Race Rights and the Law Blog
Nadia B. Ahmad
November 4, 2025
Liu Lijun, a Chinese graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) had her keffiyah removed. (Source: Express Tribune.)
The crisis of Critical Race Studies is existential. It lives in the uneasy gap between the radical origins of the field and its current comfort within the university. It’s about what the academy has done to movements, but also about what we, the scholars…
Nadia B. Ahmad
October 10, 2025
In 2022, Race Rights and the Law made the decision to move to its own platform. At the time, it felt like a gamble. We were leaving the established Law Professor Blogs Network for the sake of autonomy and control, not knowing how it would turn out.
Three and half years later, that move proved critical. As the ABA Journal recently reported, the Law Professor Blogs Network is SHUTTING DOWN…
Alexander Gray
January 11, 2024
By Alexander Gray
January 11, 2023
The Student Scholar Fund has been a catalyst for impactful projects, supporting passionate individuals in their pursuit of fighting for equity. Let's delve into the stories of four of our outstanding summer 2023 grantees and the remarkable projects they undertook.
Sommer Blair: Addressing Whiteness in ChurchesProject Overview:Sommer's project, titled "How to…
Vinay Harpalani
June 6, 2023
As the U.S. Supreme Court considers challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Asian Americans find ourselves in a precarious position. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the organization bringing these challenges, operates deceptively. At the outset of the cases, it contended that “a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision essentially forbids […
Vinay Harpalani
February 14, 2023
On Monday, October 31, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in both Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina. [1] These cases are the latest challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at the nation’s elite universities. And they may be the last. Given the composition of the Court, it appears…
Vinay Harpalani
December 11, 2022
On August 24, 2022, President Biden announced a three-part strategy to address the U.S. student debt crisis. [1] First, cancellation of up to $10,000 for borrowers who earned less than $125,000 per year, with an additional $10,000 available for Pell grantees. Second, providing relief to borrowers by fixing the well-known problems with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program and cutting…
Christopher Ogolla
August 16, 2022
The AALS Section on Minority Groups (SOMG) is inviting submissions for its next annual Works-in-Progress/New Voices (WIPs) session at the AALS 2023 Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting will be held in person from Wednesday, January 4, 2023, through Saturday, January 7, 2023 in San Diego, California.
The SOMG will focus its annual WIPs session on current topics addressing inequitable legislation…
SpearIt
August 11, 2022
New piece from the American Bar Association's State of Criminal Justice 2022 entitled, Prison Transfers and Mootness Doctrine: Disappearing the Rule of Law in Prison. Here is a summary:
Access to the legal system does not come easily for people in prison. There are administrative procedures that must be exhausted; federal legislation like the Prison Litigation Reform Act disadvantages prisoner-…
SpearIt
July 25, 2022
This new piece, Muslims in American Prisons: Advancing the Rule of Law through Litigation Praxis is up at SSRN.com. Here is the abstract:
Islamic ideas about justice and equality directly informed the development of prison law jurisprudence in the United States. Since the early 1960s, when federal courts began to hear claims by state prisoner-petitioners, Muslims began to look to courts to…
Sahar Aziz
July 7, 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court’s overruling of the landmark case Roe v. Wade rightfully triggered a national debate about the role of religion in public life, women’s right to control their reproductive lives, and the racially disparate impact of state prohibitions on abortion. The Center for Security, Race and Rights hosted a conversation by legal scholars Asifa Quraishi, Cynthia Soohoo and Sahar Aziz…