In an age of Black Lives Matter and videotaped police violence, traditional civil rights remedies are no longer adequate to address problems of inequality and discrimination. But is Big Data really the solution? It might be – at least partially, according to Richard Thompson Ford, George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Delivering this year’s Thurgood Marshall Memorial Lecture…, Brown v. Board of Education , is no longer enough. “My claim is not that there are no answers to these problems, far from it,” Ford said. “It’s that the answers are multivalent. Eliminating discrimination is only one part of the puzzle, and in many cases an increasingly small part of the puzzle. This is in part because discrimination – in the way we’ve defined it in our society – is very hard to prove, and in part because the…, Rethinking, Brown, While, Brown, was a cutting-edge solution to the discrimination problems of five decades ago, Ford said, it is insufficient to address many modern challenges – from police violence to employment discrimination to lingering segregation in schools and neighborhoods “Civil rights [remedies] were, in the conventional sense, astoundingly successful in fighting Jim Crow-style discrimination,” Ford explained. But in…, Brown, “we got a lot of policies designed to reproduce the effects of Jim Crow without making any explicit racial classification. We can’t find a racist? We can’t find explicit discrimination?” No remedy. That inadequacy is cast in high relief in recent police violence cases, for example, where efforts to prosecute fall short “because we’re looking for a specific individual to blame for the problem,…, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ). Meanwhile, liberal judges have diluted the power of, Brown, by allowing discrimination suits predicated on white men being excluded from Mother’s Day door prizes or Ladies’ Nights at bars. Such decisions suggest that “we can’t tell the difference between policies that are benign and malignant, between those that further entrench historical patterns and those that may even reverse them,” Ford said. “, I, suggest that not only, can, we, but we, must, make such value judgments.”, Different Approaches for Different Times, Ford said the institutional, societal and political nature of modern-day discrimination was strongly revealed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Federal response was sluggish and weak, and “the African-American community suffered the disproportionate brunt of the aftermath.” Yet the constructive possibilities of that moment, in many ways, got collapsed into Kanye West’s widely reported…, lots, of evidence,” he argued. “After all, in today’s environment there’s a common [conservative] discourse that liberals just play the race card against anyone with whom they disagree.” In fact, Katrina’s inequities resulted from “the continuing effects of past racism, and in particular economic segregation – the isolation of poor black communities in neighborhoods that were both more vulnerable to…, only, way, and probably shouldn’t even be the, central, way that we think about dealing with problems of social injustice. “ New approaches, he said, could include a regulatory system created with buy-in from law enforcement and other stakeholders rather than simply imposed from above. “We actually need the cooperation of the people that we’re regulating to understand the institutional and cultural forces that are creating these inequalities,” Ford…, Harvard Law Review, and the, Stanford Law Review, and has lectured on these topics internationally. He has published regularly in, Slate, and has written opinion pieces for the, San Jose Mercury News, and the, San Francisco Chronicle, . He is the author of several books, including, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, (2 008),, Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality, (2011), and, Universal Rights Down to Earth, (2011). He is currently working on a book about Grooming Codes. Thurgood Marshall Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the law firm of Hinckley Allen . The event was part of RWU’s year-long series, “ Talking About Race, Gender and Power. ”
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Most of the audience for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent appearance at Roger Williams University School of Law consisted of current law students. But one young woman sitting among them – in rapt attention and at close proximity to the famed U.S. Supreme Court Justice – wasn’t even out of high school yet. Ashley Rodriguez, a 16-year old junior at Classical High School in Providence, attended Justice…, and, she knows what it feels like to be an outsider. “One of the things I struggled the most with, when I first came to the United States, was fitting in – especially because I didn’t know the language,” she said. “I knew I had to face up to these challenges and really get myself involved.” Youth in Action seemed like a perfect place to start. According to its mission statement, the organization zooms…, everyone, ’s biking. And we want to understand why; why is that? Why don’t we feel safe? And how can we fix those issues?” One evening while attending a session at YIA’s Broad Street headquarters in Providence, Rodriguez met Verdi, and the two hit it off. “I got involved with Youth In Action in part to make sure that I remained involved in the community and to try and make a difference,” Verdi explained. “…, alma mater, and a lunch panel with current law students, followed by meeting a Superior Court judge and then a networking event with law school alums and members of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. “It was a really exciting, successful day,” Verdi said, “and Ashley was one of the youths who participated. She came up to me later and told me how much she loved it, and how she was thinking of law school because…
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