Civil Rights & Restorative Justice
Summer Quarter 2017
Seminar: Wednesday 1:40- 3:40, 310B Dockser
Instructors: Margaret Burnham, 81 Cargill; (#8857) ; Rose Zoltek-Jick, 20 Cargill; (#4947)
Zitrin Teaching Fellow: Melvin Kelley, 120 Dockser (#8243)
Archivist: Dr. Rhonda Jones, 65 Cargill (# 3495)
Editors: Nancy Earsy, , Vickie Rothbaum,
Course Description:
Student clinicians investigateand document cases of the untold murders of African Americans and the legal sequelae of these killings as part of the development of a national archive on racial violence in the Jim Crow South from 1930-1970.
The course aims to help students to develop lawyering intelligence and gain the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to investigate facts and handle cases involving historical civil rights violations that raise complex legal, political and social issues. The course introduces students to the rules that govern the redress of violations of civil rights and traces the development of these laws from their historical roots to the current era. We explore the core themes, debates, and concepts of restorative justice in an interdisciplinary and global context. The clinic follows litigation firm practices -- small groups work collaboratively on cases and other CRRJ projects.
Your work in the clinic has three main components:
- An academic seminar which covers the legal and historical material that supports the work of the clinic;
- The investigation by students working in teams of several cold cases of the murders of African Americans in the Jim Crow South in the period from 1930-1970 and the legal sequelae or consequences for the perpetrator;
- The search for family members of the victims in your cases so that we can supplement our understanding of the case facts and, when possible, initiate restorative justice measures in collaboration with the family and the community in which the murder occurred.
The course is six credits. Be prepared to spend about twenty hours a week, including the two-hour seminar, your preparation of the materials assigned for that week, and a one hour team meeting with your professors.
Seminar
On Wednesday, we meet in a seminar for two hours from 1:40-3:40 pm in 310B Dockser, the new home of the CRRJ clinic. We will be transitioning to this location over the Quarter. We will hold the seminar here but you will work in the NUSL main clinic.
There is no casebook.The syllabus gives the readings assigned, which are posted on Blackboard under “Syllabus and Readings” and in most cases, also by electronic link from your syllabus.
Each week (except for our first meeting), a different student team is responsible for producing a guide to the reading material with “Questions and Comments on the Readings” that is to be posted on Blackboard under Assignments for the Relevant Week by Monday nightbefore the Wednesday seminar. Everyone should then be prepared to participate in a rich discussion of the material that will be jointly led by the team and the professors.
The students who are NOT in charge of writing the Discussion Guide and leading the class will have a short writing assignment each week that is tied to the readings. Your written assignment must be posted on Blackboard under Weekly Short Paperby Monday night so that your professors will have a chance to give your feedback on your written work in our meeting later that week.
The instructors will begin each seminar meeting with an introductory lecture, and we will try to conclude each class with a wrap-up of the “major message.” The lectures supplement the reading; they do not replace them. Hence you should not depend on the lectures to synthesize the readings. This is a seminar course and you are expected to be fully prepared and to participate voluntarily every class.
You should read the materials carefully and critically. You do not need to fully understand or agree with the theoretical material, but you need to be prepared to engage actively in discussion. The readings are extensive, but they barely scratch the surface of the topics. For some classes the readings may take more than one night to get through, so plan accordingly.
Case Investigation
Although the whole clinic “owns” all of the cases, students are assigned to investigate the assigned cases in teams;each team of two students is assigned criminal matters from the CRRJ Case Docket. Students are expected to do their work in the main NUSL clinic on the second floor. You will be assigned a desk in the clinic offices.You may not remove CRRJ files from the clinic at any time.
Your cases are available on Blackboard in the folder Case Assignments. These cases are ones where littleis recorded in the history books and our work is to restore the story of this killing and the response of the criminal justice system to the historical record. We also seek to find out as much as is possible about the person who was killed in order to document and better understand the consequences of each person’s murder to their family and community.
Familiarize yourself with the Blackboard site and the CRRJ Manual found on it; both of which contain a good amount of “how to” information on our research. It is a good idea to do this before the first meeting with your professors on your case, which will take place during the second week of classes.
You should start right in on your investigation. We will expect you to have made some progress by our first meeting in researching whether more is known or has been written about your case beyond what we ourselves have so far located. You have only 12 weeks to investigate your case and build the case file, so there is not a moment to waste.
You will obtain legal documents available through state and federal disclosure laws; compile a full set of newspaper and other accounts of your case; interview fact witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, academics and other investigators; track down secondary literature; and, when feasible, conducts field research into the case and do genealogical and other research to find the living relatives of the victim.
Your team will meet for one hour every week – sometime on Wednesday or Thursday that works around your other class obligations—with your professors to track your progress and guide your research and understanding of the legal documents and processes you are navigating in your case. And although this to some degree a fiction, we regard the victim as our “client” and such, we expect you to observe all rules and norms of professional responsibility. These issues should also be discussed with us during our weekly meetings. Students should be in frequent touch with us, and as necessary withMelvin Kelley orDr. Jones, to discuss investigative sourcesfor your cases. Feel free to contact us by phone or email at any time.
Your principal assignment is a publishable paper on one of your cases. You should also produce a short article/memorandum on other cases you have researched, to be determined during the quarter. The short memo should describe the case in summary form. This memorandum is what is creating the archive and as such, it should be a fact-rich short article for which you have documents or other evidence to support every assertion in it.
You will need tobe certain the documents are uploaded to our archive; these documents substantiate the narrative you are providing and will provide the basis for future academics to research this era in history more richly and from a variety of perspectives.
Thecases you investigate will also require a transition memo in which you outline your investigative work on the case file so that in the event that new information is found, or further work is needed in a subsequent clinic, we know what you have done and with whom you have been in contact and a new clinician can pick up the work where you left off.
One of your cases will also be the subject of a longer essay (20-25 pages) and an oral presentation at Grand Rounds during exam week in which you present your findings to a panel of academics in the field.
After your long paper is submitted at the completion of Grand Rounds, it is sent to our team of editors. They will return it to you with comments and suggestions and proposed edits. Although it will be after the Quarter is over, you are responsible to respond to your editor and work with her until your final paper is deemed ready for posting to the archive.
This paper qualifies to be submitted in satisfaction of the Rigorous Writing Requirement.
Family and Community Outreach/Restorative Justice Projects
We endeavor in every case to find family members of the victims and then to establish contact with them. This is not always possible or successful. When we do reach family members, they often add to the narrative of what happened in the case, and what happened to the larger family unit because of the killing, and since the killing.
By doing this aspect of the work, we not only add to the breadth of the historical record of these murdersbut also can begin to trace the inter-generational sequalae of these killings to families and communities; effects that help us understand current events with a richer perspective and understanding.
Whenever possible, we then initiate a process to explore whether measures of restorative justice can be undertaken to repatriate the story to the family and the community where the killing took place.
This is work that may not always be able to be accomplished in a single quarter and is often the subject of follow-up work in later academic quarters under the supervision of your professors, often for extra credit.
Attendance Requirements:
The class meets 11 times for 2 hours-- May 31, June 7, 14, 21, 28, July 5, 12, 19, 26, August 2, 9.
There will then be two sessions during examination week, August 14-18, which will be the public Grand Rounds presentations of the cases covered by the clinic. The dates for Grand Rounds are TBD in conjunction with the exam schedules of all clinic participants.
Attendance for all the classes and both of the Rounds sessions is mandatory. You should plan all other academic and professional responsibilities with this in mind. You cannot miss the Grand Rounds sessions.
If you will be missing class for observance of religious holidays you must inform us of these dates during the first week of class. If you plan on participating in a job fair, interviewing for co-op, or participating in Moot Court, you must be mindful that the dates and times do not conflict with the CRRJ clinic.
Do not plan to pass papers on a house, present a paper at a conference, or be the bestperson at a wedding if the event conflicts with a CRRJ scheduled session. You are required to attend both of the Grand Rounds sessions. (We regret the infantilizing language; bitter experience has turned us into attendance tyrants).
Fulfilment of Course:
To reiterate, there are three final writing products:
(1) A written Essay, Note or Comment of 20-25 pages on one of your cases. You may use this piece for your Rigorous Writing Requirement;
(2) A Web-ready short article for each your cases;
(3) A transition memo for each case outlining all of your investigative steps and contacts.
These writing products are due on August 18th, the last day of the quarter.
Further Information on the Essay: The essay should be 20-25 pages. The essay will cover important aspects of the case, including facts, legal history, and social and political context.This is not a reflective essay nor a guide as to the process by which the facts of your case were found.
