Etienne Toussaint
Etienne C. Toussaint is an award-winning law professor and founder of the "Becoming Full" newsletter.
As a tenured private law scholar, he studies the historical development of poverty, food insecurity, and environmental injustice in the U.S. political economy. Drawing on critical legal theory, his scholarship examines the relationship among race, culture, and modern social movements as they confront private law’s ordering of the U.S. economy. He teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, and Critical Legal History, among other courses.
Nationally recognized for his teaching, scholarship, and service, Professor Toussaint received the National Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Award in 2024. In 2023, he was named a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. His numerous honors include the Junior Great Teacher Award from SALT (2022) and the Stegner Center Young Scholar Award (2021). His work has been featured at top academic conferences, including the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and his scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Harvard Environmental Law Review.
Before pursuing a career in legal academia, he worked as a project finance associate with the international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP. Additionally, he served as a Law & Policy Fellow with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C., focusing on fair housing law and policy.
Professor Toussaint holds degrees from MIT (B.S., Mechanical Engineering), Johns Hopkins University (M.S.E., Environmental Engineering), Harvard Law School (J.D.), where he was an editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and The George Washington University Law School, where he earned an LL.M. in Advocacy as a Friedman Fellow.
Passionate about academic career growth and personal fulfillment, Toussaint launched the "Becoming Full" newsletter in 2024 to help scholars and professionals—especially those on the tenure track—navigate the complexities of legal academia while achieving balance in their personal lives. The newsletter provides insights on academic success, work-life balance, and personal growth, offering candid advice and resources to those aiming to thrive in their careers and beyond.
Join the free newsletter here: https://becomingfull.substack.com/
Born in the South Bronx, Professor Toussaint is married to Dr. Ebony A. Toussaint, Ph.D., and is the proud father of their three sons.
As a tenured private law scholar, he studies the historical development of poverty, food insecurity, and environmental injustice in the U.S. political economy. Drawing on critical legal theory, his scholarship examines the relationship among race, culture, and modern social movements as they confront private law’s ordering of the U.S. economy. He teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, and Critical Legal History, among other courses.
Nationally recognized for his teaching, scholarship, and service, Professor Toussaint received the National Bar Association’s 40 Under 40 Award in 2024. In 2023, he was named a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. His numerous honors include the Junior Great Teacher Award from SALT (2022) and the Stegner Center Young Scholar Award (2021). His work has been featured at top academic conferences, including the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and his scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Harvard Environmental Law Review.
Before pursuing a career in legal academia, he worked as a project finance associate with the international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP. Additionally, he served as a Law & Policy Fellow with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C., focusing on fair housing law and policy.
Professor Toussaint holds degrees from MIT (B.S., Mechanical Engineering), Johns Hopkins University (M.S.E., Environmental Engineering), Harvard Law School (J.D.), where he was an editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review, and The George Washington University Law School, where he earned an LL.M. in Advocacy as a Friedman Fellow.
Passionate about academic career growth and personal fulfillment, Toussaint launched the "Becoming Full" newsletter in 2024 to help scholars and professionals—especially those on the tenure track—navigate the complexities of legal academia while achieving balance in their personal lives. The newsletter provides insights on academic success, work-life balance, and personal growth, offering candid advice and resources to those aiming to thrive in their careers and beyond.
Join the free newsletter here: https://becomingfull.substack.com/
Born in the South Bronx, Professor Toussaint is married to Dr. Ebony A. Toussaint, Ph.D., and is the proud father of their three sons.
less
Uploads
Journal Articles by Etienne Toussaint
First, this Essay advances an Afrofuturist legal critique of the modern workplace that challenges the form and function of business enterprises in advanced capitalist markets. Three themes of Afrofuturist literature ground this critique: (1) Afrofuturism calls for the disruption of elitist, identity- based hierarchies that undermine human dignity; (2) Afrofuturism urges the reformation of legal systems that foster alienation in political and economic society; and (3) Afrofuturism demands the abolition of hegemonic framings of the human condition that naturalize involuntary human sacrifice (both literal and figurative) in everyday life. Second, this Essay articulates an Afrofuturist legal praxis that emphasizes the dialogical, constitutive, and legitimating nature of law. Afrofuturism’s legal critique of the modern workplace suggests that business enterprises cannot simultaneously manage competing stakeholder interests and uphold worker dignity without reckoning with the alienation and human sacrifice that are endemic to capitalist economies.
To defeat this impasse, this Article advocates an abolition constitutionalist framing of food insecurity in the United States. Specifcally, it argues that framing the problem of food insecurity in historically marginalized communities as a badge of the antebellum system of chattel slavery invokes the legislative potential of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Enforcement Clause. Although the Supreme Court has empowered Congress to pass laws necessary for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery, there remains a lack of clarity on the scope of material conditions or forms of discrimination that constitute such lingering harms, leading some lower courts to limit the Amendment’s enforcement to literal slavery or involuntary servitude. Accordingly, this Article proposes a dignity-based normative framework to assess the nature of injuries or material conditions that are proximately traceable to the political economic system of American slavery. Using the problem of food insecurity as a guiding explanatory thread, this framework reveals how modern badges of slavery can infict: (i) equality-based; (ii) liberty-based; and (iii) integrity-based dignitary harms. These dignitary harms, individually and collectively, can perpetuate the types of oppression levied by chattel slavery; in this instance, the exploitative, marginalizing, and violent harms of food oppression. Whether modern-day food oppression is animated by state action (or inaction) or by private actors, it not only hinders public health and degrades democracy, but most importantly, it also violates the spirit and letter of the Thirteenth Amendment.
This Article argues that the anti-racist, democratic, and movement lawyering principles advocated by progressive legal scholars should not be viewed merely as aspirational ideals for social justice law courses. Rather, querying whether legal systems and political institutions further racism, economic oppression, or social injustice must be viewed as endemic to the fundamental purpose of legal education. In so doing, this Article makes three important contributions to the literature on legal education and philosophical legal ethics. First, it clarifies how two ideologies—functionalism and neoliberalism—have threatened to drift law school’s historic public purpose away from the democratic norms of public citizenship, inflicting law students, law faculty, and the legal academy with an existential identity crisis. Second, it explores historical mechanisms of institutional change within law schools that reveal diverse notions of law school’s purpose as historically contingent. Such perspectives are shaped by the behaviors, cultural attitudes, and ideological beliefs of law faculty operating within particular social, political, and economic contexts. Third, and finally, it demonstrates the urgency of moving beyond liberal legalism in legal education by integrating critical legal theories and movement law principles throughout the entire law school curriculum.
upon lawyers, as public citizens, to embrace a special responsibility for the quality of justice in the legal profession and in society. Yet, some law professors have historically adopted a formalistic and doctrinally neutral approach to law teaching that elides critical perspectives of law, avoids the intersection of law and politics, and tends to overlook the way law can construct the very social injustices that it seeks to contain. The objective, apolitical, and so-called “colorblind” jurisprudential stance in many law classrooms inflicts intellectual violence upon law students who discover a legal doctrine in conflict with their own lived experiences, yet who feel silenced and unprepared to reckon with the moral legitimacy of unjust laws. Perhaps as a result, in recent years, law schools have begun to
rethink legal education altogether, devising anti-racist curricula, professional identity trainings, and novel experiential learning programs to produce a new generation of critically conscious lawyers for the crises of our modern age.
