme Court, and work as a private lawyer Nisbet demonstrated a consistent commitment to a technical American legal culture that allowed elite southern lawyers like him to support slavery in subtle but important ways.

The full text is not available for download.

Zietlow on Slavery, Liberty, and the Right to Contract @ProfessorRZ

Rebecca E. Zietlow, University of Toledo College of Law, is publishing Slavery, Liberty and the Right to Contract in volume 19 of the Nevada Law Journal (2019). Here is the abstract.

This article explores what the right to contract meant to slaves, free blacks and northern workers before and after the Civil War, to uncover the lost history of liberty of contract under the Thirteenth Amendment. By abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, the Thirteenth Amendment transformed United States labor law and expanded rights for all workers. Until then, the slave had been at the center of United States labor law, and the paradigm of labor law was unfree labor. The Thirteenth Amendment and other Reconstruction measures established a new paradigm: the autonomous worker with liberty of contract. Today, liberty of contract is most often invoked by conservatives and libertarians, who argue that the right to contract entails a right to be free of government intervention. Scholars trace the Lochner libertarian right to contract to free labor ideology of the antislavery movement and the Reconstruction Era. Until now, the dominant model of liberty of contract is the individualist right to be free of government interference, embraced by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York. This article shows that to the contrary, the Thirteen Amendment based right to contract invites government intervention to empower workers exercising that right. The Reconstruction Congress invoked the Thirteenth Amendment as it intervened in employment contracts to protect not only their rights, but the rights of northern workers. Paradoxically, the Reconstruction Congress enacted precisely the type of regulations that the Lochner Era Court struck down as violating liberty of contract.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bhagwat on Judge Johnson and the Kaleidoscopic First Amendment @AlaLawReview

Ashutosh Avinash Bhagwat, University of California, Davis, School of Law, is publishing Judge Johnson and the Kaleidoscopic First Amendment in the Alabama Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.’s decision in Williams v. Wallace, in which Judge Johnson issued an opinion which permitted the Selma March to proceed despite unremitting opposition from local and state authorities, is now a settled part of American history. Furthermore, today few question the underlying correctness of the decision. But in fact, seen in the wider context of modern First Amendment jurisprudence, Judge Johnson’s decision was remarkable. Just how remarkable it was becomes apparent when it is contrasted with a decision of the United States Supreme Court just a year later, Adderly v. Florida, in which the Court upheld the trespass convictions of participants in a civil rights protest on the grounds of a county jail. Adderly, authored by that most vociferous defender of civil rights and liberties Justice Hugo Black, demonstrates that the modern First Amendment has rarely been interpreted to require access by protestors to public property when that access might interfere with its regular uses. Yet in Williams Judge Johnson authorized a 54 mile long march by 25,000 protestors along a public highway! Why did Judge Johnson rule as he did, in the face of precedent and judicial norms? Part of the answer has to lie in the unique back-history of the March, which included stunning acts of violence and brutality on the part of officials and the KKK. But there was a constitutional insight driving Judge Johnson’s decision as well, one that Justice Black missed. The opinion in Williams v. Wallace demonstrates an understanding of two fundamental points about the First Amendment that the modern Supreme Court (beginning, in a very meaningful way, in Adderly itself) has forgotten. The first is that the First Amendment protects multiple political rights, not just free speech. The second is that these rights, though related, are distinct and cumulative. More specifically, Judge Johnson recognized that what was at issue in the Selma March was not just free speech, but also association, assembly and petition, and that these rights fortify one another. In other words, Judge Johnson recognized the kaleidoscopic nature of the First Amendment in its relationship to citizenship and democracy. That is an insight that should not have been lost, and which we would do well to recover today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Munshi on White Slavery and the Crisis of Will in the Age of Contract @GeorgetownLaw

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing White Slavery and the Crisis of Will in the Age of Contract in volume 30 of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism (2018). Here is the abstract.

