Blackness as Delinquency

This is one of the first law review article to analyze both the role of ―blackness‖ in shaping the first juvenile court and the black community’s response to the court’s jurisprudence. This Article breaks new ground on two fronts. First, it considers the first juvenile court’s treatment of black youth within the context of the heightened racial oppression immediately following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Second, this Article recovers the lost story of the black women’s club movement’s response to race issues within the juvenile court movement. In doing so, this Article reconsiders the history of the national black women’s club movement within a new framework—that of black women as advocates for juvenile and criminal justice reform. Furthermore, a major issue that these child savers faced remains one that scholars of the juvenile court’s early history have not fully explored: race. Thus, this Article makes two main arguments. First, from its inception, the juvenile court perpetuated existing racial stereotypes about blackness and delinquency and enforced societal notions of race, gender and class stratification. Second, the National Association of Colored Women (―NACW‖) responded by placing criminal and juvenile justice issues as a major component of its civil rights agenda. From 1899 to 1930, the NACW’s efforts to challenge stereotypes about black delinquency impacted the development of the juvenile court system and its jurisprudence. NACW’s particular interest in juvenile justice sheds new light on how black female activists shaped the national discourse on race and crime and formulated their own strategies for juvenile justice reform

Sex Slavery in the Lone Star State: Does the Texas Human Trafficking Legislation of 2011 Protect Minors?

This Article argues that, while Texas has made great strides in its movement to combat child trafficking, there are three major areas in which further reform is needed. First, Texas should provide stronger protections for not only minors trafficked for sex, but also those trafficked for labor. Second, Texas law must shift its emphasis from prosecution of traffickers to a more balanced approach that also prioritizes the protection of minors and the prevention of future trafficking crimes against them. Third, Texas should adopt safe harbor provisions that reflect a child welfare response toward prostituted minor

The Story Behind a Letter in Support of Professor Derrick Bell

Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr. had a long and proud history of disturbing authority. He is widely noted as one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. His scholarship on race was not only a direct challenge to the traditionally conservative legal academy, but also to the more liberal bastions within the academy, such as the Critical Legal Studies movement. His writings about the role of race in American law have made him one of the most prominent legal scholars of a generation. However, Professor Bell did not merely write about racial injustices. He was willing to take risks to promote racial equality and ideological balance in the legal academy. In 1980, he resigned his deanship at the University of Oregon School of Law after the faculty refused to honor his recommendation that an Asian-American woman, Pat K. Chew, be hired. In 1987, after returning to Harvard, Professor Bell staged a sit-in to protest the Law School’s failure to grant tenure to two white professors, Claire Dalton and David Trubek, whose work was aligned with the Critical Legal Studies movement

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead