Race, Income, and College in 25 Years: Evaluating Justice O'Connor's Conjecture

In Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice O’Connor conjecturedthat in 25 years affirmative action in college admissions willbe unnecessary. We project the test score distribution of blackand white college applicants 25 years from now, focusing onthe role of black–white family income gaps. Economic progressalone is unlikely to narrow the achievement gap enough in 25years to produce today’s racial diversity levels withrace-blind admissions. A return to the rapid black–whitetest score convergence of the 1980s could plausibly cause blackrepresentation to approach current levels at moderately selectiveschools, but not at the most selective schools.     

Coffee House: Habitus and Performance Among Law Students

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. "Coffee House" is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that "nothing is going on," our ethnography suggests that in "Coffee House" identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.     

Human Rights in the Scottish Courts

This article looks at the use made of the human rights legislation in the Scottish courts since the devolution of legislative and executive power to Scotland, based on research undertaken in all the ordinary courts, but excluding tribunals. It concludes that the incorporation of the Convention via the human rights legislation has had significant effects within the Scottish court system and on policy development without amounting to a major upheaval.     

Human Rights in Policing: The Past,Present and Future

This article seeks to demonstrate, largely from practitioners’ perspectives, the growing evolution in understanding and implementation of meaningful human rights standards within the policing context. In the early 2000s, human rights were perceived and treated as a rather restrictive framework in UK policing. They are now more readily seen as a set of tools that guide and help the police to balance the views and interests of all parties to the criminal justice process. Human rights values enable police in the UK to better endeavour to do the right thing, ‘without fear or favour’.