Recognizing human freedom is never as simple as acts of legal pronouncement might suggest. Liberal abstractions like freedom and equality; legal formulations of personhood, free will, and contract; the constructed divisions between public and private, self and other, home and market on which the former are predicated — these are often inadequate to understanding, let alone realizing, the shared aspirations they supposedly define. By the same token, the dense and dynamic relations of power that characterize any liberal society overwhelm and exceed our critical vocabulary. “Racism,” “sexism,” and “capitalism” powerfully name structures of inequality, but they fail to capture the full spectrum of social relations, practices, and exchanges that reproduce inequality — deep structures of feeling, unspoken common sense, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our places in it. Focusing on an early twentieth-century case involving an immigrant convicted of “white slavery,” accused of “mesmerizing” his secretary, this Article explores the ways in which the white slave panic and spiritualist practices reflect a set of anxieties about the nature of agency and consent obscured by the universalizing and formalist abstractions of contract law and theory. Through a close reading of competing narratives surrounding the case, this Article seeks to investigate some of the ways in which the rhetorical distortions of law affect the lives of its most vulnerable subjects.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

17th Annual Symposium: Religion, Racism and Religious Racism: The Color of Faith Discrimination, April 25-26,2019, UNC, Charlotte

From the emailbox:

On April 25 and April 26, 2019, the Africana Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA) will host its 17th Annual Symposium, “Religion, Racism and Religious Racism: The Color of Faith Discrimination.” The symposium will open on April 25 with a moderated discussion with Babalorixá Gustavo Melo Cerqueira titled “Religious Racism in Brazil: Evangelical Extremism Against African Diaspora Faiths.” On April 26, the event will continue with five hour-long panels, as well as a special midday presentation by Dr. Abbas Barzegar, Director of Research and Advocacy at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The opening event on April 25 will be held in the auditorium at UNC Charlotte’s Center City Campus. The remainder of the symposium will be held at UNC Charlotte’s Main Campus in Atkins Library Room 143 (space is limited).

The opening event will be live streamed on Youtube. The other presentations will be accessible by video conference for registered attendees.

The entire symposium is free and open to the public. For more information, visit our website. Click here to register.

Anderson on Peremptory Challenges at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

April Anderson, Independent Scholar, has published Peremptory Challenges at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Development of Modern Jury Selection Strategies As Seen in Practitioners’ Trial Manuals. Here is the abstract.

Peremptory strikes on the basis of race, national origin, religion, and class are well-known problems in modern jury selection, and have led to calls to abolish peremptory strikes altogether. Defenders of peremptory strikes argue that they are a fixture of the common law system that should not be discarded because of a few abuses. This Article explores how and why strategic jury selection developed in the United States by looking at previously unstudied primary source materials: nineteenth-century trial-attorneys’ practice guides. Peremptory challenges and voir dire are difficult to study because court records often leave them out. Even when strikes are recorded, an attorney’s strategy may not be evident to the outsider. But practice guide materials reveal these strategies, demonstrating that nineteenth-century attorneys used peremptory strikes to eliminate jurors based on stereotypes regarding race, national origin, religion, and class. They also show how a number of features of the modern American jury selection system—most notably, extended pretrial questioning of jurors—were expanded from their more limited common law forms to make it easier for lawyers to either respond to particular social prejudices in American society or to make discriminatory peremptory challenges. These findings have important implications for the modern-day debate over peremptory challenges. While proponents of peremptory challenges point to their ancient origins as justification for keeping them, a historical perspective shows that modern jury selection looks nothing like its English common law progenitor. Analysis of turn-of-the-century practices, the beginnings of the procedures we use now, exposes modern abuses as part of a trend that began in the 1800s. Simply put, the problems reformers now point to are not recent abuses that have crept in to an ancient system. They have existed for as long as the jury selection procedures we know have been practiced. Modern jury selection and abusive tactics grew up simultaneously in the 1800s as a reaction to the country’s social divisions, suggesting that discrimination as a trial strategy is inevitable in a heterogeneous society where courts allow extended voir dire and unfettered peremptory challenges.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sawers on Race and Property After the Civil War: Creating the Right To Exclude

Brian Sawers, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing Race and Property After the Civil War: Creating the Right to Exclude in volume 87 of the Mississippi Law Journal (2018). Here is the abstract.

This Article uncovers a lost history of property, showing the role that race and white supremacy played in the development of modern trespass law. Property law does not change in response to economic opportunities, evolving to ever-more efficiency. Instead, property law reflects political power. At times, the political process may reorient property law to produce a larger surplus. Oftentimes, politics produce redistribution from the weak to the powerful. States closed the range to coerce blacks into working for white landowners for low wages and under bad conditions. Southern society as a whole suffered from the planter’s greed. Low wages and cruel laws impoverished not only black and white sharecroppers, but the entire region. Changing property law was a core element of the program of legal aggression that began with the black codes and continued with Jim Crow.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Hollingsworth on the Power of African-American Women Voters in Lexington's School Suffrage, 1895-1902: History of the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Movement

Randolph Hollingsworth has published Power of African-American Women Voters in Lexington's School Suffrage, 1895-1902: Race and the History of the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Movement. Here is the abstract.

Women suffragists in the U.S. included partial suffrage through participation in school-related elections as one of their strategies to reach full citizenship rights. Kentucky had already pointed the way for this strategy when in 1838 a statewide law passed protecting the right of female taxpaying heads-of-households in rural areas to vote on matters related to the new common school system. The leaders of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) sought to build on this precedent during the 1890 Kentucky constitutional convention that offered the possibility of the legislature to grant women the right to vote. When the charters of cities of the second-class (i.e., Lexington, Covington and Newport) were up for revision in 1894, the General Assembly included what the KERA lobbyists were hoping for – the right for women in second-class cities to vote on school-related issues. By then, women in fifteen other states had successfully lobbied for legislation for partial suffrage (or full suffrage in some Western territories and states). This presentation will chronicle the evolution of school suffrage laws of Kentucky, focusing on the 1901 school board election in Lexington and the revocation of school suffrage in 1902. That election cycle evidenced a large percentage of African-American women whose registration totals favored the Republican Party. However, only half of the registrants ended up casting a vote – leading to the election of a Democratic Party ticket that year. The unusual numbers of black women voters threatened the racially conservative norm, and in January 1902, the Kentucky legislature repealed the partial suffrage law. The political backlash over the racial disproportionality of women voters in this election exposed the Kentucky partisan feuds of the time, however the issue of race control was at the core of the reasoning for revoking even this limited attempt at partial suffrage in Kentucky. This paper argues that race mattered more than partisan politics, class or social standing in determining the outcome of suffrage laws for women in Kentucky.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Geraldine Heng's The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages Wins PROSE Award In World History @PROSEAwards @cambUP_History

ICYMI: Geraldine Heng, University of Texas, Austin, has published The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

This book has just received the 2019 PROSE Award in World History.

Nunn on Legal Theory and the Morality of Conscious Racial Identity @UFLaw @NebLRev

Kenneth B. Nunn, University of Florida College of Law, has published 'Essentially Black': Legal Theory and the Morality of Conscious Racial Identity 97 Nebraska Law Review 287 (2018). Here is the abstract.

