Financing a Greater New York and an American Empire

This paper examines the connections between municipal bond financing in early 1900s New York, the portfolios of the city's largest banks, and the use of expertise by both urban reformers and international financial advisors

Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter

The modern discourse critiquing vote denial policies in the United States has taken two distinct paths. The first and more recent path has been to critique the effects of legislation like voter identification laws, narrowed early voting opportunities, and similar enactments to hyper-regulate the voting process, effecting, as some argue, the ability for the poor, the elderly, and minorities to vote. The second strain of this voter suppression discourse relates to the express exclusion of persons who have been convicted of felonies from the exercise of the franchise. While both vote denial by effect or by express disenfranchisement have raised numerous civil rights concerns, few scholars have treated these issues in tandem or examined the ideological interconnections between these doctrinally distinct voter suppression doctrines. This essay will use the lens of “tiered personhood” to conceptualize the dual aspects of the voter denial problem as a unified phenomenon of political subordination intended to exclude certain persons from the political community. This essay argues that this voter suppression dynamic creates statuses as between persons based upon the ability to exercise complete or less than complete constitutional rights driven by an ideology of exclusion of those deemed “un-worthy” of full membership in the political community, thus excluding those persons from full citizenship. With the problem framed in this way, the essay will briefly use this lens to analyze the disparate treatment of convicted felons and the disparate impact of voter suppression legislation as parallel mechanisms that serve the same end—the maintenance of an American political underclass. The essay will then propose a sketch of a new model for subverting this underclass dynamic—a communitarian re-conception of American political community based on a premise of inclusion within that community rather than a dynamic of exclusion

Normalizing Domination

In the 2016 election, a sufficient majority of white voters in key battleground states elected Donald Trump president. In voting for Trump, these voters, as part of the minority of voters that supported Trump, had to, through their vote, either embrace or ignore his racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetoric. Though it is impossible to know which, their votes nonetheless served to “normalize domination”—that is, their act of legitimizing Trump’s rhetoric made the absurd or incendiary commonplace and acceptable. Even before the 2016 election, institutions and individuals have normalized of the ideology of white supremacy by camouflaging it with other normative values while at the same time allowing it to flourish and reinvent itself. It asserts an epistemology of failing to know racism—a key component of what scholars know as post-racialism—as a means of achieving colorblindness. The late great Derrick Bell recognized how the underlying structure of American politics is defined by domination that embraces white identity politics as central. Thus, the institutions that continue American democracy seek to organize the American political and legal structure to protect such domination. This short essay focuses on this problem through a brief examination of the American law of politics and argues for a new race consciousness can be used as a compass to understand the structure of political domination and thus subvert such domination to create an egalitarian society

Resolution of the Navier-Stokes equation in laminar and turbulent regimes

The main aim of this projectistodevelop numerical codesthat solve basicfluid dynamicsand heat transfer problems. Following the finite volume method, the respective partial differential equations for the five problems considered are solved. Requisite comparisonswith literatureand benchmark results withown simulations of the problems are presented. The five cases considered are pure conduction, convection-diffusion, driven cavity, differentially heated cavity, and burgers equation.Incomin

When Political Domination Becomes Racial Discrimination: NAACP v. McCrory and the Inextricable Problem of Race in Politics

In North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina\u27s 2013 omnibus voting law due to its discriminatory effect and the fact it was passed with an intent to abridge the ability of African Americans to vote. This decision represents a landmark victory for voting rights advocates against strict voter identification laws and other similar regulations that foster voter suppression. It also represents a remarkable and extraordinary use of the Arlington Heights doctrine to address the race or politics problem in election law. This Article examines the McCrory decision with an eye towards parsing out how the court arrived at this due care approach. It then confronts the uncertain future of McCrory considering the difficulties in distinguishing impermissible racial motives and permissible political motives, the uncertain judicial future of the post-Shelby County Voting Rights Act, and the academic literature disfavoring race-conscious remedies. The Article concludes optimistically by noting that whether McCrory represents a momentary victory in the larger attack against the Voting Rights Act or whether it stands as good law for the foreseeable future, the opinion offers a well-reasoned approach that accomplishes the ends of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act through offering a race-conscious intersectional approach grounded in the reality of voter suppression in North Carolina

The Voting Rights Paradox: Ideology and Incompleteness of American Democratic Practice

This Essay describes the “voting rights paradox”—the factthat despite America’s professed commitment to universalenfranchisement, voting rights legislation throughout U.S.history has arisen in some states to serve antidemocratic,exclusionary ends. This Essay argues that this contradictioncomes into focus when the right to vote is understood as havingas an ideological driving force based on worthiness foradmission to the franchise. This ideology of worthiness persistsbecause the right to vote is dependent on political decisions leftto the political branches and the majority’s willingness to allowpropaganda to influence the scope of the franchise.Ultimately, this Essay argues that the voting rights paradoxis effectively the “invisible hand” influencing the American lawof democracy. The only way out of the paradox is to reorientvoting rights towards a communitarian conception that fostersan authentic understanding of a universalist right to vote. Thismust be expressed by (and coupled with) fundamental,structural transformations in the mechanisms for allowingcitizens to exercise their voting rights

Reviving the Dream: Equality and the Democratic Promise in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Economic Precarity, Race, and Voting Structures

This article explores the evolution of an underlying utilitarian conception of the right to vote in the federal Constitution, framed as it is expressed in Crawford and Shelby County, and the impact of that in subsequent lower court decisions. I have argued in the past that this aspect of the recalibration of the right to vote represents deference to state priorities regarding the federal constitutional enforcement of the right, a balancing that effectively prioritizes state interests in administration over voter access, thus leading to excessive and cumulative regulation. This deference is utilitarian in the sense that this is premised upon the vindication of larger state interests that would effectively serve the good of the majority-indeed, the greatest number--of voting citizens even if there is a marginal expense to a relative few. This would presumably cause courts considering this kind of problem-of indirect structural disenfranchisement due to policy concerns outside of the election law context-to defer to the state\u27s interest concerning the diminished availability of opportunities for obtaining the credentials necessary to vote in a strict voter identification state due to the more pressing concern of financial exigency