Introduction: Assuming a Critical Lens in Legal Studies: Reconciling Laws and Reality

JurisdictionUnited States,Federal
Publication year2021
CitationVol. 37 No. 4

Introduction: Assuming a Critical Lens in Legal Studies: Reconciling Laws and Reality

Tanya Monique Washington Hicks
Georgia State University College of Law, twashington10@gsu.edu

Courtney Anderson
Georgia State University, canderson55@gsu.edu

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INTRODUCTION: ASSUMING A CRITICAL LENS IN LEGAL STUDIES: RECONCILING LAWS AND REALITY


Courtney Anderson* & Tanya Washington Hicks**


CONTENTS

Introduction..............................................................................1126

I. Voting Rights As Quintessential to Equal Access to and Participation in Democracy.....................................1128

II. Education Is an Engine for Socioeconomic Mobility .. 1130

III. The Racialized Criminal (In)Justice System Condemns Individuals and Communities...........................................1134

IV. Separate and Unequal Housing.......................................1136

Conclusion.................................................................................1138

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Introduction

Social justice and civil rights movements center on protecting and advancing the rights and interests of people across assumed and assigned identities, affinity groups, and socially constructed realities. They confront and demand reform and transformation of systems, structures, institutions, and laws that frustrate and foreclose social and racial justice. For the law to be relevant it must respond to shifting priorities and goals and to demands for change that emerge through and in response to these movements. The content and expression of law must be guided by inherent principles of equity, inclusion, and justice. Those currently in the legal profession and those preparing to enter it are engaging and learning the law during a syndemic, which is surfacing and intersecting with entrenched societal fissures and fault lines resulting from historic, pervasive, and continuing structural, systemic, and institutional inequality. The dynamic nature of the current reality shaped by a global pandemic, a racial reckoning, and unconscionable and unsustainable power, and resource inequities between people and communities urge us to reflect on the role of the law in creating, maintaining, and facilitating inequality. This moment also calls us to examine the responsibility of law to cure persisting inequality, to redress the injury it inflicts, and to curate a more equitable reality for all people.

Disparities produced by racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and poverty, which have been ignored for far too long, are now on full display. Embedded, supremacist structures and systems facilitate oppression and exclusion that marginalize people diminishing their quality of life, squander talent and human resources, weaken institutions, and compromise effective decision-making. These systems and structures operate effectively because they are often difficult to discern, but like gravity, their effect is ubiquitous.

This extraordinary moment challenges law students and legal professionals alike to acknowledge the persistent reality of systemic and structural inequality and to consider their role as power brokers

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entrusted with the authority and responsibility to address and change this reality, to ensure categorical protection of civil and human rights, and to promote justice for all. The selected Articles in this Symposium Issue of the Georgia State University Law Review and the Spring 2021 convening that introduced this special edition of the journal highlight proposed solutions to social and racial (in)justice across a continuum of contexts and by multifarious means. This timely publication calls the question on social and racial inequality and asks, "What Next?" This important question urges consideration of the capacity and responsibility of the law, and those who study and practice it, to identify and dismantle structures and systems designed to produce and protect an enduring legacy of inequality and to make manifest a system of laws that promote justice for all.

Problems resulting from complex, intersecting realities require complex, intersecting solutions. The siloed thinking of old yields solutions that cannot address the shape, depth, breadth, and content of social and racial inequality. Siloed solutions ignore overlapping, compounding, and oppressive realities experienced by Black, Brown, and poor people in the United States. These challenges call for new wine and new bottles. This brief introduction illustrates an intersectional approach to addressing pressing social and racial inequality in the areas of voter suppression, K-12 public schools, the U.S. criminal legal system, and housing insecurity. Inequality in these fundamental aspects of the lived experience condemn people and communities to realities marked by discrimination, limited prospects, disenfranchisement, violence by state and private actors, and racialized morbidity and mortality rates. It is in these same contexts that the law has great potential to dismantle racial and social inequality and to manifest social and racial justice and equity. By highlighting how these seemingly independent contexts intersect in ways that facilitate interlocking inequality, we hope to inspire intersectional solutions to foundational and entrenched obstacles to social and racial justice.

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I. Voting Rights As Quintessential to Equal Access to and Participation in Democracy

We begin with a discussion of voting rights because the franchise is a constituent aspect of democracy and because it is preservative of other legal rights and protections. Voter suppression efforts underway in Georgia and across the nation are the most efficient way to deprive people of elected representation and to exile them and their communities from access to quality K-12 educational opportunities, from access to criminal justice, and from access to government provided resources, services, and support.

More than 159 million votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election,1 which was the most voters to ever participate in a presidential election in u.S. history by more than 20 million voters.2 That this record-breaking exercise of democracy occurred in the midst of a deadly pandemic, during which many states were subject to quarantine orders, makes this achievement even more extraordinary.3 Rather than celebrate this democratic feat and embrace the laws, policies, and practices that made it possible, pervasive efforts are afoot to curtail voter turnout and to enact laws that strategically target low-income voters, younger voters, elderly voters, and voters of color.4

As of May 2021, 389 bills restricting voting access had been introduced in 48 states during the 2021 legislative session.5 Georgia's

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GOP-controlled legislature passed, and GOP-Governor Brian Kemp signed into law, a carefully crafted web of voter suppression strategies, including reduced weekend voting, limited mail-in voting eligibility, restricted availability of drop-boxes, additional voter ID requirements, establishment of an uber-Election Board empowered to takeover county election processes and challenge (and change) election results, and criminalizing the distribution of food and drink to voters waiting in the long lines that are a foreseeable consequence of this patchwork quilt of voting restrictions.6 This overhaul of Georgia's election laws is an example of a solution in search of a problem and is designed to reduce voter turnout and diminish the political power of Black, Brown, and poor voters to elect officials who will advance their interests in achieving greater social and racial equality. Enactments that Senator Raphael Warnock, the first black senator to represent Georgia, calls Jim Crow 2.0.7

The Herculean effort to suppress the vote, however, may not have the last word. In the midst of voter suppression tactics in Georgia as a response to election results that challenge the State's longstanding reputation as a red state, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For the People Act emerge as federal responses to the proliferation of state voter suppression laws.8 The John Lewis Voting Right Advancement Act (John Lewis Act) is appropriately named after an American hero whose life and legacy represent an unyielding commitment to protecting and enforcing the right to exercise the franchise. In the spirit of "good trouble," the John Lewis Act is animated by a desire to rectify past and present patterns of voter discrimination by restoring and augmenting the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were gutted by the U.S. Supreme

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Court's decision in Shelby County vs. Holder in 2013.9 Reinforcing the framework the John Lewis Act would provide, the For the People Act would respond to laws calibrated to suppress the voting rights of specific voter demographics, and it would automate and modernize voter registration and protect against discriminatory practices like voter roll purges that disenfranchised voters in Georgia's 2019 gubernatorial election.10 Both historic bills acknowledge and respond to the existential threat voter suppression laws pose to the right to vote and to the democracy that depends upon free and fair elections and robust and unfettered voter participation. The enactment of these voting rights laws would preserve and protect the power of people and communities to elect representative officials who can challenge and remediate systems and structures that enable and advance social and racial inequality.

II. Education Is an Engine for Socioeconomic Mobility

Intersecting with efforts at voter suppression are laws and policies that deny huge swaths of our population a quality education, thereby limiting their political, social, and economic prospects. The U.S. Supreme court has recognized the symbiotic relationship between education and democracy.11 In its unanimous, landmark desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of...

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