In philosophy, essentialism involves the claim that everything that exists has a fundamental character or core set of features that makes it what it is. Although this idea developed out of Platonic notions of ideal forms, it has spread beyond philosophy into the social sciences and hard scientific disciplines like mathematics and biology. Since the advent of postmodernism, discussions around essentialism have become controversial. Adherents of postmodern theory argue that social categories, such as gender, race, and sexuality are socially constructed and that essentialist notions of identity, which suggest that identity is static, natural, and unchanging, are theoretically wrong. This postmodern perspective has engendered a significant and often contentious debate on the value of essentialist thought in contemporary identity movements focused on gender, sexuality, and race. In the context of these debates, essentialism has taken on a pejorative character and a negative moral connotation, especially among progressives and left-leaning social activists. The consequences of this moral condemnation are far-reaching. It makes it difficult for identity groups to organize around any social category deemed to be essentialist. This morally-grounded prohibition is especially problematic for Black nationalists and African-centered activists. In this Article, I examine the anti-essentialism critique that has developed in Critical Race and LatCrit legal theory. I argue that the anti-essentialism critique offered by critical theorists is misguided insofar as it claims that the assertion of a conscious racial identity is morally wrong. In reaching this conclusion, I first point out some contradictions and failings in the reasoning underlying the critique. Next, I detail some of the difficulties that adherence to anti-essentialism creates for Black communities and activists. Finally, I link normative approaches to essentialism to culture and worldview. I argue that antiessentialism is Eurocentric and its claim to a universal moral prohibition against race-consciousness is false.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Wilson on the Legal Foundations of White Supremacy @Erika_K_Wilson

Erika K. Wilson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, College of Law, has published The Legal Foundations of White Supremacy, 11 DePaul Journal for Social Justice 1 (2018). From the introduction:

The election of former President Barack Obama, the country’s first African-American president, temporarily changed the discourse around race in America. Despite America’s sordid racial history, President Obama’s election was hailed as evidence that race was no longer a salient factor in meting out opportunities—that the country was finally “post-racial.” Indeed, some even went so far as to suggest that his election signified “the gradual erosion of ‘whiteness’ as the touchstone of what it means to be American.” Recent events have upended this “post-racial” narrative. In the wake of the racially charged election of Donald J. Trump and the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, race generally and white supremacy specifically are again taking center stage. For many, the reemergence of the kind of overt manifestations of white supremacy that were unveiled in Charlottesville was particularly jarring. It forced many people to grapple with the reality that white supremacy, a phenomenon that many believed had been relegated to a historical footnote, still exists and is stronger than ever. Yet those such as myself who examine race critically have long been aware that the fissures caused by race generally and white supremacy specifically, never went anywhere, notwithstanding the election of the country’s first self-identified African-American president. Race generally and white supremacy specifically are embedded into the framework of most American social institutions. As a result, now more than ever, it is imperative that we critically examine all forms and manifestations of white supremacy. This paper focuses on a very important part of white supremacy — the legal foundations of white supremacy. The central thesis of this paper is that American law has historically played a vital role in constructing white supremacy. While America has eliminated overt race-conscious laws that favor whites, the law continues to play a critical role in maintaining white supremacy today. Unless and until we commit to understanding the history of the law in constructing white supremacy and the ways in which modern iterations of law continue to perpetuate white supremacy, white supremacy will remain an enduring feature of American society.

Download the article via the link given.

McClain on Reflections on Loving v Virginia at Fifty

Linda C. McClain, Boston University School of Law, has published Prejudice, Moral Progress, and Being 'On the Right Side of History': Reflections on Loving v. Virginia at Fifty as 86 Fordham Law Review 2701 (2018). Here is the abstract.