Building upon such efforts, alongside recent scholarship in legal education and philosophical legal ethics, this Essay proposes foundational pedagogical principles to teach public citizenship lawyering. This Essay defines public citizenship lawyering as a democratic conception of professional responsibility whereby lawyers engage in routine critique of their lawyering practice through the lens of justice as a moral virtue. This pedagogy finds normative grounding in the ABA Model Rules based upon the contention that a skewed vision of professional lawyering identity has hindered a justice-oriented interpretation of the lawyer’s public citizen charge. Specifically, this Essay articulates four pedagogical principles: (1) deconstructive framing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of candor; (2) ethical reposturing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of competence and professional judgment; (3) reconstructive ordering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to improve the law; and (4) liberatory lawyering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to assist the client and others in gaining competence. Collectively, these principles assert
a counter-cultural vision of practice readiness that empowers law students to affirmatively challenge social and economic injustice in the legal profession and the rule of law. More than exalting a democratic conception of professional lawyering identity, these principles affirm the legal academy as law’s laboratory for progressive social change.
This Article uses the origin story of hip-hop music to advance this thesis, making three claims about law and culture. First, it argues that cultural theories of poverty and crime (embedded with racial stereotypes and cultural biases) shaped the political response to the growth of Black urban ghettos in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, via a textual analysis of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s 1982 hip-hop song The Message, this Article contends that early hip-hop cultural views of democratic life were in rivalry with the dominant cultural discourse of conservative politicians and leading public intellectuals. Third, this Article breaks new ground by conceptualizing the socioeconomic inequities that plague Black urban ghettos as “tragedies of the cultural commons.” Building upon Garrett Hardin’s famous Tragedy of the Commons allegory, this framing employs the concept of the commons to illuminate how racism can mold the symbiotic relationship between law and democratic culture.
Taken together, this Article’s critical legal history of the rise of early hip-hop culture suggests that if law is in fact both constitutive of and constituted by dominant cultural views, then in the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life have historically labored under the hegemonic rivalry of a White supremacist vision of law and order. Further, hip-hop culture emerges as a counter-cultural vision of democratic life—an example of what Sheila R. Foster calls “urban collective action” or what Lisa T. Alexander calls “cultural collective efficacy.” If racial injustice in America is indeed the byproduct of law’s flawed empire, then perhaps reforming law’s empire demands a reconstruction of the democratic cultural commons.
This Article argues that resolving the fragility of American democracy amidst the terrors of COVID-19 warrants a renewed commitment to the emancipatory language of human rights. This assertion rests on three claims, using the challenges of housing insecurity as a guiding explanatory thread. First, the geography of health inequity in Black communities across the United States embodies not merely governmental neglect, but more poignantly, the rituals of white supremacy that create and reconstitute the racial social order. As a result, beyond coordinated public health measures and short-term economic stimulus plans to address human vulnerability, the future of American democracy demands new tools to confront racial ritualization in everyday life. Second, human rights discourse challenges the normative underpinnings of contemporary public policy, which are shaped by liberal assumptions about the human condition that enshrine structural inequality and propagate economic power. Third, human rights discourse expands the social imagination, fostering innovation in lawmaking by deconstructing antiquated valuations of equality and reconstructing contextualized notions of liberty. Taken together, these insights reveal human rights discourse as a project of reimagining legal subjectivity and state responsibility.
To further elucidate the benefits of human rights discourse in view of compelling arguments to move beyond rights-based framings of equality and discrimination, this Article places Martha Fineman’s theory of vulnerability in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s articulation of the Black American experience during Jim Crow segregation in his novel, Invisible Man. This dialogue reveals the erasure of “sacrifice” from ongoing discussions of social and economic inequality. As this Article argues, sacrifice is a critical dimension of democratic citizenship that has been rendered invisible in contemporary rights-based discourse and emergent strategies for poverty alleviation. Drawing insights from the Movement for Black Lives and contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this dialogue clarifies the central role of “dignity” in establishing the preconditions for an engaged citizenry in the context of American racial capitalism.
