Jordan on Ida Platt: The First African-American Female Lawyer in Illinois @UISedu

Gwen Jordan, University of Illinois, Springfield, has published ‘A Woman of Strange, Unfathomable Presence’: Ida Platt's Lived Experience of Race, Gender, and Law, 1863-1939. Here is the abstract.

In 1894, Ida Platt became the first African-American woman lawyer in Illinois. She was one of only five black women lawyers in the country and the only one able to maintain a law practice. Throughout her thirty-three year career, Platt served as head of her household, providing for her mother and sisters, without marrying or having children. She accomplished these feats by employing a fluid racial identity, passing as white in her professional life, and by avoiding the dominant gender roles that excluded women from the masculine legal profession. In 1927, at the age of sixty-four, Ida Platt retired, married Walter Burke, a white man, and moved to England. Twelve years later, Ida Burke died. As is the practice in England, there was no race designation on her death certificate. Platt’s choice to employ a fluid racial identity allowed her to pursue her career as a lawyer amidst a racist and sexist society that particularly discriminated against black women. She entered the law when Jim Crow was taking root, race lines were hardening, and elite, white, male lawyers were intensifying their opposition to women’s rise within the profession. Platt’s life and career offer insights into how law and the legal profession responded to the complexities of race and tender a new story of the lived experience of race as it intersects with gender. It suggests that Platt’s pragmatic strategy of changing her racial identity both contested and shaped the ways in which race, gender, and identity were constructed and represented in American society, as it exposed both the rigidity and permeability of these constructions. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Pye on African-American Lawyers and the Civil Rights Movement Before Brown v. Board of Education

David Kenneth Pye has published Before Civil Rights Was in Vogue: The Black Lawyer Before Brown. Here is the abstract.

Scholars cannot become too infatuated with Equal Protection arguments. Doing so blinds them to the various tactics employed by the pre-Civil Rights Movement African American bar to combat racial segregation and discrimination. Ignoring the actual arguments of historical actors is a form of teleology, in which we allow our knowledge of the present to direct how we interpret the past. History becomes less objective when done in this manner. Moreover, lawyers of today, when presented with teleological scholarship, can remain blind to possibilities open to them to defend clients in the embattled black community and beyond.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Dennis Greene, Law Professor and Founding Member of Sha-Na-Na, Passes Away

Frederick Dennis Greene, a founding member of the rock and roll group Sha-Na-Na and a graduate of Yale Law School, has died after a brief illness. Among the courses Professor Greene taught at the University of Dayton Law School from 2004 to his death were Torts, Constitutional Law, and Entertainment Law. I had the honor of serving with him on the AALS Law and Film Committee and knew him as a charming, erudite, and witty colleague. I will miss him.

Selected Bibliography of Frederick Dennis Greene

Cultural Colonization in the Hollywood Film: The Harlem Debates, Part 2, 5 Asian Law Journal 63 (1998).

Immigrants In Chains: Afrophobia in American Legal History: The Harlem Debates, Part 3, 76 Oregon Law Review 537 (1997).

The Law and Business of the Entertainment Industry (Cognella Press, 2013).

The Resurrection of Gunga Din, 81 Iowa Law Review 1521 (1995-1996).


Tragically Hip: Hollywood and African American Film, Cineaste (1994)

Dennis Greene: Sha Na Law
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZl927OcoA

"Little Star": Denny Greene RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpzjZBhLYvY

The Cultural Study of Law and Lawyers

Rakesh K. Anand, Syracuse University College of Law, has published Advancing the Cultural Study of the Lawyer: Developing Three Philosophical Claims and Introducing a New Comparative Normative Inquiry at 3 Washington University Jurisprudence Review 107 (2010). Here is the abstract.

In America, law is a cultural practice, a type of social activity that generates a complete world of meaning. As such, it makes behavioral demands on those who participate in its form of experience. That is, it requires that those who take up its way of life act in certain ways. This fact -that law has an innate normativity, or an inherent ethics - is the organizing principle of the cultural study of the lawyer, a project that considers the implications of this condition for our thinking about law and about the work of law’s most representative figures, namely lawyers. This Article builds upon previous writing in the project and pursues two natural consequent lines of inquiry. First, it provides a more detailed account of three philosophical claims that the cultural study of the lawyer has made, either explicitly or implicitly, the purpose of which is to clarify certain intellectual positions of the project. Second, moving forward from the cultural study of the lawyer’s earlier exploration of how, at the most basic level, the behavioral demands of law differ from those associated with the moral form of experience, this Article begins a parallel discourse, reflecting on the behavioral demands of law and those of the cultural practice of economics, again specifically focusing on fundamental principles and their differential character. As with the earlier consideration of legal and moral prescription, the aim of this analysis is to make clear the distinction between the two cultural practices’ requirements on conduct - an analysis that in turn shows that, at his or her core, a lawyer is not an economic person (and therefore not a businessperson). Because the cultural study of the lawyer may be unfamiliar to some, this Article begins with an overview of the project, emphasizing in particular its intellectual setting and genealogy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Thurgood Marshall as Writer

Anna P. Hemingway, Starla J. Williams, Jennifer M. Lear, all of Widener University School of Law and Ann Fruth, of Widener University School of Law, Harrisburg, have published Thurgood Marshall: The Writer at 47 Willamette Law Review 211 (2011). Here is the abstract.

