Racial Profiling: Legal and Constitutional Issues
Racial profiling is the practice of targeting individuals for police or security detention based on their race or ethnicity in the belief that certain minority groups are more likely to engage in unlawful behavior. Examples of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies suggest that minorities are disproportionately the subject of security-related practices. The issue has periodically attracted congressional interest and several courts have considered the constitutional ramifications of the practice as an "unreasonable search and seizure" under the Fourth Amendment and, more recently, as a denial of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee. A variety of federal and state statutes provide potential relief to individuals who claim that their rights are violated by race-based law enforcement practices and policies.
The Policing Strategy of Racial Profiling and its Impact on African Americans
The Policing Strategy of Racial Profiling and its Impact on African Americans by Derrick P. Jones M.A., University of the Rockies, 2014 B.C.J., Tiffin University, 2012 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Criminal Justice
Law as Palimpsest: Conceptualizing Contingency in Judicial Opinions (forthcoming 2009)
Metaphors create conceptualizations, and for decades legal academics have employed metaphors to shape understandings of legal problems. But no metaphor in current use successfully conceptualizes the contingency of judicial opinions and the complexity of the relationship between opinions and precedent. This Article seeks to fill this void by introducing a new metaphor, the palimpsest, into the realm of legal analysis. A palimpsest is a writing surface that can be cleared away for reuse, like a personal blackboard. What distinguishes a palimpsest from other writing surfaces is that its removed contents do not disappear, but remain, obscured yet recoverable: A writing on a palimpsest never goes away. This Article argues that thinking of judicial opinions as being part of a shared, ever-evolving palimpsest underscores the fact that they are ultimately contingent and serves as a reminder of the multiple levels of interconnectedness between them and the cases they cite. Precedents—like the underlayers of a palimpsest—never go away, and they inform and shape the application of opinions in ways far more significant than simply serving as points of reference. A palimpsestic approach to understanding judicial decisionmaking also helps to explain why even the oldest, most reviled cases remain part of our national psyche—like underlayers of a palimpsest, they can never truly disappear, and their continued presence forces us to grapple with their existence. Finally, considering judicial opinions as part of a shared palimpsest reminds us that even the most troubling opinion is ultimately contingent, its application subject to reexamination and revision by future courts and future generations. Just as such an opinion replaces its precedents, it too will one day be replaced, like each of a palimpsest’s layers. 2 Law as Palimpsest [Vol. __:__ Law as Palimpsest: Conceptualizing Contingency in Judicial Opinions