Social Justice

“LSC plays a critical role in preserving our nation’s promise of equal justice under law and the effective functioning of our adversary system of justice.”   Please read and share widely SALT’s Statement in Support of Legal Services Corporation, which is set out below and available here.

By Hugh Mundy, Associate Professor, The John Marshall Law School During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump relied on vague “tough on crime” rhetoric over policy specifics. Trump’s post-election selection of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, though, lends credence to his campaign trail exhortations. As the United States Attorney for the Southern…

On January 13, 2017, the United States Department of Justice released a report of its months-long investigation into allegations of officer misconduct, racially discriminatory policing, and accountability gaps within the Chicago Police Department. The report concluded that CPD officers routinely use unreasonable force against suspects due in part to the…

SALT Statement on Human Rights Day December 10, 2016 The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), a community of progressive law teachers working for justice, diversity, and academic excellence, is committed to respect for the rule of law, to an inclusive society, and to social justice. SALT’s current human…

On October 20, 2016, SALT joined the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality (Korematsu Center), 18 other bar associations and non-profit organizations, and 32 law school professors in filing an amicus brief with the New York Court of Appeals, urging the Court to recognize that excluding an individual…

Daly Quigley letter to American Law Professors (1) To: Law Professors Interested in International Social Justice From: Erin Daly, Widener University Delaware Law School, Bill Quigley, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Dear Colleagues: We write to invite you to participate in an exciting experience — to share…

In this holy day season of Light, Hope, and “good will toward all humanity,” we join together to trumpet our support for the proposal put forth by Professor Doug Colbert’s University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law students in their op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun (“Unwarranted Warrants…

SALT was proud to be one of the sponsors supporting Law For Black Lives, a national gathering of lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers committed to building a world where #BlackLivesMatter. The Law For Black Lives program conference was held July 31- Aug. 1 in Harlem. It united…

By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.  On August 7, it bent a little more that way with the monumental passage of the American Psychological Association Resolution banning…

By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law This week the American Psychological Association (APA) is holding its annual meeting in turmoil resulting from the scathing independent review – the Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture or the…

By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law With Charleston funerals and the Supreme Court same-sex marriage decision occurring today, there are many emotions in the air.  I think of my childhood friend, Reggie Eley.  He was my first best friend – running through…

RBG Jan. 3 2014 letter to SALT June 26, 2015 —On the occasion of its 40th Anniversary celebration and annual awards in 2014, United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent greetings to the Society of American Law Teachers and reflected on her role in founding the organization…

June 26, 2015 — The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) hails the United States Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges today.   Since 1974, SALT has advocated for justice, diversity and human rights in legal education and beyond.  In the 1990s, SALT worked against the military’s 1996 ban…

By George Critchlow A Hispanic student raised in poverty in central California will be the first person in her immigrant family to graduate from college.  Her goal is to work with people of limited means on issues affecting families, communities, and employment.  She would like to be a lawyer…

We are a group of Latino/a Law Professors who wish to address some of the fallacies of the  David Bernstein ScotusBlog Commentary of June 25, 2013, “Hispanics and affirmative action in state universities after Fisher.”   While this complex issue cannot be fully addressed in a short letter, we believe that…

by Marjorie Cohn Although whistleblower Bradley Manning pled guilty to 10 offenses that will garner him 20 years in custody, military prosecutors are pursuing further charges – aiding the enemy and violation of the Espionage Act – that carry life in prison. The court-martial of Bradley Manning, the most…

Written by Hazel Weiser Here’s where I disagree with Professor Tamanaha.  It’s not that SALT has been silent or callous about the rise of student debt.  As Dean Van Cleave so passionately stated in her recent blog, to solve the economic problem the profession faces, we have to answer…

