The Braiding Cases, Cultural Deference, and the Inadequate Protection of Black Women Consumers

In September 2006, Taalib-Din Uqdah, the man whom at least one observer called the Johnny Cochran of natural hair, and the plaintiff in the 1993 braiding case Uqdah v. District of Columbia, went to Illinois to lead braiders\u27 efforts to eliminate braider licensing regulations. He calls himself a modem-day abolitionist on a crusade against the last legal bastion of chattel slavery in the United States -the cosmetology industry. Uqdah claims that the purpose of his endeavor is to get[] the white man\u27s foot off the black woman\u27s neck. Uqdah\u27s fighting spirit has heartened braiders, dreadlock stylists ( lockticians ), and state legislators, who are optimistic that a bill will pass to amend the Illinois Barber, Cosmetology, Esthetics and Nail Technology Act of 1985 to exclude braiders from state regulation

Grassroots Death Sentences? The Social Movment for Capital Child Rape Laws

Despite the Supreme Court\u27s 1977 ruling in Coker v. Georgia declaring use of the death penalty for rape unconstitutional, there has been a recent explosion of state statutes making the death penalty available for the rape of a child. Numerous articles have tried to discern whether using the death penalty for child rape comports with the Coker holding-often reaching divergent conclusions-but none has focused first on the socio-political setting that brought about these laws to inform their constitutional analysis. This Article attempts to begin contextualizing capital child rape statutes within a social movements framework. I argue that capital child rape statutes can be attributed to three movements: the popular movement to shame, fear, and isolate sex offenders; the feminist movement for harsher punishment of sexual and intra-familial violence; and the legal and political movement to punish attacks against vulnerable victims with death. Understanding these statutes in a richer way helps shed light on their potential constitutional problems

Grassroots Death Sentences: The Social Movement for Capital Child Rape Laws

Despite the Supreme Court\u27s 1977 ruling in Coker v. Georgia declaring use of the death penalty for rape unconstitutional, there has been a recent explosion of state statutes making the death penalty available for the rape of a child. Numerous articles have tried to discern whether using the death penalty for child rape comports with the Coker holding-often reaching divergent conclusions-but none has focused first on the socio-political setting that brought about these laws to inform their constitutional analysis. This Article attempts to begin contextualizing capital child rape statutes within a social movements framework. I argue that capital child rape statutes can be attributed to three movements: the popular movement to shame, fear, and isolate sex offenders; the feminist movement for harsher punishment of sexual and intra-familial violence; and the legal and political movement to punish attacks against vulnerable victims with death. Understanding these statutes in a richer way helps shed light on their potential constitutional problems

Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement

In police reform circles, many scholars and policymakers diagnose the frayed relationship between police forces and the communities they serve as a problem of illegitimacy, or the idea that people lack confidence in the police and thus are unlikely to comply or cooperate with them. The core proposal emanating from this illegitimacy diagnosis is procedural justice, a concept that emphasizes police officers\u27 obligation to treat people with dignity and respect, behave in a neutral, non-biased way, exhibit an intention to help, and give them voice to express themselves and their needs, largely in the context of police stops. This Essay argues that legitimacy theory offers an incomplete diagnosis of the policing crisis, and thus de-emphasizes deeper structural, group-centered approaches to the problem of policing. The existing police regulatory regime encourages large swaths of American society to see themselves as existing within the law\u27s aegis but outside its protection. This Essay critiques the reliance of police decision makers on a simplified version of legitimacy and procedural justice theory. It aims to expand the predominant understanding of police mistrust among African Americans and the poor, proposing that legal estrangement offers a better lens through which scholars and policymakers can understand and respond to the current problems of policing. Legal estrangement is a theory of detachment and eventual alienation from the law\u27s enforcers, and it reflects the intuition among many people in poor communities of color that the law operates to exclude them from society. Building on the concepts of legal cynicism and anomie in sociology, the concept of legal estrangement provides a way of understanding the deep concerns that motivate today\u27s police reform movement and points toward structural approaches to reforming policing

The Obligation Thesis: Understanding the Persistent \u27Black Voice\u27 in Modern Legal Scholarship

This Article revisits the debate over minority voice scholarship, particularly African-American scholarship, that raged in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the advent of critical race theory (CRT). Many critical race theorists elevated the voices of minority scholars, arguing that scholarship in the minority voice should be accorded greater legitimacy than work on race produced by white intellectuals. Many white and some African-American scholars disagreed with Crits \u27 analyses. They charged that good scholarship by African Americans should be judged as a fact-in-itself, not ghettoized or subjected to less rigorous analysis than scholarship by white academics. This Article explores the work of four current up-and-coming black legal scholars to revisit that early disagreement and its ramifications in the modem black legal academy. By and large, it appears that the anti-CRT writers have won the debate. Today\u27s legal academy, at least as reflected in the work of many highly sought-after black scholars, more closely reflects the anti-narrative perspective on scholarship. Black scholars continue to write on racial topics, but with different methodologies than many CRT scholars. Like other areas of legal scholarship, interdisciplinary and doctrinal methods are most prevalent. The Article suggests that one reason African-American legal scholars continue to write about race, despite the risks of doing so, is their sense of obligation to the black community. I contend that this obligation runs just as deeply for black academics as it does for black practitioners, who tend to closely relate the legal profession with the struggle for racial justice

Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism

Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle-class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African-American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro-level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimac