Legal Concepts

Item set

• Citizenship
  United States citizenship as an official legal status has been historically contested, restricted because of racialization and exclusion and also extended through the 14th Amendment and acts of Congress. Tribal citizenship is the legal status of admission to a tribe or nation based on factors like blood quantum or lineal descent.
• Civil Rights
  Civil rights are privileges that are guaranteed to citizens by the government and protected by the Constitution and acts of Congress. These rights, and their protection or denial, have varied over time as issues of racial segregation, enfranchisement, reproductive rights, and marriage equality came before the courts.
• Education
  Education has been a critical arena for racialization in U.S. law. Discrimination in education has often been based on race, ability, and sexuality. While public education is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments, the federal government’s role in education has expanded since the 1960s.
• Emancipation
  Emancipation refers to the process by which enslaved people achieved freedom from their enslavers. Emancipation occurred through a variety of means: self-emancipation, freedom suits, manumission through wills and deeds, and state and federal legislation. Rather than being recipients of emancipation, enslaved people took an active part in making emancipation for themselves and their families a reality.
• Empire
  Empire is the process of political, ideological, and cultural domination of one state or society over another. Violence often accompanies the act of conquest, control, and exploitation of colonized lands. American policies of territorial expansion and settler colonialism led to the genocide of Native Americans, a war in the Philippines, and the acquisition of island territories in the Caribbean and Pacific.
• Extralegal Violence
  Extralegal violence refers to violent actions committed outside the authority of the law or judicial procedure. Examples of extralegal violence include racially motivated lynchings, death squads, and targeted killings.
• Family
  Family refers to a group of people who are connected by birth or law, such as through marriage or adoption. This is a legal definition and does not take into account the complexities of kinship and family groups that fall outside of this definition. Throughout U.S. history, family and kinship were key determining characteristics in crucial legal statuses like citizenship, freedom, immigration, and tribal citizenship.
• Federal Indian Policy
  Federal Indian policy was the result of combined and overlapping programs from all branches of the U.S. government. Historically, sources of federal Indian policy included Congress, the War Department, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as executive orders and Supreme Court decisions. Projects related to federal Indian policy include treaty-making, relocation, removal, allotment, termination, and reinstation or self-determination.
• Freedom Suit
  Freedom suits were legal cases challenging slavery in the United States during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Examples of legal strategies in freedom suits included importation violations, descent from a free woman, born free, and kidnapping. Through freedom suits, African American litigants organized and pioneered innovative legal approaches to gain their freedom in county, state, and federal courts.
• Gender
  Gender refers to perceived or experienced sexual identity, based on characteristics socially determined to indicate categories of sex. Gender has been a crucial frame for racialization in U.S. law, beginning with colonial Virginia anti-miscegenation laws in the seventeenth century and extending into the twenty first century with the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
• Habeas Corpus
  With roots in the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus is a legal tool against imprisonment. Latin for "you should have the body," a writ of habeas corpus is presented to a judge by a petitioner to assert their freedom from incarceration. As a legal mechanism borrowed from British common law and guaranteed as a civil right in U.S. federal and state constitutions, habeas offers a perspective of the diverse community of legal actors to demand due process, resist enslavement, challenge child removal and reservation confinement, avoid deportation, present child custody claims and protest child marriage, and to challenge institutionalization and detention in private and state institutions.
• Hearsay
  Hearsay is a statement or testimony made in court about words or actions the witness or deponent did not directly observe. This "second-hand" assertion is considered hearsay when it is offered during court proceedings to assert truth. Hearsay can include verbal utterances, written text, or nonverbal information. Hearsay was first applied as a rule of evidence to exclude testimony about the status of free ancestors by enslaved families in freedom suits, especially the 1813 Supreme Court decision in Mima Queen v. Hepburn. The hearsay rule, as it is called today, was used to disallow testimony in favor of freedom.
• Immigration
  Immigration laws and policies in the U.S. both created and perpetuated racial categories and racialization. Immigration restrictions and exclusions in varied greatly over time, including the barring of anarchists, paupers, and other political and social categories; however, the scope and power of federal immigration agencies and authority, adjudicated from Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. (1889) to Trump v. Hawaii (2017), has centered on racial exclusion and categorization.
• Incarceration
  Incarceration refers to the confinement of convicted and sentenced offenders as well as groups who have been detained or interned in prisons, institutions, or camps based on a perceived threat, offense, and/or conviction.
• Jim Crow Laws
  Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the U.S. South that enforced the segregation of African Americans between 1877-1965. These laws were upheld by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Jim Crow refers to a commonly-used minstrel character from the 19th century depicting African Americans in racist tropes.
• Property
  Property is anything that can be owned by a person or entity. Property ownership, specifically in regards to land, was used by white Europeans as a measure of "civilization" during the days of empire and territorial expansion.
• Race
  Race is a social construction based on a person’s ancestry, culture, self-identification, and/or perceived physical attributes. Race has been central to American law and history, from genocide and enslavement, to immigration quotas and mass incarceration.
• Racialized Violence
  Racialized violence refers to acts of intimidation, harassment, aggression, or harm against an individual or group based upon their race, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Examples of racialized violence include genocide, race riots, lynchings, and massacres.
• Reproductive Rights
  Reproductive rights are fundamental human rights to make decisions about one’s reproductive and sexual health, free from discrimination and restriction. Such rights include access to contraception, abortion, and sex education.
• Segregation
  Segregation refers to the separation of people into groups based on race or ethnicity. In the United States, segregation was practiced in many states, even mandated by law in some. Segregation occurred in public spaces like restaurants, water fountains, restrooms, public transportation, schools, theaters, and hospitals.
• Sexuality
  Legal issues pertaining to sexuality include the regulation of sexuality, relationships, and family structures, civil rights related to gender identity and sexual orientation, and employment discrimination based on gender and/or sexuality. Sexuality often intersects with other characteristics such as race, social class, and religion.
• Slavery
  Racial slavery resulted from the European colonization of the Americas and was codified in law and legal institutions. Approximately 2.5-5 million Indigenous people were targeted for enslavement within the Americas, while the Transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 10-11 million Africans into slavery. When the U.S. and other nations outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, a domestic slave trade quickly expanded and took its place within the U.S., where more than 1.5 million people were sold and separated from family. The debate over the expansion of slavery during the 19th century culminated in the American Civil War, which resulted in a Union victory and the prohibition of slavery with the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• State Sanctioned Violence
  State sanctioned violence refers to acts of force, harm, intimidation, or oppression by a government or government officials. Examples of state sanctioned violence include law enforcement or military violence, settler colonialism, immigration laws, mass incarceration, and forced sterilization.
• Trade
  Trade refers to the exchange of goods, commodities, and/or services between persons, nations, organizations, and/or communities.
• Tribal Sovereignty
  Tribal sovereignty is the political state of self-governance. Tribal sovereignty in the United States has legal foundations in treaties, federal Indian law, and Supreme Court decisions. Relationships to kin and land also reflect both historic and modern sovereignty.
• Vagrancy
  Vagrancy is the condition of wandering from place to place without a permanent home, employment, or material resources. Many vagrancy acts were used to target the poor, people of color, and women.
• Voting Rights
  Voting rights are established in the United States Constitution, requiring that U.S. citizens shall not be denied of their right to vote based on their race, color, previous condition of servitude, sex, or age. These rights may be infringed upon at a state level by state rules and regulations, such as voter identification laws or cuts to early voting, for example.
• Whiteness
  Whiteness is a social construction reflecting a priority toward northern and western European-descended identities and has been linked to privilege in the context of systemic racism and cultural bigotry. Historically, United States law has repeatedly contended with the legal category of whiteness in relation to many key statuses like citizenship, voting, freedom, immigration, and motherhood.