What does it mean to be on the “right” or “wrong” side of history? When Virginia’s Attorney General explained his decision not to defend Virginia’s “Defense of Marriage Law” prohibiting same-sex marriage, he asserted that it was time for Virginia to be on the “right” rather than the “wrong” side of history and the law. He criticized his predecessors, who defended the discriminatory laws at issue in Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and United States v. Virginia. Loving played a crucial role in the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, even as the dissenters disputed its relevance; it continues to feature in post-Obergefell controversies over religious liberty and LGBT rights. Looking back at the record in Loving, this article argues that Loving illustrates a theme of generational moral progress in constitutional interpretation: laws once justified by appeals to nature, history, tradition, divine law, and the well-being of children and society are repudiated as rooted in prejudice. Virginia sought to distance its antimiscegenation law from prejudice and white supremacy by appealing to social science that identified problems posed by “intermarriage” -- particularly for children -- and rejected the idea that intermarriage was a path toward progress and freedom from prejudice. Countering with narratives of constitutional moral progress, the Lovings and their amici argued that Virginia’s law was an odious relic of slavery and a present-day reflection of racial prejudice, unsupported by modern science. The article concludes with a look at Obergefell, and the competing arguments southern states made about Loving and the lessons of history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Reichmann on Anti-Chinese Racism at Berkeley: The Case For Renaming Boalt Hall

Charles Reichmann, UC Berkeley School of Law, has published Anti-Chinese Racism at Berkeley: The Case for Renaming Boalt Hall. Here is the abstract.

Those familiar with UC Berkeley School of Law know its traditional name and the name of its primary classroom building - Boalt Hall. Yet few know much about the man who gave the law school its name. A close look at John Boalt’s legacy, however, calls out for a reexamination of the law school’s continued association with Boalt, given the contrast between UC Berkeley’s stated values and Boalt’s influential views that the Chinese were an unassimilable race that ought to be excluded from the United States. Boalt's racial theories were identical to John C. Calhoun's, whose name Yale University recently removed from a residential college on the grounds that Calhoun's principles and legacy are at odds with Yale's mission and values. Through his widely-circulated and virulently racist 1877 address "The Chinese Question" and his proposal for a plebiscite on further immigration, Boalt was instrumental in catalyzing support for the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Pushaw on Ulysses S. Grant and the Lost Opportunity for Racial Justice

Robert J. Pushaw, Pepperdine University School of Law, has published Ulysses S. Grant and the Lost Opportunity for Racial Justice (Reviewing Ron Chernow, Grant (2017)) at 33 Const. Comment. 331 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Every law student, legal academic, and attorney would benefit from reading Ron Chernow's exhaustive biography of Ulysses S. Grant. At first glance, that recommendation sounds counterintuitive, because Grant was not a lawyer--much less one like Alexander Hamilton. Nor was Grant a distinguished intellectual like Woodrow Wilson, whose novel vision of the Constitution reshaped America in ways that reverberate to this day. Rather, Grant was a failed businessman, a ruthlessly effective but not especially brilliant general, and a mediocre President. Chernow attempts to rehabilitate Grant's military and political reputation. He does so primarily by highlighting Grant's one indispensable contribution to American law and government: spearheading the implementation of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the various constitutional amendments and statutes that sought to guarantee former slaves not merely their liberty but also their civil and political rights.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Mr. and Mrs. Loving

You can once again watch the wonderful Mr. and Mrs. Loving, with Timothy Hutton and Lela Rochon (made for television, 1996), and not available on DVD right now, on Amazon Prime. While Nancy Buirski's Loving and The Loving Story, interpretations of the battle Mildred and Richard Loving fought to overturn the Virginia law against miscegenation are also available, I have a soft spot for the 1996 film and am glad to see it for the first time in a number of years.

I hope it remains on Amazon Prime long enough for my fall class on Law and Society to get a chance to see it. Many of my students would have been five years old or younger when it first aired, and of course wouldn't have been born yet when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the history-making case (1967). Maybe their parents weren't either?

A short bibliography of the movie and the case.

ACLU, Loving: Looking Back at the Landmark Case, Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

Patricia Hruby Powell, Loving Vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case (Chronicle Books, 2017).

Robert A. Pratt, Essay: Crossing the Color Line: A Historical Assessment and Personal Narrative of Loving v. Virginia, 41 Howard L.J. 229 (1997/1998).

Peter Wallenstein, Virginia Hasn't Always Been For Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving, 112 The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 440(4) (2004).

