Diverse Case Perspectives

Drawing upon the experience of faculty from across the country, Integrating Doctrine and Diversity is a collection of essays with practical advice, written by faculty for faculty, on specific ways to integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into the law school curriculum. Chapters focus on subjects traditionally taught in the first-year curriculum (Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Legal Writing, Legal Research, Property, Torts) and each chapter will also include a short annotated bibliography curated by a law librarian. With submissions from over 40 scholars, the collection is the first of its kind to offer reflections, advice, and specific instruction on how to integrate issues of diversity and inclusions into first-year doctrinal courses.

The essays included in this volume began as presentations at the March 19-20, 2010 "Vulnerable Populations and Economic Realities" teaching conference organized and hosted by Golden Gate University School of Law and co-sponsored by the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). That conference, generously funded by a grant from The Elfenworks Foundation, brought together law faculty, practitioners, and students to reexamine how issues of race, gender, sexual identity, nationality, disability, and generally--outsider status--are linked to poverty. Contributors have transformed their presentations into essays, offering a variety of roadmaps for incorporating these issues into the law school curriculum, both inside the classroom as well as in clinical and externship settings, study abroad, and social activism. These essays provide glimpses into "teaching moments," both intentional and organic, to help trigger opportunities for students and faculty to question their own perceptions and experiences about who creates and interprets law, and who has access to power and the force of law. This book expands the parameters of law teaching so that this next generation of attorneys will be dedicated to their roles as public citizens, broadening the availability of justice.

What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? Feminist Judgments brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant US Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions reveal that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice. Feminist Judgments opens a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact of judicial diversity on the law as well as the influence of perspective on judging.

White Supremacy pervades American history. Moreover, notwithstanding landmark civil rights gains and egalitarian aspirations, America remains segregated and unequal. This book examines the role of law in reinforcing and ameliorating racial injustice. Although surveying key historical precedents, its primary focus is the present. The book examines contemporary controversies across a variety of settings, animated by three fundamental questions: What is the current racial order? To what extent is it unjust? How can law and legal actors advance a more racially just order? The book uses cases, statutes and other sources of law, supplemented by problems and exercises, to equip students to both critique and construct pragmatic solutions to race-related controversies.

This publication provides a student with an understanding of ten leading torts cases, focusing on how the litigation was shaped by lawyers, judges and socioeconomic factors, and why the cases have attained landmark status. It is suitable for adoption as a supplement in a first-year torts course, or as a text for an advanced seminar.

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.

This innovative, student-friendly casebook provide frequent opportunities to consider the application of tort law in the context of social justice issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. For example, the book treats important but often overlooked issues of fairness in tort damages based on minority status and gender, especially in cases involving young children. To identify the location of such materials in the casebook, there is a new Diversity and Inclusion Index.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation. Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

Dorf's Constitutional Law Stories provides a student with an understanding of 15 leading U.S. constitutional law cases. It focuses on how lawyers, judges, and socioeconomic factors shaped the litigation, and why the cases have attained landmark status. This book is suitable for adoption as a supplement in an introductory constitutional law course or as a text for an advanced seminar.

Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Social Identity, Second Edition, provides a dynamic social, historical, and doctrinal context for understanding property law. With historical perspective and doctrinal analysis, it maps the directions in which property law has turned in response to issues of race and ethnicity, and demonstrates how racial and ethnic categories continue to affect contemporary property law. The authors note that the purpose of the book is to “help to ‘integrate’ talk of the salience of race and ethnicity with traditional property law and theory.” Throughout the book they emphasize the links between the history of the acquisition and control of property in the United States and the harm suffered by some because of their status as racial or ethnic minorities. The first part of this book discusses dispossession, slavery, and the connection between property rights and civil rights. The second part explores the race-related aspects of zoning and nuisance cases, as well as housing discrimination based on race and ethnicity. The final part examines the role of race in contemporary property law issues, such as environmental justice, takings, gifts, and partition cases.

In Property Stories, each chapter discusses a major court decision on a topic that would be covered in a first year property law class. The text differs from similar texts, however, in that it uses storytelling as a mechanism to delve into the social policies and political context that led to the issues and outcomes in the cases. The authors do not shy away from detail in an attempt to help students better understand the issues at play in each case and the impact each case has had on current law. Rose's chapter focuses specifically on the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer,4 which held that the enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

How could feminist perspectives and methods change the shape of property law? This volume assembles a group of diverse scholars to explore this question by presenting fundamental property law cases rewritten from a feminist perspective. The cases cover a broad range of property law topics, from landlord-tenant rights and obligations, patents, and zoning to publicity rights, land titles, concurrent ownership, and takings. These rewritten opinions and their accompanying commentaries demonstrate how incorporating feminist theories and methods could have made property law more just and equitable for women and marginalized groups. The book also shows how property law is not neutral but is shaped by the society that produces it and the judges who apply it.

'Is it possible to be both a judge and a feminist?' Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions answers that question in the affirmative by re-writing seminal opinions that implicate critical dimensions of criminal law jurisprudence, from the sexual assault law to provocation to cultural defences to the death penalty. Right now, one in three Americans has a criminal record, mass incarceration and over-criminalization are the norm, and our jails cycle through about ten million people each year. At the same time, sexual assaults are rarely prosecuted at all, domestic violence remains pervasive, and the distribution of punishment, and by extension justice, seems not only raced and classed, but also gendered. We have had #MeToo campaigns and #SayHerName campaigns, and yet not enough has changed. How might all of justice look different through a feminist lens. This book answers that question.

No Equal Justice is the seminal work on race- and class-based double standards in criminal justice. Hailed as a "shocking and necessary book" by The Economist, it has become the standard reference point for anyone trying to understand the fundamental inequalities in the American legal system. The book, written by constitutional law scholar and civil liberties advocate David Cole, was named the best nonfiction book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and the best book on an issue of national policy by the American Political Science Association. No Equal Justice examines subjects ranging from police behavior and jury selection to sentencing, and argues that our system does not merely fail to live up to the promise of equality, but actively requires double standards to operate. Such disparities,Cole argues, allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor.

This collection of case stories illustrates the balance, continuity, and evolution in substantive criminal law doctrine in light of the social and political contexts in which those doctrines are perennially tested. These stories focus on the pre-litigation behavior of defendants, raising important moral and cultural questions about human nature and human society and how social norms get translated into workable legal doctrines. They survey the typical variety of doctrines addressed in a standard criminal law course, elucidating the classic themes of common law jurisprudence

Fourteen law school professors collaborated to write Civil Procedure Stories, which provides deeper understanding of the great civil procedure cases. Each professor wrote a short chapter on one of the cases, retelling the case in his or her own voice and by his or her own method. Each chapter includes separate sections on: Social and legal background of the case Factual background of the case Lower court proceedings in the case Final appellate disposition, including issues, decisions, reasons, and separate opinions Factual postscript to the case Immediate impact of the case on the development of the law (why the case is famous and when it became so) Continuing importance of the case today (why it is still a leading case)

Shines a light on the ways in which civil procedure may privilege--or silence--voices in our justice system In today's increasingly hostile political and cultural climate, law schools throughout the country are urgently seeking effective tools to address embedded inequality in the United States legal system. A Guide to Civil Procedure aims to serve as one such tool by centering questions of systemic injustice in the teaching, learning, and practice of civil procedure. Featuring an outstanding group of diverse scholars, the contributors illustrate how law school curriculums often ignore issues such as race, gender, disability, class, immigration status, and sexual orientation. Too often, students view the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, immigration/citizenship controversy, or LGBTQ+ issues as mere footnotes to their legal education, often leading to the marginalization of many students and the production of graduates that do not view issues of systemic injustice as central to their profession. A Guide to Civil Procedure reveals how procedure is, and always has been, a central pressure point in the struggle to eradicate structural inequality and oppression through the courts. This book will give students and scholars alike a more complex view of their roles as attorneys, sharpen their litigation skills, and provide a stronger sense of community and purpose in the law school classroom.

In this offering, the editors are joined by other leading contracts scholars in placing the major cases in contract law in their historical and cultural context. Each of the 11 short and readily accessible chapters provides newly uncovered facts about and insights into the cases that lie at the core of the first-year contracts class. Long-standing puzzles are answered and these answers in turn are linked to the larger political and social forces at work, demonstrating how these forces have shaped the evolution of contract law.