05. Looking Back on 10 Years of UCI Law

L. Song Richardson published this article in the Orange County Register reflecting on the law school\u27s milestones and bright future as part of the law school\u27s 10 year anniversary celebration

Interrogating Racial Violence

This symposium essay constructs a theory of police racial violence that is based upon the social psychology of contemporary bias. Our examination of this violence through the lens of the mind sciences reveals that it is an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of current policing strategies and culture, even in the absence of institutional and individual racial animus. These practices, such as stops and frisks, create an environment that nurtures the unconscious racial biases and self-threats that can lead even consciously egalitarian officers to be more likely to use force disproportionately against Black suspects relative to suspects of other races. This Essay argues that if the state is to take seriously the project of protecting citizens from violence, then it must contend with the role of both unconscious racial biases and self-threats in producing racially disparate violence. Although one way to achieve this is to change existing legal doctrines to account for the pernicious effects of these psychological processes, our focus is examining ways to transform current policing strategies to better protect citizens from racial violence

Stereociliary Myosin-1c Receptors Are Sensitive to Calcium Chelation and Absent from Cadherin 23 Mutant Mice

The identities of some of the constituents of the hair-cell transduction apparatus have been elucidated only recently. The molecular motor myosin-1c (Myo1c) functions in adaptation of the hair-cell response to sustained mechanical stimuli and is therefore an integral part of the transduction complex. Recent data indicate that Myo1c interacts in vitro with two other molecules proposed to be important for transduction: cadherin 23 (Cdh23), a candidate for the stereociliary tip link, and phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2), which is abundant in the membranes of hair-cell stereocilia. It is not known, however, whether these interactions occur in hair cells. Using an in situ binding assay on saccular hair cells, we demonstrated previously that Myo1c interacts with molecules at stereociliary tips, the site of transduction, through sequences contained within its calmodulin (CaM)-binding neck domain, which can bind up to four CaM molecules. In the current study, we identify the second CaM-binding IQ domain as a region of Myo1c that mediates CaM-sensitive binding to stereociliary tips and to PIP2 immobilized on a solid support. Binding of Myo1c to stereociliary tips of cochlear and vestibular hair cells is disrupted by treatments that break tip links. In addition, Myo1c does not bind to stereocilia from mice whose hair cells lack Cdh23 protein despite the presence of PIP2 in the stereociliary membranes. Collectively, our data suggest that Myo1c and Cdh23 interact at the tips of hair-cell stereocilia and that this interaction is modulated by CaM

Implicit Racial Bias in Public Defender Triage

Despite the promise of Gideon, providing “the guiding hand of counsel” to indigent defendants remains unmanageable, largely because the nation’s public defender offices are overworked and underfunded. Faced with overwhelming caseloads and inadequate resources, public defenders must engage in triage, deciding which cases deserve attention and which do not. Although scholars have recognized the need to develop standards for making these difficult judgments, they have paid little attention to how implicit, i.e., unconscious, biases may affect those decisions. There is reason to suspect that unconscious biases will influence public defender decisionmaking due to generations of racial stereotypes specific to stigmatized groups and crime. This Essay urges legal scholars and practitioners to consider how implicit biases may influence the rationing of defense entitlements and suggests ways to safeguard against the effects of these unconscious forces