ICYMI: Finkelman on Frederick Douglass's Constitution @PaulFinkelman @GratzCollege

ICYMI: Paul Finkelman, Gratz College, has published Frederick Douglas's Constitution: From Garrisonian Abolitionist to Lincoln Republican at 81 Missouri Law Review 1 (2016). Here is the abstract.

This Article explores how the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was both a constitutional actor and a constitutional theorist. Unlike most constitutional actors, Douglass was not a judge, lawyer, professor, or an elected official. Nevertheless, throughout much of his life, Douglass shaped the Constitution through his actions. He was also shaped by the Constitution as he went from being a fugitive slave – and thus an “object” of the Constitution – to being a free citizen and an appointed officeholder. He became a constitutional theorist who brought his theories into action through his speeches, writings, and activities as an abolitionist, as an antislavery activist, and then as a spokesman for African Americans during the Civil War. This Article provides insights into antebellum constitutional thought and the background to the Fourteenth Amendment. This Article also explores our understanding of the Constitution and its relationship to slavery through the lens of Frederick Douglass. First, the Article looks at how the Constitution impacted Douglass and how Douglass was himself a “constitutional actor,” even though he held no public office and was not even considered a U.S. citizen under the holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford. For example, Douglass was a constitutional actor when he escaped from slavery – and thus came under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution; when he married in New York but was still a fugitive from Maryland; when he applied for, and received, a copyright for his first autobiography, even though he was a fugitive slave at the time; and when he left the United States for Great Britain without a passport. This Article also explores Douglass’s constitutional theories and understandings and how he used the Constitution to oppose slavery. I argue, in part, that his understanding of the Constitution and his approach to constitutional interpretation changed as his life circumstances changed. Thus, when he returned from England, he was a free man because British friends had purchased his liberty. This led him to a new understanding of how to approach the Constitution and how to fight slavery under the Constitution. While essentially a work of legal history, this Article also offers ways of understanding constitutional theory and the elements of being a constitutional actor. The Article also raises issues of interstate comity and the recognition in one state of a status created in another. While not explicitly stated – because this is a work of legal history – this Article obviously has implications for modern issues surrounding marriage equality, child-custody based on interstate recognitions of status changes, the interstate recognition of gender transitions, and the legal rights of non-citizens within the United States.

Download the article here.

Mulligan on Diverse Originalism @MulliganEsq ‏

Christina Mulligan, Brooklyn Law School, is publishing Diverse Originalism in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Here is the abstract.

Originalism has a difficult relationship with race and gender. People of color and white women were largely absent from the process of drafting and ratifying the Constitution. Today, self-described originalists are overwhelmingly white men. In light of these realities, can originalism solve its “race and gender” problems while continuing to be originalist? This Article argues that originalists can take several actions today to address originalism’s race and gender problems, including debiasing present-day interpretation, looking to historical sources authored by people of color and white women, and severing originalism and the Constitution’s text from their historical associations with racism and sexism. Taking these steps will not only make originalism more inclusive, but also help originalists become better at accessing the original meaning of the Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Munshi on Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive @GeorgetownLaw

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing 'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive in Law and the Visual: Representation, Technologies, and Critique (Desmond Manderson, ed., 2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1932, the United States government sought to cancel the citizenship of Dinshah Ghadiali, an immigrant from India, alleging that Ghadiali “by reason of his not being a free white person or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.” Ghadiali was one of dozens of Indian immigrants targeted for denaturalization in the wake of United States v. Thind (1923), in which the Supreme Court declared that “Hindus,” though capable of cultural assimilation, would remain visually unassimilable. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali submitted into evidence a series of photographs, assuring the judge, “You will see my family became so American.” How do these photographs purport to show that Ghadiali and his family had become “so American”? In this essay, through a through a close reading of Ghadiali’s photography, I explore a tension between the visualization of race—a practice at once institutionalized by law and inextricably bound with the medium of photography—and the performance of national belonging.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.