Academic

National People of Color Conference Concludes

address critical national and global issues through the lens of legal scholarship that explicitly and implicitly examines contemporary racial context. It will feature panels on the ?war on terror,? urban revitalization, criminal law, health care, education, immigration, human trafficking, voting rights, international and comparative law, judicial nominations, environmental justice, and corporate responsibility, among others. It will also include a Junior Faculty and Development Workshop and a Pipeline Program for lawyers interested in entering the legal academy. A media plenary session will explore the meaning of a ?post-racial? society and its relevance to legal scholarship and teaching.  Third National People of Color Conference, Our Country Our World in a "Post-Racial" Era?, Homepage.

Paper Abstract: That political communities are vertically ordered is well known, as is the resulting structure of exploitation and subordination. This vertical ordering has been reproduced in the elaboration of a global system of economic organization understood as globalization. As a consequence, economic, social, cultural and religious communities, like the states with which they interact, also tend to replicate this pattern of organization. The ideology of subordination is deeply embedded in global culture; it is exploited as effectively by communities of color against each other as it is deployed against communities of color by developed states. Yet that ideology might also be characterized as irrational. It can be argued that at the transnational level, corporations have failed to act rationally with respect to a global population that is overwhelmingly composed of communities of color, communities of color that have been traditionally exploited or ignored by both economic entities and the governments seeking to impose global order on transnational actors and markets. Political efforts to reduce discrimination and subordination at the global level have been discouraging. But emerging systems of global soft law may provide a basis for attaining a greater measure of racial and ethnic justice. This paper examines how international civil society actors are beginning to use instruments of soft law corporate governance to attack discrimination and subordination of communities of color by economic actors and others a variety of contexts. The paper?s thesis follows: the power to affect the relationships between communities of color and global economic actors may prove a more powerful force for change than those targeting traditional nation-states or the global state-law system.

Full post as published by Law at the End of the Day on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).