This article profiles Thurgood Marshall as a writer in his roles as an advocate and social activist, a legal scholar and a Supreme Court Justice. It examines the techniques that he used as a writer to inform and persuade his audiences in his life-long endeavor to achieve equality for everyone. This examination of Marshall’s legal, scholarly, and judicial writings can help lawyers, academics, and students increase their knowledge of how the written word profoundly impacts society. The article first studies his arguments and legal strategy in two early civil rights cases, University of Maryland v. Murray and Smith v. Allwright. It goes on to examine several letters Marshall wrote while he was working on Lyons v. Oklahoma, a murder trial where the prosecution sought the death penalty. It explains how his creativity as a legal strategist was fashioned of necessity as a young African-American lawyer representing African-American clients in a still segregated society. The second profile explores how the social context and the ethical dilemma that Marshall faced in drafting his brief in Brown v. Board of Education influenced his use of persuasive writing techniques. It shows how Marshall’s choices as a writer accomplished an effective strategy that was simultaneously principled and practical. The article then considers Marshall as a moral activist by examining his speech and writing on the occasion of the Bicentennial Celebration of the Constitution in which he famously refused to applaud it. It compares the contemporaneous reaction to his stance to the consequent controversy about his position that arose during the Senate confirmation hearings of Marshall’s most famous clerk, Elena Kagan. Finally, the article looks at Justice Marshall as a writer in his dissent in Payne v. Tennessee, a capital sentencing case. It demonstrates that by choosing to attack the assumptions underlying the majority’s argument, he was able to craft a broad and powerful writing in which he not only advocated his position opposing the death penalty, but also defended a panoply of individual rights that he believed essential to attaining and maintaining his aspiration of equality for everyone.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Black Corporate Bar and the Rise of Barack Obama

David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School, has published The New Social Engineers in the Age of Obama: Black Corporate Lawyers and the Making of the First Black President. Here is the abstract.

In this article, I document the connection between the election of the nation’s first black president and the fledgling, but nevertheless important, creation of a new black "corporate" bar. Specifically, I argue that the new generation of black lawyers who moved into important positions of power and responsibility in corporate America since the mid-1960s played a critical role in opening the door for an Obama presidency – and that understanding the experiences and attitudes of these new "social engineers" is critical to understanding the President's approach to integrating his obligations as leader of all of the people and his expressed commitment to improving the lives of black people in the first decades of the twentieth century.

My argument proceeds in four parts. Part I documents the important role that Houston’s and Marshall’s original social engineers played in paving the way for Obama. As the President frequently acknowledges, he stands on the shoulders of these giants who quite literally laid the groundwork for his success. Indeed, before running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996 Obama’s career was eerily reminiscent of the great social engineer Wiley Branton for whom the Symposium at Howard Law School where this article appears is named. But for all of his connections to the original social engineers, it was a new generation of black lawyers who actually propelled Obama’s meteoric rise from the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate, and eventually to the presidency. Part II charts the rise of this new generation and explains both their connections to, and differences from, the prior generation of social engineers. Although much has rightly been made of the theme of generational change in Obama’s ascendance, many have mischaracterized both the formative experiences and the commitments of what I will refer to as the Brown generation of black lawyers who came of age in the years following that historic decision. Using original interview data and other sources, I document these experiences and commitments and demonstrate how this generation’s unique status as black professionals with role-related obligations that are separate from, and potentially in opposition to, their continuing commitment to use their positions in corporate America to advance the cause of racial justice both drew this new black legal elite to Obama, and in turn, shaped the way in which the President has responded to similar tensions between his role as president and his desire to use the powers of his office to improve the plight of black Americans.

Part III explores these tensions by examining how Obama has attempted to use the office of the presidency to advance the cause of racial justice. In each of the three major avenues through which he has pursued this goal – using the "bully pulpit" to assist traditional civil rights organizations and to inspire individual responsibility and high aspirations among blacks generally, placing talented black professionals in important positions in his administration, and, most importantly, promising to improve the lives of black Americans through a combination of vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and a series of new race-neutral social programs targeting areas of particular concern to blacks – the President has employed strategies also employed by the Brown generation. Not surprisingly, many of the same problems that the nation’s first black corporate lawyers encountered when they attempted to negotiate the complex and sometimes conflicting demands of the "equal opportunity" and "social justice" legacies of the Brown decision have also come to haunt the nation’s first black President as he has engaged in an even more public balancing act between his obligation (and right) to be the president of all the people and his commitment to use his office to improve the lives of black people in this country. Part IV closes by briefly examining how the election of the first black president presents unique opportunities – but also poses unique challenges – for this country’s still fragile black bar.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.