AALS Mid-Year Meeting June 8-10: Post Racial Civil Rights Law
The AALS Mid-Year Meeting on Post Racial Civil Rights Law will include many immigration-sessions. Here is a tentative schedule:
“Post Racial” Civil Rights Law, Politics and Legal Education: New and Old Colorlines in the age of Obama
June 8 – 10, 2010 Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, New York, New York
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Speakers Meeting
5:00 – 8:00 p.m.
AALS Registration
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
AALS Reception
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
8:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
AALS Registration
8:45 – 9:00 a.m.
Welcome
Susan Westerberg Prager, AALS Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
Introduction
Devon Wayne Carbado, University of California, Los Angeles, Chair, Planning Committee for AALS Workshop on Race & the Law
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Plenary: The Legal (Re)production of Inequality
(Panelists will be asked to produce something (paper or answer questions) to be posted on workshop website)
Racial disparities persist across a number of sectors of American life—so much so, in fact, that they are part of our “common knowledge” about race. Most people agree, for example, that whites do better on standardized tests than blacks and Latinos and that blacks and Latinos are more vulnerable to incarceration than whites. While conservative arguments tend to explain these racial disparities in terms of agency and social responsibility, liberal or progressive arguments tend to invoke broader social structures. As between these two competing explanations, the conservative one has far more traction—politically and doctrinally. This makes it all the more important for proponents of the “social structures” approach to articulate precisely how such structures work.
From the standpoint of the social structures approach, law can play a role in reproducing inequality, even when no “racial classifications” are involved. It is the project of this plenary to demonstrate some of the distinctive mechanisms through which law reproduces racial inequality in areas including: criminal justice, healthcare, housing, education, employment, immigration, and constitutional law.
Criminal Justice
Healthcare
Housing
Education
Employment
Immigration
Constitutional Law
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Plenary continues
(Audience discussion in groups for 30 minutes to develop questions for panelists; panelists response to questions)
12:00 – 1:45 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
Racial Inequality Without Racists:
Featured Keynote
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Plenary: New Paradigms of Racialization?
Race, Citizenship, Indigeneity, Immigration (Post-Jim Crow)
Over the past two decades, the racial demographics of the United States have significantly changed. Not only has America become decidedly less white, but a new “majority minority” has emerged: Latinas/os. What this means for our pursuit of racial equality remains under-theorized. Calls to move beyond the black/white binary, without more, do little to help. At the same time, US foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and concerns about national security have intensified the non-citizen and terrorist racialization of people perceived to be Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern. While certainly not new, the social and ideological effects of this racialization are at least in part a function of the growing and more visible Muslim presence at home and the United States global ambitions abroad. Immigration law and social policy have become more salient than ever as immigrants demand the right to be more fully included in American society and people across the ideological spectrum push back by scapegoating undocumented people as a social and economic “drag” on society.
This plenary panel will explore whether these demographic changes—and social response to them–reflect new paradigms of racialization. How should we now count race? What are the frames in which we now talk about race? And what are the intersectional implications of these shifts in demographics and discourse? How do they affect our conception of whiteness? Do they have implications for relations of intimacy—shaping perceptions about childbearing and child care, or the social expression of sexuality? How do these new forms of racialization shape claims about citizenship and security?
What precisely is the relationship between immigration and racialization? Are sovereignty and racialization (or race and indigeniety) oppositional concepts? To what extent, if any, are blacks implicated in and affected by the racialization of undocumented people? What do the current racial demographics portend for anti-racist inter-racial coalitional politics? Have changes in American racial demographics and the racialization of immigration made us more aware of how race is operating on the global stage? Is America “exporting” its racial ideologies? Are there racial regimes outside of the United States that we should “import”? These are some of the questions this plenary will explore.
Counting Race in Changing Demographics
Race and Sovereignty
Immigration & Profiling
Race & Dependency
Race, Family & Sexuality
Whiteness
3:30 – 3:45 p.m.
Refreshment Break
3:45 – 5:00 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions
[Each will consists of three speakers and a moderator]
Counting Race in Changing Demographics
Race and Sovereignty
Immigration & Profiling
Race & Dependency
Race & Sexuality
Colorism
5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Reception
9:00 p.m.
Film: Divided We Stand
Thursday, June 10, 2010
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Plenary: Race Across the Curriculum & Law School: Race Law 101 and Beyond
(post curricula/syllabi on website before workshop)
Most law schools in the United States offer a basic course in Race and the Law. Yet, race law scholars have had few opportunities to engage each other about the substantive content of this course. Is there a difference between a course on Race and the Law and Critical Race Theory? Do identity specific race law courses, such as Latinos and the Law or Asian American Jurisprudence, undermine a multi-racial understanding of race and the law? How, if at all, does one include class, gender and sexual orientation, among other social categories, in a course on race and the law? Significantly, concerns about race and legal education transcend the boundaries of race-specific courses. Professors of core courses in both the first and upper year curriculum (for example, contracts and tax) often struggle with the question of how best to incorporate race into their classrooms. At the same time, every year issues arise across American law schools that remind us that law schools are “racialized spaces”—that is, domains that structure racial interactions and experiences. This plenary will engage the foregoing issues. More specifically, in addition to providing both professors of race law courses and those who teach classes that are not explicitly marked in terms of race the opportunity to think hard about how productively to teach race across disparate doctrinal and substantive contexts, this plenary will take up the broader question of race and law school culture. Educating the next generation of lawyers that “race matters” is crucial not only to the future of legal education but to the future of law as well.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Refreshment Break
10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Small Group Discussions: Race Across the Curriculum
Race and Contracts
Race and Torts
Race and Taxation
Race and the Law
Race and Criminal Law
Race Law Curriculum
Race and Law School Climate
12:00 – 1:45 p.m.
AALS Luncheon
Holding the President Accountable: What the Obama Administration is Doing
2:00 – 3:15 p.m.
Plenary: Interventions: The Possibilities of Law
Law has played a significant role effectuating social change in American society. Certainly this is true with respect to racial progress. This is not to say that law standing alone has performed this work. Indeed, even one of the most important anti-racist legal moments in American history—Brown v. Board of Education, a case that is often described as revolutionary—cannot be understood outside of the broader social forces of civil unrest and activism that made the case possible. To put the point slightly differently, while a clear legal vision drove the Brown litigation, the realization of that vision required more than a good legal argument; it required a social movement. This observation raises a crucial question for contemporary racial inequalities: What clear legal visions do we need to address ongoing racial inequities—and, more importantly, what political conditions are necessary to realize those visions? This plenary will explore this question across a number of disparate doctrinal terrains. From antidiscrimination law to immigration law to human rights to housing and criminal justice reforms, the panelists will explore the possibilities and limitations of law—working alongside large and small scale political organizing—to effectuate progressive racial change.
Anti-Discrimination Law
Constitutional Law
Immigration Reform
Criminal Process Reform
Housing Reform and Urban Renewal
Entitlement Programs
Race & Democracy / Voting
Social Inclusion Programs
Human Rights
National Service (Military Service)
3:15 – 3:30 p.m.
Refreshment Break
3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Structured in the form of a roundtable, this plenary will press the panelists to engage some of the most difficult and controversial questions about the future of race, law and civil rights? Some of the questions will explicitly draw from, though they will not be exhausted by, the themes around which the preceding plenaries are organized. Is Obama’s presidency likely to be more symbolic than substantive? Are there progressive terms upon which assimilationist projects can be articulated? Should whiteness be more explicitly engaged in our public and political discourses about race? How we should we theorize the notion of a black/white binary? Has civil rights advocacy failed meaningfully to engage class? How, if at all, should arguments based on hierarchies of oppression figure in civil rights advocacy? To what extent should our racial engagements be more globally-centered? What is role of international law in domestic civil rights reform? These are some of the questions this plenary will take up.
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