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One Paragraph 1

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1.) Describe one concept you have learned or reflected on in this course that you will want to continue to read and discuss in the future.

2.) After reading and engaging critical scholarship on the relationships of structural inequality and sociolegal institutions and practices, how do you imagine social justice? What would a just society be? (reading file attached)

Add these definitions in your own words on what they mean in law and society:

Colonial and Settler colonial Law

Indigenous land –

Decolonization –

Jurisdiction –

Sovereignty –

University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. CHAPTER SEVEN Law and Social Justice: Plus Ça Change . . . In the small town where I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, race relations in the 1950s were not much di=erent from what they’d been after the Civil War almost a century earlier. The public schools were so segregated and the “colored” schools so geographically and socially isolated that white children like me were only dimly aware they existed. On Saturday afternoons, the town’s one movie theater brought together the rambunctious children of white farmers, watermen, wealthy transplants from Washington and New York, landed gentry, and local professionals, for a weekly dose of cowboys and Indians; black children who could a=ord the twenty-?ve-cent ticket entered through the side door and sat in the cramped balcony. There were two black residential neighborhoods, one in town behind the jail / courthouse complex, where neat clapboard houses were interspersed with corner stores that served the sequestered population; the other was in a small rural settlement just outside town where servants for the area’s sprawling estates lived, mostly in one- or tworoom shanties with outhouses and no running water. In those few public places shared by blacks and whites—like the town’s one-room bus depot—restrooms and drinking fountains were designated for “Whites only” and “Coloreds.” This was not even the Deep South, but the iconic symbols of apartheid were everywhere. Then, in 1954 and 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and that school districts had to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The decision seemed poised to undo not just the segregation of schools but the whole racist system in place for centuries in my hometown and across the country. Law professor and Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell (2004, 3) recalls that the decision was “the equivalent of the Holy Grail of racial justice.” Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to Law and Society : An Introduction to the Study of Real Law, University of Chicago Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/johnjay-ebooks/detail.action?docID=534575. Created from johnjay-ebooks on 2020-11-16 13:08:38. Copyright © 2010. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. Newspaper editorials praised it as a salve on the wound of racism that would prove to be “profoundly healthy and healing” (Washington Post and Times Herald 1954). The Chicago Defender (1954) declared, “This means the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life and the . . . segregation which supported it.” To underscore the continuing symbolic power of Brown v. Board, Bell (2004, 1) tells a story of his participation at a Yale University graduation ceremony in 2002. Former civil rights attorney and federal district court judge Robert L. Carter was being celebrated with an honorary degree. His impressive achievements were read aloud to polite applause, but when his participation in Brown v. Board was announced, Bell reports that the audience spontaneously “leaped to its feet” in a boisterous standing ovation. But the Brown decision became “a magni?cent mirage” (Bell 2004, 4). “All deliberate speed” turned out to mean deliberately slow. A decade after the decision, 98 percent of black children in most southern states were still enrolled in segregated schools. Delaying tactics and phony integration schemes were ?nally prohibited with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That same year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black declared in a landmark decision that when it came to school desegregation, deliberate speed was no longer su