The Color of Kinship

This Article addresses the need for family law scholarship that better theorizes and grapples with how race informs American life in the 21st Century. Family law scholars have been instrumental in documenting and advocating for recognition of the “new kinship”—familial relationships and affective ties forged outside of marriage and amidst dramatic demographic shifts. In doing so, though, they have largely ignored race, focusing instead on matters such as gender or class. The assumption is that kinship is raceneutral. But, in fact, kinship has a color. Part II explores this reality by analyzing Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Banks, LLC, a case involving a lesbian mother who filed a wrongful birth suit when the insemination process she underwent resulted not in the white baby desired, but a child who is partially black. Part III explains how the colorblind approach that informs much of family law scholarship undermines the ability of scholars in this area both to interrogate cases like Cramblett and to offer meaningful solutions to the problems that families confront. Part IV advocates for a new approach to issues of family and race, including whiteness. Mapping a research agenda and alternative vision for family law scholarship, this article urges greater attention to the ways in which race informs the functioning of all families and intersects with issues like sexual orientation and class. This article also makes the case that family law scholars can advance the national debate about race and inequality in the United States by offering insights into the ways in which family law systems and policies shape notions of race and structure inequality across a range of areas

Race in the Life Sciences: An Empirical Assessment, 1950-2000

The mainstream narrative regarding the evolution of race as an idea in the scientific community is that biological understandings of race dominated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until World War II, after which a social constructionist approach is thought to have taken hold. Many believe that the horrific outcomes of the most notorious applications of biological race—eugenics and the Holocaust—moved scientists away from thinking that race reflects inherent differences and toward an understanding that race is a largely social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This understanding of the evolution of race as a scientific idea informed the way that many areas of law conceptualize human equality, including civil rights, human rights, and constitutional law. This Article provides one of the first large-scale empirical assessments of publications in peer-reviewed biomedical and life science journals to examine whether biological theories of race actually lost credibility in the life sciences after World War II. We find that biological theories of race transformed yet persisted in the dominant academic discourse up through modern times—a finding that contradicts the central narrative that the life sciences became “color-blind” or “post-racial” several decades ago. The continued salience of biological race in the life sciences suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the questionable assumptions driving this research on biological race and its potential spillover effects, i.e., how persisting claims of biological race in the scientific literature might reconstitute its significance in law and society in a manner that may be harmful to racial minorities

Afrodescendants, Law, and Race in Latin America

Law and Society research in and about Latin America has been particularly beneficial in elucidating the gap between the ideals of racial equality laws in the region and the actual subordinated status of its racialized subjects. Some of the recurrent themes in the race-related literature have been: the limits of the Latin American emphasis on criminal law to redress discriminatory actions; the limits of multicultural constitutional reform for full political participation; the insufficiency of land reform and recognition of ethnic communal property titles; and the challenges to implementing race conscious public policies such as affirmative action. Especially illuminating have been the surveys of judicial cases that demonstrate the continued judicial resistance to the notion that racial discrimination exists in Latin America simply because its manifestations are deemed to be inconsequential compared to the “real discrimination” of the racially violent United States. Future research projects could be instrumental in disrupting this Latin American judicial attitude of racial innocence that interferes with the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Emerging research could interrogate the presumption that racial violence does not and has not existed in Latin America, and the social disempowerment of not naming the violence as racial. In short, deconstructing the judicial premise that racial violence is particular to the United States and the defining feature of true racism by which strategic comparisons to Latin America’s presumed non-racial violence situate it as non-discriminatory, all point to a productive area for future Law and Society race-related research

[Review of] David Delaney. Race, Place, & the Law

David Delaney\u27s work is informative and contributes to an understanding of race relations and the legal system. The central finding is that race relations exist in different spatial contexts at the same time. The author begins with the case Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pick. 193 (1836) which focuses on a young slave girl, Med and her freedom. The cause of action involved the movement of the servant girl to Massachusetts by her Louisiana master. The master was visiting relatives. Under Louisiana law Med was a slave, but Massachusetts law did not permit slavery