University of Colorado Law Review

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE Introduction Many scholars have recognized broad connections between slavery and the contemporary criminal justice system.[1] For example, in different ways at different times, people of color have been subject to race-based criminalization, detention, or expulsion[2]—something that has never systematically been inflicted on White people in the United States.[3] There are repeated historical resonances to slavery with respect to specific enforcement techniques. Thus, the Fugitive Slave Acts blessed Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE Introduction It is not easy these days to talk about race in America,[1] especially in a diverse group across racial lines. This is because people tend to feel strongly about these controversial issues, and when they disagree, they end up calling each other bad names, and that upsets their stomachs; then, they cannot enjoy the good food and drink that often accompany such events. So many simply Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE PDF: Tom I. Romero, II,* The Color(blind) Conundrum in Colorado Property Law  I. Colorblindness “The Color Line Doesn’t Exist” in Colorado. – Isaac Jones, Baltimore Afro-American (1952)[1] I recently wrote an article detailing the long-time struggle of the Rocky Mountain West’s legal institutions to reconcile the region as both a utopia of racial promise and progress and one replete with countless examples of state-sanctioned racial violence and Jim-Crow-type Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE PDF: Robert Turner,* Roundtable: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre; The Quest for Accountability I am from Tuskegee, Alabama. In Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington started a school, now called the Tuskegee University, and was a leader of the Black community, whom he encouraged to help themselves. Washington later hired George Washington Carver, a famous inventor who discovered over three hundred inventions from peanuts, to teach at the school. Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE The social construction of race is fundamentally a story of power, in which those in positions of political, economic, and social authority create and recreate categories of difference and assign meaning and value on the basis of those categories to maintain and naturalize their own dominance.[1] Introduction This Article presents a reframing of the description and, therefore, the analysis of White on Black violence. It explores the Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE Introduction The night of May 31–June 1, 1921 was one of the most violent and hate-filled nights of racist violence on U.S. soil in the twentieth century. However, Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead attorney on the 2020 lawsuit Randle v. City of Tulsa,[1] often points out that the Tulsa Race Massacre (“Massacre”) began as a love story.[2] The love story was certainly not between Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE PDF: Christopher J. Mathis, JD, PhD,* Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Preliminary Analysis of States’ Reparations in Higher Education Professor Mathis gave an abbreviated version of this speech at the University of Colorado Law School’s 30th Annual Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Conference during the Institutional Complicity in U.S. Slavery; the Role of the Judiciary and Higher Education panel.[1] Included here are additions to his original Conference speech which Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE PDF: Lolita Buckner Inniss,* Foreword: Expanding The Boundaries of Knowledge About Slavery And Its Legacy I taught Property Law for over twenty years before becoming the Dean of the University of Colorado Law School in 2021. In those years I covered the legal, economic, and social aspects of property, both historic and modern, and along the way addressed property in many of its iterations and forms. In Continue reading →

CONTENT WARNING: Please read the Editor’s Note regarding the language used in Volume 94, Issue 2. READ HERE PDF: Suzette M. Malveaux,* Foreword: Looking Back to Move Forward: Exploring the Legacy of U.S. Slavery This year, the 30th Annual Ira C. Rothgerber Conference brought together scholars, lawyers, and community leaders from all over the country to discuss one of the most salient issues today—the legacy of U.S. slavery. Centuries of systemic racism and discrimination following the brutal chattel slavery of African Americans has resulted in Black Americans Continue reading →