Census Bureau Report: “Poverty Rates for Selected Detailed Race and Hispanic Groups by State and Place: 2007–2011″

Census Bureau Report: Suzanne Macartney et al.,  Poverty Rates for Selected Detailed Race and Hispanic Groups by State and Place: 2007–2011, American Community Survey Briefs (Feb. 2013).

Self-Promoting Post, Article Published =) : “The Ambition and Transformative Potential of Progressive Property”

Self-Promoting Post, My Article is Published =) : Ezra Rosser, The Ambition and Transformative Potential of Progressive Property, 101 California L. Rev. 107 (2013).  Link to PDF.  Abstract below:

The emerging progressive property school celebrates and finds its meaning in the social nature of property. Rejecting the idea that exclusion lies at the core of property law, progressive property scholars call for a reconsideration of the relationships owners and nonowners have with property and with each other. Despite these ambitions, progressive property scholarship has so far largely confined itself to questions of exclusion and access. This Essay argues that such an emphasis glosses over race-related acquisition and distribution problems that pervade American history and property law. The modest structural changes supported by progressive property scholars fail to account for this racial history and, by so doing, present a limited vision of the changes to property law that progressive scholars should support. Though sympathetic with the political and scholarly orientation of the progressive property school, and with its policy arguments regarding exclusion and access, I argue that the first priority of any transformative project of progressive property must be revisiting acquisition and distribution.

Let me add that the editors were amazing to work with and I sincerely appreciate both their interest in the article and their innumerable great suggestions!

News Article: “The Neighborhood Effect”

News Article: Marc Perry, The Neighborhood Effect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 5, 2012.  [An in-depth look back at William J. Wilson's influence.]

-Thanks to the Property Law Prof Blog for the  heads up!

New Article: “Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination”

New Article: Ronald G. Fryer Jr., Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination, NBER Working Paper w16256 (2012) [Note: NOT freely available]. Abstract below:

There are large and important differences between blacks and whites in nearly every facet of life – earnings, unemployment, incarceration, health, and so on. This chapter contains three themes. First, relative to the 20th century, the significance of discrimination as an explanation for racial inequality across economic and social indicators has declined. Racial differences in social and economic outcomes are greatly reduced when one accounts for educational achievement; therefore, the new challenge is to understand the obstacles undermining the development of skill in black and Hispanic children in primary and secondary school. Second, analyzing ten large datasets that include children ranging in age from eight months old to seventeen years old, I demonstrate that the racial achievement gap is remarkably robust across time, samples, and particular assessments used. The gap does not exist in the first year of life, but black students fall behind quickly thereafter and observables cannot explain differences between racial groups after kindergarten. Third, we provide a brief history of efforts to close the achievement gap. There are several programs — various early childhood interventions, more flexibility and stricter accountability for schools, data-driven instruction, smaller class sizes, certain student incentives, and bonuses for effective teachers to teach in high-need schools, which have a positive return on investment, but they cannot close the achievement gap in isolation. More promising are results from a handful of high-performing charter schools, which combine many of the investments above in a comprehensive framework and provide an “existence proof” — demonstrating that a few simple investments can dramatically increase the achievement of even the poorest minority students. The challenge for the future is to take these examples to scale.

Kentucky Law Journal Symposium: “Structural Racism: Inequality in America Today”

Kentucky Law Journal Symposium Issue: “Structural Racism: Inequality in America Today” published, with the following articles:

Structural Racism and the Law in America Today: An Introduction
William M. Wiecek

Racial Cartels and the Thirteenth Amendment  Enforcement Power
Darrell A.H. Miller

Beyond Public/Private: Understanding Excessive  Corporate Prerogative
john a. powell

Overcoming Structural Barriers to Integrated Housing: A Back–to–the–Future Reflection on the Fair Housing  Act’s “Affirmatively Further” Mandate
Robert G. Schwemm

New Article: “Is Marriage for Rich People? A Book Review of Ralph Richard Banks’s Is Marriage for White People?”