By Lisa R. Pruitt One of the most e-mailed items in the New York Times for the past day or so has been Claire Vaye Watkins “The Ivy League Was Another Planet.” (The alternative headline is “Elite Colleges Are As Foreign as Mars.”) In her op-ed, Watkins recounts her journey from nonmetropolitan Pahrump, Nevada to college at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her story is that of a kid from a working class family in “rural” Nevada (her description; technically, Pahrump is not rural because, though unincorporated, its 2010 population is more than 35,000) who didn’t know about colleges or how to pick one.  Lucky for her, Watkins went on to get an MFA from Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of English at Bucknell. Watkins writes of getting her wake-up call about dramatic variations in educational resources when she was a high school senior, vying for a prestigious state-funded scholarship. That’s when she met a peer from a Las Vegas high school who attended a magnet school, took college prep courses, had a tutor, and had spent time abroad.  The variations in resources, she realized, were based on geography:  he was an urban kid and she was a rural one.  But they were also based on class.  She doesn’t specify the background of the Vegas teen, but she mentions that her mother and step-father had not gone to college.  I note that Pahrump’s poverty rate is a fairly steep 21.1%.  Just 10.1% of residents there have a bachelor’s degree or better, compared to about 30% nationwide. Even after meeting the privileged teen from Vegas, however, Watkins didn’t know what she didn’t know.  She remained ignorant of the world of elite colleges, a sector that represented the “other planet” or “Mars” of the headline.  Instead, Watkins applied to UN Reno, she explains, because she had once taken a Greyhound bus to visit friends there. As Watkins expresses it, when poor rural kids apply to college (which, I might add, is altogether too rare), they typically apply to those institutions to which they have been “incidentally exposed.”

This year's ClassCrits meeting will be at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, November 15-16.  The deadline for abstracts and panel proposals is fast approaching:  March 20, 2013. The call follows, and you can get more details here.  Send proposals to classcrits@gmail.com. The theme of this year’s workshop--the sixth meeting of ClassCrits--is debt, austerity and the possibilities of the political. The economic crisis of 2008 was a referendum on the failures of deregulation and neoliberal ideology all over the world. Far from being a sophisticated mechanism to absorb and diffuse systemic economic risk, the crisis exposed a fragile global financial system characterized by dysfunctional imbalances of increasingly precarious and largely unregulated risk societies. In the United States, the social contract of class mobility and the “American Dream” financed with “easy” credit was exposed as an empty promise. In the European context, the sovereign debt crisis resulted in the imposition of draconian austerity measures in several nation-states, like Greece, undermining social safety nets and wage structures, rupturing traditional alliances, and driving down individual standards of living. At the same time, the Occupy Movement—and similar movements across the globe—refocused attention on socio-economic inequality for the first time in decades. The old ways of seeing things proved inadequate for framing the changing realities of the new post-recession world. But whatever the initial shock to the social order, political and financial elites everywhere have since doubled down on the failed neoliberal project with a mania for balancing budgets in the name of discredited austerity policies which have only accelerated neoliberalism’s upward transfer and concentration of wealth and intensified the class stratification in contemporary global societies. Stuck in the grip of austerity groupthink and faced with nation states captured by elite interests─a trend only made worse in the United States by Citizens United─any movement forward will require creatively leveraging national political and legal systems as instruments for progressive economic change and deleveraging social class divides.

Written by Joel A. Mintz Although protection of the environment and natural resources received scant attention in the 2012 presidential contest, the positions taken by the candidates on those significant issues presented some sharp contrasts. They also carry significant implications for us in 2013 and beyond. Governor Mitt Romney’s views were in sync with the stridently anti-regulatory and anti-environmental stance of the right wing of his party. Romney adopted a head-in-the-sand posture regarding climate change, ignoring clear scientific evidence and denying that climate change has been definitively linked to human activities. His proposed energy policies clearly favored the development of high-polluting energy sources—such as coal and oil—with only occasional, brief references to renewable energy alternatives. Notwithstanding the fact that they were ultimately endorsed by thirteen major automakers (including Chrysler, Ford and GM), Governor Romney referred to the Obama administrations fuel efficiency standards as “extreme,” and he opposed them vigorously. Romney, with his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan, favored drastic cuts in the budget of EPA, an agency which currently constitutes less than one tenth of one percent of the federal budget. If realized, those cuts would have thwarted EPA’s ability to protect drinking water and to limit the discharge of toxic chemicals that threaten the health of Americans. Romney also advocated opening vast tracts of environmentally sensitive lands to mineral extraction, and he endorsed a plan to sell off 3.3 million acres of National Parks and other public lands. On the other hand, the environmental views and record of President Barack Obama, during his first term in office, presented a decidedly mixed picture. On the pro-environmental side of the ledger, the president openly recognized the serious threats posed by global climate change. His views were in sync with those of the more than 97% of scientists with relevant expertise who accept the soundness of the idea that human emissions of greenhouse gases disrupt the world’s climate. The president endorsed climate change legislation that would curb the emission of those pollutants in the United States, and he urged other nations to take similar steps.