In response, much in the way Cheryl Harris revealed Whiteness as Property, this Essay suggests and defends Black identity itself, or Blackness – whether articulated by the pure speech of racial justice activists who affirm Black humanity, or embodied by the symbolic speech of Black bodies assembled in collective dissent in the public square – as “fighting words” in the consciousness of America, a type of public speech unprotected by the Constitution. The very utterance of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” tends to incite imminent violence and unbridled rage from police in city streets across America. Discussions of “Black Lives Matter” by pundits conjure images of subversion, disorder, and looting, the racialized narratives of social unrest commonly portrayed by the media. Yet, the words “Black Lives Matter” and the peaceful assembly of Black protestors also encapsulate the fire of righteous indignation burning in the hearts of minoritized citizens. This dynamic reflects unresolved tensions in the First Amendment’s treatment of race relations in America. Even more, it exposes the role of policing in smothering the Constitutional rights of Black and Brown citizens.
This Essay provides three contributions to the ongoing discourse on policing in the United States. First, it reveals how unresolved racial tensions in the First Amendment – focusing specifically on ambiguities in the fighting words doctrine – perpetuate the racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of American policing. Second, it analyzes how such unresolved racial tensions cast a dark shadow over the liberty of Black and Brown citizens who experience racism at the hands of police officers, yet avoid acts of protest for fear of bodily harm or arrest. Third, it illuminates the embeddedness of racism in American policing culture, more generally; a culture that not only constructs and reconstitutes the racial social order, but also degrades the dignity of Black and Brown citizens. Collectively, these insights lend support toward demands for police abolition from BLM activists. As this Essay concludes, until we as a nation wrestle with the unresolved racial subtext of modern policing – a racist culture woven into law that not only silences the legitimate protests of minoritized citizens in violation of their First Amendment rights, but also rationalizes callous violence at the hands of law enforcement – Black America will remain a peril to the veil of white supremacy that looms over the American constitutional order.
investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding from private impact investors to finance social welfare programs within marginalized communities. SIBs seemingly answer the call of local government law scholars of the New Regionalists movement who advocate for governmental mechanisms that facilitate regional cooperation, address equity concerns, and respect local government autonomy. However, this Article argues that the SIB model of impact investing will struggle to advance metropolitan equity due to its grounding in the politics of neoliberalism.
After highlighting limitations of the SIB, this Article links contemporary debates about CED theory to historical contestations within the black community about economically-oriented racial uplift strategies. Placing historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, in conversation with more contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this Article offers an alternative conceptual framework of CED. Termed justice-based CED, this framing distinguishes a typology of social change that places democracy at the epicenter of the development debate and points toward the political principles of the solidarity economy as guideposts for law reform. The justice-based approach rests upon three core values: social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy. Taken together, this perspective reflects a vision of political morality that embodies one of America’s most foundational democratic values—human moral dignity.
This Article sets forth a critical examination of the new SIB model, highlighting some of the opportunities for the social finance tool to promote social impact, while also revealing several of its challenges that may hinder its broader adoption in communities across America. In the process, this Article exposes key flaws inherent in the design of the SIB model, including its neoliberal emphasis on market-based economic development strategies and its disregard for the primary role of government in the protection and advancement of the public good. It concludes by calling for a more progressive economic development framework to guide the implementation of the SIB model, one that can help development practitioners, philanthropists, and impact investors wrestle with the deficiencies of our global capitalist economic system and overcome the entrenched systemic barriers to economic justice in America.
This Article was drafted as part of a symposium — Lessons from Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Working with Community-Based Organizations to Build Capacity and Fight for Economic Justice — held at the Association of American Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education, April 30–May 3, 2016, in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference theme, “Clinics and Communities: Exploring Community Engagement Through Clinical Education,” was a platform for examining “the role of law and lawyers in aggravating or alleviating suffering, and in collaborating on legal efforts to build communities’ strengths and address harms experienced by those who seek their assistance.”
