Native Lives Matter, Too

Today in the New York Times, Lydia Millet crafted an Op-Ed that shines a harsh light on police killing of American Indians in the United States.  At a time when #BlackLivesMatter is driving media attention and conversation, Millet writes in "Native Lives Matter, Too" that American Indians are virtually invisible when it comes to loss of life at the hands of law enforcement when per capita, American Indians suffer a higher percentage of killing at the hands of law enforcement than any other race. The Op-Ed states:

"American Indians are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by the police, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, which studied police killings from 1999 to 2011 (the rate was determined as a percentage of total population). But apart from media outlets like Indian Country Today, almost no attention is paid to this pattern of violence against already devastated peoples. When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness."

She further writes:  "Economic and health statistics, as well as police-violence statistics, shed light on the pressures on American Indian communities and individuals: Indian youths have the highest suicide rate of any United States ethnic group. Adolescent women have suicide rates four times the rate of white women in the same age group. Indians suffer from an infant mortality rate 60 percent higher than that of Caucasians, a 50 percent higher AIDS rate, and a rate of accidental death (including car crashes) more than twice that of the general population.  At the root of much of this is economic inequality: Indians are the poorest people in the United States, with a poverty rate in 2013 that was about twice the national average at 29.2 percent — meaning almost one in three Indians lives in poverty."

NEW LAW REVIEW ARTICLE: Toward a Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy and Scholarship

Cheryl Wade, dre cummings and I have just posted a new law review article on SSRN that challenges mainstream corporate law scholars and teachers to think more deeply about the role of the modern public corporation in America and beyond. More specifically, we show that corporate law and regulation permits the corporation to operate as a key mechanism of: 1) racial and economic inequality, 2) the devolution of our political system towards a corporatocracy, 3) the continuation of mass incarceration, 4) the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, and 5) even the creeping privatization of education. The article just came out in the Washington University Law Review. 

Here is the abstract:

In recent years, the publicly held corporation has assumed a central position in both the economic and political spheres of American life. Economically, the public corporation has long acted as the key institution within American capitalism. Politically, the public corporation now can use its economic might to sway electoral outcomes as never before. Indeed, individuals who control public firms wield more economic might and political power today than ever before. These truths profoundly shape American society. The power, control, and role of the public corporation under law and regulation, therefore, hold more importance than at any other time period.  

Even though corporate law and regulation define all aspects of this central economic and political institution within the American system, the development of corporate law is impeded by a deficient pedagogy — and thus, to a certain degree, scholarship — that scarcely mentions the power and influence corporations hold. Critical voices, in particular, are excluded from virtually all corporate law textbooks. Many corporate law texts taught in law school classrooms treat the social role of the public corporation as a black box of corporate law pedagogy and, by extension, mainstream legal scholarship. Indeed, a relentless stream of legal scholarship challenging the law and regulation of the public firm from the perspective of its broader social and economic implications receives little to no mention in the key textbooks adopted and taught from in law schools today. This Article challenges the dominant corporate law master narrative perpetuated in all of the major business law textbooks. This master narrative prevents students of the law and legal scholars from fully understanding and analyzing the changing nature and evolution of law and power in the United States. 

This article forms the basic template of our forthcoming textbook, Business Organizations: A Critical Perspective. The article is available in full for free download, here.