New Article: Nancy Leong, Is Marriage for Rich People? A Book Review of Ralph Richard Banks’s Is Marriage for White People?, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1311 (2012).  Abstract below:

Blacks have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in America, and black women are more than three times as likely as white women to never to marry. Ralph Richard Banks’ monograph Is Marriage for White People? provides a searching inquiry into the condition of black singleness. He argues that, as the result of a shortage of “eligible” black men, black women often face the unappealing dilemma of “marrying down” — that is, marrying a man of a lower socieoeconomic class — or remaining single. He advocates that black women would serve both themselves and blacks more generally by opening themselves to “marrying out” — that is, to marrying a man of a different race.

The changes Banks envisions, played out to their logical conclusion, would reduce the racial disparity in marriage at the expense of widening the socioeconomic disparity in marriage and instantiating current socioeconomic gaps. Banks is correct that objections to interracial marriage are often overstated. But a better solution to the marriage disparity would both discourage hostility to interracial marriage and avoid reifying class distinctions. One place to start involves our thinking about both “marrying out” and “marrying down.” If we recognize both alternatives as potentially legitimate choices, we would make progress toward wearing away existing barriers of race and class.

New Articles: “The Market as a Legal Concept” & “Race as a Legal Concept”

New Articles: Justin Desautels-Stein, The Market as a Legal Concept, 60 Buff. L. Rev. 387 (2012);  Justin Desautels-Stein,  Race as a Legal Concept, 2 Columbia J. of Race & L. 1 (2012).

Howard Law Journal Symposium: “The State of the Ordinary Family”

Howard Law Journal Symposium: “The State of the Ordinary Family” is available here.  The symposium is published online as a single document, but includes:

THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW:
INCARCERATION AND THE
ORDINARY FAMILY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kimberly L. Alderman 293

FAMILIES OF COLOR IN CRISIS:
BEARING THE WEIGHT OF
THE FINANCIAL MARKET
MELTDOWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . andr´e douglas pond cummings 303

AN ESSAY ON SLAVERY’S HIDDEN
LEGACY: SOCIAL HYSTERIA AND
STRUCTURAL CONDONATION OF INCEST . . . . . Zanita E. Fenton 319

THE “FIRST FAMILY EFFECT:”
“LOVE ON TOP” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lenese C. Herbert 339

THE IMPACT OF RECESSIONARY POLITICS
ON LATINO-AMERICAN AND IMMIGRANT
FAMILIES: SCHIP SUCCESS AND
DREAM ACT FAILURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mariela Olivares 359

DARK SECRETS: OBEDIENCE TRAINING, RIGID
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE BLACK PARENTING, AND
REASSESSING THE ORIGINS OF INSTABILITY IN
THE BLACK FAMILY THROUGH A RE-READING
OF FOX BUTTERFIELD’S ALL GOD’S
CHILDREN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reginald Leamon Robinson 393

“COLONIAL WHITE MATER PRIVILEGE”: AN
ABOVE-GROUND RAILROAD TO FREEDOM
AND LAND RECLAMATION . . . . . . . . . . Cynthia Hawkins DeBose 455

ORDINARY PEOPLE IN AN EXTRAORDINARY TIME:
THE BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS IN THE AGE
OF OBAMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leland Ware 533
and Theodore J. Davis

Two (opposing) New Articles related to Poverty and the Occupy Movement

1. Nick J. Sciullo, Social Justice in Turbulent Times: Critical Race Theory and Occupy Wall Street, 69 National Lawyers Guild Review (2012).  Abstract below:

In this brief article, I want to tackle several issues that are critically important to progressive move(ment)s in the law and in society as a whole. I am convinced that with continued articulation and a combined sense of theory and practice, the progressive community can make great strides in enriching the law and people’s experience with it. We need to move beyond litigation and engage our critical consciousness to embrace activism on all fronts. his is why I locate a positive politics of struggle in the Occupy Movements that progressives ought to embrace. At the same time, we must come to grips with the tremendous injustices perpetrated on people of color while we simultaneously critique the capitalist system that enacts a powerful system of oppression that is concomitant with the plight of racialized minorities. Social justice in turbulent times? Yes. A futurity of possibility? Absolutely.