Reports by Etienne Toussaint
First, this Essay advances an Afrofuturist legal critique of the modern workplace that challenges the form and function of business enterprises in advanced capitalist markets. Three themes of Afrofuturist literature ground this critique: (1) Afrofuturism calls for the disruption of elitist, identity- based hierarchies that undermine human dignity; (2) Afrofuturism urges the reformation of legal systems that foster alienation in political and economic society; and (3) Afrofuturism demands the abolition of hegemonic framings of the human condition that naturalize involuntary human sacrifice (both literal and figurative) in everyday life. Second, this Essay articulates an Afrofuturist legal praxis that emphasizes the dialogical, constitutive, and legitimating nature of law. Afrofuturism’s legal critique of the modern workplace suggests that business enterprises cannot simultaneously manage competing stakeholder interests and uphold worker dignity without reckoning with the alienation and human sacrifice that are endemic to capitalist economies.
To defeat this impasse, this Article advocates an abolition constitutionalist framing of food insecurity in the United States. Specifcally, it argues that framing the problem of food insecurity in historically marginalized communities as a badge of the antebellum system of chattel slavery invokes the legislative potential of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Enforcement Clause. Although the Supreme Court has empowered Congress to pass laws necessary for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery, there remains a lack of clarity on the scope of material conditions or forms of discrimination that constitute such lingering harms, leading some lower courts to limit the Amendment’s enforcement to literal slavery or involuntary servitude. Accordingly, this Article proposes a dignity-based normative framework to assess the nature of injuries or material conditions that are proximately traceable to the political economic system of American slavery. Using the problem of food insecurity as a guiding explanatory thread, this framework reveals how modern badges of slavery can infict: (i) equality-based; (ii) liberty-based; and (iii) integrity-based dignitary harms. These dignitary harms, individually and collectively, can perpetuate the types of oppression levied by chattel slavery; in this instance, the exploitative, marginalizing, and violent harms of food oppression. Whether modern-day food oppression is animated by state action (or inaction) or by private actors, it not only hinders public health and degrades democracy, but most importantly, it also violates the spirit and letter of the Thirteenth Amendment.
This Article argues that the anti-racist, democratic, and movement lawyering principles advocated by progressive legal scholars should not be viewed merely as aspirational ideals for social justice law courses. Rather, querying whether legal systems and political institutions further racism, economic oppression, or social injustice must be viewed as endemic to the fundamental purpose of legal education. In so doing, this Article makes three important contributions to the literature on legal education and philosophical legal ethics. First, it clarifies how two ideologies—functionalism and neoliberalism—have threatened to drift law school’s historic public purpose away from the democratic norms of public citizenship, inflicting law students, law faculty, and the legal academy with an existential identity crisis. Second, it explores historical mechanisms of institutional change within law schools that reveal diverse notions of law school’s purpose as historically contingent. Such perspectives are shaped by the behaviors, cultural attitudes, and ideological beliefs of law faculty operating within particular social, political, and economic contexts. Third, and finally, it demonstrates the urgency of moving beyond liberal legalism in legal education by integrating critical legal theories and movement law principles throughout the entire law school curriculum.
upon lawyers, as public citizens, to embrace a special responsibility for the quality of justice in the legal profession and in society. Yet, some law professors have historically adopted a formalistic and doctrinally neutral approach to law teaching that elides critical perspectives of law, avoids the intersection of law and politics, and tends to overlook the way law can construct the very social injustices that it seeks to contain. The objective, apolitical, and so-called “colorblind” jurisprudential stance in many law classrooms inflicts intellectual violence upon law students who discover a legal doctrine in conflict with their own lived experiences, yet who feel silenced and unprepared to reckon with the moral legitimacy of unjust laws. Perhaps as a result, in recent years, law schools have begun to
rethink legal education altogether, devising anti-racist curricula, professional identity trainings, and novel experiential learning programs to produce a new generation of critically conscious lawyers for the crises of our modern age.
