Critical Race Theory: Origins, Permutations, and Current Queries

Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged from two movements in legal education. One was the Critical Legal Studies movement, which fostered a power critique about American law and emerged at the University of Wisconsin in 19771 and continued through meetings and scholarship until about 1992.2 The second movement, which came to be known as Critical Race Theory, was the result of meetings between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s convened by minority law professors to address the apartheid of American law.3 That apartheid had two dimensions-first, the exclusion of racial minorities from the legal academy as students and faculty, and second, the absence of pedagogy and scholarship directly related to the experience of racial minorities in America.4 The failure of Critical Legal Studies to address this apartheid5 coincided with minority professors entering legal education, determined to increase their numbers and engage in racetransformative scholarship. 6 They began these efforts by gathering as minority professors apart from their white counterparts.

From Tokenism to Emancipatory Politics: The Conferences and Meetings of Law Professors of Color

In this paper, the author traces the history of the First National Meetings and conferences since 1969. In Part II, this paper explores the range of meetings and conferences which outlined the development of a proactive agenda for minority student and faculty inclusion within mainstream historically White legal institutions and the evolution of this agenda from one of access to an agenda of security, retention, and the advancement of legal theory and scholarship within and without the established academy. Part III chronicles the maturation of this tradition of independent meetings and conferences of professors of color into a network of legal education institutions promoting institutional, as well as ideological, pluralism. Finally, the concluding comments are devoted to an analysis of the two-fold function of this tradition of meetings and conferences: to combat the paradoxical isolation and heightened visibility of professors of color within historically White institutions and to generate legal theory responsive to the experiences of people of color

The Battle for Brown

This article contends that the battle to preserve and place the principles of Brown v. Board of Education' at the center of the quest for educational equality is more important than ever before. Initially, this article notes that the United States Supreme Court's stewardship of Brown has been uneven, and the decision's precedential force has been much diminished in the hands of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. But as the Court has withdrawn from vigorous enforcement of Brown's desegregation mandate, segregation in public education persists, and other factors such as class, housing segregation, hypercriminalization, and employment discrimination intersect with race to condemn black and brown children to disparities in educational attainment. While Court partisans2 and the nation debate whether we are a post-racial America, 3 many sobering realities, including disparate educational outcomes, demonstrate that racial disparity and discrimination in America remain as resilient as ever

A Tale of Two Justices: Brandeis, Marshall, and Federal Court Judicial Diversity

In this Article, I will focus on the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court as a significant landmark in the history of the federal judiciary. I explore this topic initially through a comparison of President Woodrow Wilson's 1916 appointment of Louis Brandeis with President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of Thurgood Marshall as a symbolic opening of the federal bench to African-American lawyers. Both Brandeis and Marshall were well-known nationally prior to their appointments, with Brandeis engaged in significant domestic and international activities, including his embrace of Zionism, and Marshall engaged in almost a four-decade long assault on racial segregation and Plessy v. Ferguson.' Perhaps not ironically, both endured abnormally long waits between nomination and confirmation while their opponents raised substantive objections that thinly veiled the opposition to the placement of a member of their respective groups on the highest court

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall - Gender, Olympic Competition and Persistence of the Feminine Ideal

When the Modern Games began in 1896, women did not compete.5 The founder of the modern Games adamantly opposed female competition on the basis of a natural law principle it believed governed the role of women. Its leadership held that female competition would violate "the laws of nature" and would be "the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate."6 "It seems to me therefore that is those sports and games which are suitable for men be modified and reduced so that they cannot anyway injure the woman, and if we can create organizations which will enforce these modified regulations stringently, we will have gone a long way towards achieving our objects."7 Today, the role of women is still limited by policies that echo these outdated assumptions about female capacity, now justified by scientific and fair completion rationales. In this article I posit that the history. of sport is plagued by a commitment to a feminine ideal. In part one, I argue that achievement of gender equality in Olympic Sport is limited by a feminine ideal. That ideal embodies women as stereotypically feminine and weak, males as stereotypically masculine and stronger, and males as decision-makers over the scope of women's competitive destiny.

Assessing the Effects of Communication Media Affordances and the Awareness of Media Security on Knowledge Sharing Behavior

Global Software Development (GSD) team members engage in intellectual activities that involve sharing business domain knowledge and technical knowledge across geographical areas, which is crucial to the successful development of software. In global software development, media choice may influence how virtual teams create and share knowledge. As digital technology advances and organizations become more digitally transformed, current communication theories for media selection lack the explanation to the complicated phenomena with the use of advanced media technologies. There have been many studies focused on the effectiveness of media, but they did not include user’s understanding of system security and its influence on knowledge sharing behavior. However, affordance theory explains the utility with both social actors and technical features. The use of media may be shaped by features of technologies and user’s perception on system security. The goal of this study was to empirically assess the effects of media affordances and media security awareness on knowledge sharing behaviors among GSD team members with the lens of affordance theory. In this study, data was collected through survey from 214 GSD employees, after inviting 1000 employees to participate. The survey data was analyzed to test the effects of communication media affordance and user’s awareness of media security on behavior in knowledge sharing. The analysis results show that awareness of media security had significant moderating effects on the relationships from some actualized media affordances to implicit knowledge sharing. The results of this study revealed positive relationships between perceived media affordances and actualized media affordances. The results also showed that organization tenure had a significant effect on implicit knowledge sharing, and professional tenure had a significant effect on explicit and implicit knowledge behavior. This study contributed to the body of knowledge in organizational communication literature by providing new insights into how technology properties and users’ awareness on technology security shape team members’ knowledge sharing practice

Before and After Michael Brown—Toward an End to Structural and Actual Violence

This Article offers a comprehensive view of the multitude of factors and circumstances that have culminated with the current climate of racial unrest. Greene traces the historical sources of racism as it intersects with policing and the justice system through the twentieth century and demonstrates how it pervades many aspects of American culture, from Supreme Court jurisprudence to television shows, in a “structure of violence.” Greene points out the need for a paradigm shift to overcome these forces in the new century