2. Ilya Shapiro & Carl G. DeNigris [both of the Cato Institute], Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue: How the Government’s Unconstitutional Actions Hurt the 99%, forthcoming Drake Law Review.  Abstract below:

Economic freedom is the best tool man has ever had in the perpetual struggle against poverty. It allows every individual to employ their faculties to a multitude of opportunities, and it has fueled the economic growth that has lifted millions out of poverty in the last century alone. Moreover, it provides a path for individuals and communities to free themselves from coercive government policies that serve political elites and discrete political classes at the expense of the politically weak. Because of their relative political weakness, the poor and lower middle class tend to suffer the most from these inescapable power disparities.

Yet economic freedom — and ultimately, economic growth — is not self-sustaining. This tool of prosperity requires sound principles that provide a framework for cooperation and voluntary exchanges in a free society. Principles equally applied to all and beyond the arbitrary discretion of government actors; principles that provide a degree of certainty and predictability in an otherwise uncertain world. That is, economic freedom requires the rule of law, not men.

In this article, we discuss the corrosive effects that unconstitutional actions have on the rule of law, economic growth and, in turn, on the ability of the poor to improve their economic misfortune. We focus on the institutional dangers and adverse incentives that unconstitutional policies tend to create. These dangers are not just abstract or theoretical; this article shows how specific unconstitutional actions adversely affect the lives of poor Americans. And while Part IV shows that even constitutional violations by local governments can have disastrous effects, our central theme is that the federal government’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution has led to policies that kill jobs, stymie economic growth, and ultimately exacerbate the problems of those living in poverty.

New Article: “Waging War on ‘Unemployables’? Race, Low-Wage Work, and Minimum Wages: The New Evidence”

New Article: Harry G. Hutchison, Waging War on ‘Unemployables’? Race, Low-Wage Work, and Minimum Wages: The New Evidence, 29 Hofstra Labor & Employment L.J. 25 (2011).  Abstract below:

Capturing both popular and academic imaginations, recent literature contributions contest the standard treatment of minimum wage statutes as vehicles that enlarge the economic and social dislocation of vulnerable workers. A persistent strain of the current scholarship dedicated to progressive labor ideology implies that minimum wages or, alternatively, living wage statutes are necessary to preclude the degradation of low-wage workers. The publication of Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson’s recent article, Minimum Wage Legislation, constitutes yet another effort to destabilize the neoclassical consensus that emphasizes the adverse employment effects of wage regulation. Prescinding from orthodox economic analysis, Deakin and Wilkinson insist that there is a good efficiency-based case for minimum wage legislation. If the authors are correct, and if efficiency standing alone supports their normative viewpoint, then the contention that such legislation ought to be seen as a societal good might become tenable.

Unfortunately, their claims are highly doubtful. Perceived through the lenses of American labor history, classical liberalism, Critical Race Theory and neoclassical economics, the authors’ allegations signify the capitulation of reasoned analysis to ideology. Rather than supporting the interest of the public or of vulnerable workers, their starkly conventional and progressive approach to labor law reform recalls John Stuart Mill’s embrace of Social Darwinism and consequent exclusion of inferior classes of workers. The authors’ approach also verifies Mill’s observation that modern liberal democracy – operating consistently with the goals of exclusion – is insufficient to protect disfavored groups and individuals from the coercive power authorized by a majority or its hierarchs. Since Deakin and Wilkinson’s credulous claims are in harmony with more than a century of progressive policies, and since the normative and prudential case for raising or retaining the minimum wage remains weak, marginalized members of society have much to fear from their analysis.