Building upon such efforts, alongside recent scholarship in legal education and philosophical legal ethics, this Essay proposes foundational pedagogical principles to teach public citizenship lawyering. This Essay defines public citizenship lawyering as a democratic conception of professional responsibility whereby lawyers engage in routine critique of their lawyering practice through the lens of justice as a moral virtue. This pedagogy finds normative grounding in the ABA Model Rules based upon the contention that a skewed vision of professional lawyering identity has hindered a justice-oriented interpretation of the lawyer’s public citizen charge. Specifically, this Essay articulates four pedagogical principles: (1) deconstructive framing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of candor; (2) ethical reposturing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of competence and professional judgment; (3) reconstructive ordering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to improve the law; and (4) liberatory lawyering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to assist the client and others in gaining competence. Collectively, these principles assert
a counter-cultural vision of practice readiness that empowers law students to affirmatively challenge social and economic injustice in the legal profession and the rule of law. More than exalting a democratic conception of professional lawyering identity, these principles affirm the legal academy as law’s laboratory for progressive social change.
This Article uses the origin story of hip-hop music to advance this thesis, making three claims about law and culture. First, it argues that cultural theories of poverty and crime (embedded with racial stereotypes and cultural biases) shaped the political response to the growth of Black urban ghettos in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, via a textual analysis of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s 1982 hip-hop song The Message, this Article contends that early hip-hop cultural views of democratic life were in rivalry with the dominant cultural discourse of conservative politicians and leading public intellectuals. Third, this Article breaks new ground by conceptualizing the socioeconomic inequities that plague Black urban ghettos as “tragedies of the cultural commons.” Building upon Garrett Hardin’s famous Tragedy of the Commons allegory, this framing employs the concept of the commons to illuminate how racism can mold the symbiotic relationship between law and democratic culture.
Taken together, this Article’s critical legal history of the rise of early hip-hop culture suggests that if law is in fact both constitutive of and constituted by dominant cultural views, then in the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life have historically labored under the hegemonic rivalry of a White supremacist vision of law and order. Further, hip-hop culture emerges as a counter-cultural vision of democratic life—an example of what Sheila R. Foster calls “urban collective action” or what Lisa T. Alexander calls “cultural collective efficacy.” If racial injustice in America is indeed the byproduct of law’s flawed empire, then perhaps reforming law’s empire demands a reconstruction of the democratic cultural commons.
This Article argues that resolving the fragility of American democracy amidst the terrors of COVID-19 warrants a renewed commitment to the emancipatory language of human rights. This assertion rests on three claims, using the challenges of housing insecurity as a guiding explanatory thread. First, the geography of health inequity in Black communities across the United States embodies not merely governmental neglect, but more poignantly, the rituals of white supremacy that create and reconstitute the racial social order. As a result, beyond coordinated public health measures and short-term economic stimulus plans to address human vulnerability, the future of American democracy demands new tools to confront racial ritualization in everyday life. Second, human rights discourse challenges the normative underpinnings of contemporary public policy, which are shaped by liberal assumptions about the human condition that enshrine structural inequality and propagate economic power. Third, human rights discourse expands the social imagination, fostering innovation in lawmaking by deconstructing antiquated valuations of equality and reconstructing contextualized notions of liberty. Taken together, these insights reveal human rights discourse as a project of reimagining legal subjectivity and state responsibility.
To further elucidate the benefits of human rights discourse in view of compelling arguments to move beyond rights-based framings of equality and discrimination, this Article places Martha Fineman’s theory of vulnerability in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s articulation of the Black American experience during Jim Crow segregation in his novel, Invisible Man. This dialogue reveals the erasure of “sacrifice” from ongoing discussions of social and economic inequality. As this Article argues, sacrifice is a critical dimension of democratic citizenship that has been rendered invisible in contemporary rights-based discourse and emergent strategies for poverty alleviation. Drawing insights from the Movement for Black Lives and contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this dialogue clarifies the central role of “dignity” in establishing the preconditions for an engaged citizenry in the context of American racial capitalism.
In response, much in the way Cheryl Harris revealed Whiteness as Property, this Essay suggests and defends Black identity itself, or Blackness – whether articulated by the pure speech of racial justice activists who affirm Black humanity, or embodied by the symbolic speech of Black bodies assembled in collective dissent in the public square – as “fighting words” in the consciousness of America, a type of public speech unprotected by the Constitution. The very utterance of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” tends to incite imminent violence and unbridled rage from police in city streets across America. Discussions of “Black Lives Matter” by pundits conjure images of subversion, disorder, and looting, the racialized narratives of social unrest commonly portrayed by the media. Yet, the words “Black Lives Matter” and the peaceful assembly of Black protestors also encapsulate the fire of righteous indignation burning in the hearts of minoritized citizens. This dynamic reflects unresolved tensions in the First Amendment’s treatment of race relations in America. Even more, it exposes the role of policing in smothering the Constitutional rights of Black and Brown citizens.
This Essay provides three contributions to the ongoing discourse on policing in the United States. First, it reveals how unresolved racial tensions in the First Amendment – focusing specifically on ambiguities in the fighting words doctrine – perpetuate the racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of American policing. Second, it analyzes how such unresolved racial tensions cast a dark shadow over the liberty of Black and Brown citizens who experience racism at the hands of police officers, yet avoid acts of protest for fear of bodily harm or arrest. Third, it illuminates the embeddedness of racism in American policing culture, more generally; a culture that not only constructs and reconstitutes the racial social order, but also degrades the dignity of Black and Brown citizens. Collectively, these insights lend support toward demands for police abolition from BLM activists. As this Essay concludes, until we as a nation wrestle with the unresolved racial subtext of modern policing – a racist culture woven into law that not only silences the legitimate protests of minoritized citizens in violation of their First Amendment rights, but also rationalizes callous violence at the hands of law enforcement – Black America will remain a peril to the veil of white supremacy that looms over the American constitutional order.
investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding from private impact investors to finance social welfare programs within marginalized communities. SIBs seemingly answer the call of local government law scholars of the New Regionalists movement who advocate for governmental mechanisms that facilitate regional cooperation, address equity concerns, and respect local government autonomy. However, this Article argues that the SIB model of impact investing will struggle to advance metropolitan equity due to its grounding in the politics of neoliberalism.
After highlighting limitations of the SIB, this Article links contemporary debates about CED theory to historical contestations within the black community about economically-oriented racial uplift strategies. Placing historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, in conversation with more contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this Article offers an alternative conceptual framework of CED. Termed justice-based CED, this framing distinguishes a typology of social change that places democracy at the epicenter of the development debate and points toward the political principles of the solidarity economy as guideposts for law reform. The justice-based approach rests upon three core values: social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy. Taken together, this perspective reflects a vision of political morality that embodies one of America’s most foundational democratic values—human moral dignity.
This Article sets forth a critical examination of the new SIB model, highlighting some of the opportunities for the social finance tool to promote social impact, while also revealing several of its challenges that may hinder its broader adoption in communities across America. In the process, this Article exposes key flaws inherent in the design of the SIB model, including its neoliberal emphasis on market-based economic development strategies and its disregard for the primary role of government in the protection and advancement of the public good. It concludes by calling for a more progressive economic development framework to guide the implementation of the SIB model, one that can help development practitioners, philanthropists, and impact investors wrestle with the deficiencies of our global capitalist economic system and overcome the entrenched systemic barriers to economic justice in America.
This Article was drafted as part of a symposium — Lessons from Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Working with Community-Based Organizations to Build Capacity and Fight for Economic Justice — held at the Association of American Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education, April 30–May 3, 2016, in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference theme, “Clinics and Communities: Exploring Community Engagement Through Clinical Education,” was a platform for examining “the role of law and lawyers in aggravating or alleviating suffering, and in collaborating on legal efforts to build communities’ strengths and address harms experienced by those who seek their assistance.”