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The Scales of Reproductive Justice: Casey’s Failure to Rebalance Liberty Interests in the Racially Disparate State of Maternal Medicine
Despite the maternal medicine crisis in the U.S., especially for Black women, legislatures are challenging constitutional abortion doctrine and forcing women to interact with a system that may cost them their lives. This Article proposes that because of abysmal maternal mortality rates and the arbitrary nature of most abortion restrictions, the right to choose an abortion is embedded in our Fourteenth Amendment right to not be arbitrarily deprived of life by the State. This Article is a call to abortion advocates to begin submitting state maternal mortality data when challenging abortion restrictions. The call for attention to life was central to the holding in Roe v. Wade and is central to rebalancing the scales of reproductive justice.In Fear of Black Revolutionary Contagion and Insurrection: Foucault, Galtung, and the Genesis of Racialized Structural Violence in American Foreign Policy and Immigration Law
This article investigates the power relation between the political anatomy of the Black soul and non-somatic expressions of white supremacy-based violence. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and punishment in conjunction with Johan Galtung’s theory of structural violence, I posit that the exercise of state-sanctioned discipline and punishment in furtherance of white supremacy constitutes racialized structural violence. Thus, this article contributes to the current public discourse concerning the role white supremacy plays in America by establishing a new construct that can be used to dissect the nature of racial oppression. Furthermore, this article analyzes the genesis and construction of racialized structural violence in American foreign policy and immigration law using America’s response to the Haitian Revolution as a case study. When combined, akin to discipline, American foreign policy and immigration law is a white supremacy-oriented, complex bundle of power technologies designed to evoke docility from Black and Brown nations. Both allow America to engage in dissociative white supremacy. Over time, America’s “right” and power to discipline and punish Black and Brown nations has been normalized as a rational function of our global society.Lawyers as Social Engineers: How Lawyers Should Use Their Social Capital to Achieve Economic Justice
The Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review (MBELR) has always strived to provide a platform for legal scholars, professionals, and students to publish business-related legal scholarship. Yet, little legal business scholarship focusing on the Black business community exists, despite the extraordinary impact that Black communities have in the U.S. business landscape. In a year of revolutionary social change, we are excited to feature in this special issue the work of Professor Dana Thompson, a Michigan Law alumna, in an effort to remedy this gap. Professor Thompson’s career, professional values, and day-to-day work demonstrate genuine, commanding, and inspiring commitment to social justice and community-based organizations.Looking Toward Restorative Justice for Redlined Communities Displaced by Eco-Gentrification
MJEAL chose to publish Helen Kang’s piece, Looking Toward Restorative Justice for Redlined Communities Displaced by Eco-Gentrification, because it offers a unique analytic approach for analyzing the roots of environmental racism and the appropriate tools to help rectify it. She offers an argument for why restorative justice needs to be the framework and explains how we can accomplish this in the context of a whole government solution. MJEAL is excited to offer what will be an influential approach for environmental restorative justice to the broader activist and academic community.Excerpt of Law and Anti-Blackness
Professor Michele Goodwin’s essay here (and the article from which it came, to be published in full in our Winter issue) explicitly identifies the development of American law as a project of cementing racial caste. This piece is a call for conversation and asks us all to consider: “How has the failure to acknowledge and address the carnage and prurience of America’s racial origin story impacted life today?” For 26 volumes, we have attempted to answer that question. In publishing this story in this issue, we are excited to be joined by our peers in that effort.No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico and Constitutional Obligation
The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.A Fare Share: A Proposed Solution to Address the Racial Disparity in Access to Public Transportation Funding in America
Black American households are up to six times less likely to own a car than white families and are four times more likely to rely on public transportation to meet their daily needs. Despite this, communities of color have seen consistent disinvestment in their transit infrastructure. Four hundred years of continued housing segregation combined with post-recession austerity policies and ongoing pro-automobile bias has exacerbated this disparity. This Note proposes a straightforward legislative tool to begin to combat this inequity. The proposed legislation would require that urbanized areas spend their public transit dollars according to the population density of the communities a given project would serve, create reporting requirements related to the racial and economic impact of transit projects, and establish a private right of action. In proposing this legislation, this Note evaluates the state of civil rights litigation as it pertains to transportation racism and draws lessons from other areas such as environmental law in order to put forth a simple solution that would have tangible effects across the country in both the short and long term.Origin Stories: Critical Race Theory Encounters the War on Terror
Stories matter. They matter to those intent on maintaining structures of power and privilege, and to those being crushed by those structures. In the United States, the space to tell, and to hear, our stories has been expanding. This means that the histories and lived realities of those who have been excluded, particularly people of color, are seeping into mainstream discourse, into the books our children read, the movies and television shows they watch, and the many websites comprising social media. Critical race theory has played a role in this expansion. It insists that we recognize the legitimacy of the stories of those deemed “Other” because they have been erased or distorted beyond recognition in the dominant narrative. 3 Critical race theory has helped ensure that the legacies of genocide and broken treaties, of the cruelties imposed upon enslaved persons, of the forced inclusion and exclusion of those regarded simply as disposable labor, have worked their way into the realm of what can be talked about. Critical race scholars have exposed immigration injustices and called out xenophobia and Islamophobia. All this discomfits those who benefit, or believe they benefit, from the status quo.Medical Violence, Obstetric Racism, and the Limits of Informed Consent for Black Women
This Essay critically examines how medicine actively engages in the reproductive subordination of Black women. In obstetrics, particularly, Black women must contend with both gender and race subordination. Early American gynecology treated Black women as expendable clinical material for its institutional needs. This medical violence was animated by biological racism and the legal and economic exigencies of the antebellum era. Medical racism continues to animate Black women’s navigation of and their dehumanization within obstetrics. Today, the racial disparities in cesarean sections illustrate that Black women are simultaneously overmedicalized and medically neglected—an extension of historical medical practices rooted in the logic of biological race. Though the principle of informed consent traditionally protects the rights of autonomy, bodily integrity, and well-being, medicine nevertheless routinely subjects Black women to medically unnecessary procedures. This Essay adopts the framework of obstetric racism to analyze Black women’s overmedicalization as a site of reproductive subordination. It thus offers a critical interdisciplinary and intersectional lens to broader conversations on race in reproduction and maternal health.U.S. Race Relations and Foreign Policy
It is easy for Americans to think that the world’s most egregious human rights abuses happen in other countries. In reality, our history is plagued by injustices, and our present reality is still stained by racism and inequality. While the Michigan Journal of International Law usually publishes only pieces with a global focus, we felt it prudent in these critically important times not to shy away from the problems facing our own country. We must understand our own history before we can strive to form a better union, whether the union be the United States or the United Nations. Ambassador Susan Page is an American diplomat who has faced human rights crises both at home and abroad. We found her following call to action inspiring. We hope you do too.