There are sample essays to which you can refer on Blackboard and on the CRRJ site. Please follow the CRRJ Briefing Paper Guide for instructions on composing your essay. The Guide is in the CRRJ Manual and on Blackboard.
To reiterate, your essay will go through an editing process before it is posted to our website that begins after you have handed in your essay and that you will need to respond to editors’ comments after the quarter has concluded.
We invite you to take an independent study to pursue further investigative work on your case file, restorative justice work on your case, or your paper. As you will see from the readings, many CRRJ students have turned their papers into law review articles and other published material, or designed and executed unique restorative projects.
Further Information on the Short Article/memo for the Archive Case Page: This memorandum/ article (sometimes also called a mockup) will be the source of information for your case on our website. It should be not more than 2,000 words. Please see the Instructions for Article on Blackboard and follow them closely. Uniformity of style and tone is important for the site.
Further Information on Transition Memoranda: You will need to prepare a transition memorandum for your cases. The transition memo should contain a detailed account of what you did on the case and its current status. The memorandum should include (1) introduction; (2) investigative steps, including contact information for each person or organization with whom you have been in touch; (3) your findings, successful or not; (4) recommendations; and (5) conclusion. This is an internal document. It may be shared with the client’s family and other investigators.
Syllabus---SUMMER 2017
Week 1 – May 31
Introduction to Civil Rights Cold Cases: Criminal Prosecution and Civil Remedies
We consider the history of contemporary initiatives to revisit racial violence homicides from the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras by closely examining the legal situation in a double murder in Mississippi in 1964. The class focuses on criminal proceedings in US v. Seal and civil proceedings in Dee and Moore v. Franklin County.
Readings: Criminal Indictment, James Ford Seale; CRRJ Complaint, Moore et al v. Franklin Cnty;Defendant Franklin County’s Memorandum to Dismiss Complaint; Plaintiff’s Memorandum in Opposition; USDC Memorandum on Motion to Dismiss. David Ridgen,Cracking a Mississippi cold case; T.Din, NUSL ’10 Litigation to Vindicate Civil Rights Era Cold Cases: Ethical and Lawyering Challenges
There are no writing assignments for this class.
Week 2 –June 7
The Struggle for Racial Equality and Democracy in the 1940s
Our cases focus on a particularly tumultuous period in US history. Some term it the transitional decade, in which world events compelled democratic transformation at home. Our cases capture the violent reaction of white supremacists to bold citizenship claims, often affected by the wartime exposure and experiences of Negro soldiers and their communities back home. With the decline of “spectacle lynchings” in the 1940s, violence becomes less visible. New strategies emerge with different perspectives on how to achieve political, social and economic equality. Our focus in this class is on the civil rights movement during this era and the organizations dedicated to further its aims; their self-definition and conflicting views on how best to dismantle Jim Crow.
Readings: P. Sullivan, Movement Building During the World War II Era: The NAACP’s Legal Insurgency in the South in Fog of War (2012); J.D. Hall, The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,Journal of American History (2005); R. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007).
Group 1: Questions and Comments on the readings.
Week 3 – June 14
Building a Cold Case
We examine the mechanics of reconstructing a cold homicide case. Topics include: interviewing skills for the cold case investigator; genealogical research; public records requests; open records laws.
Guests: TBD
Interviewing Skills; Advocacy Skills; Client-Witness Self-Evaluation Form; Interactive Interviewing Tutorial; Five tips for a successful interview; Tips for interviewing a hostile subject; American Journalism Review - Interview don’ts; American Journalism Review - Interview dos; Question Man
No team assignment for this week
Assignment: Write a 2 pager mapping out your research plan.
Week 4 – June 21
Litigation and Racial Violence: Criminal Remedies
Federal laws to protect against racial violence date back to the Reconstruction period. While the laws were intermittently used in the nineteenth century, it was not until the twentieth century that they were more definitively interpreted by the Supreme Court. We examine the case law, the Justice Department’s enforcement initiatives and policies in the mid-twentieth century, and the current federal enforcement regime.
US v. Classic, 313 US 299 (1941), Screws v. US, 325 US 91 (1945), andUS v. Price 383 US 487 (1965). Watford, P. Screws v. United States and the Birth of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement; M. Burnham, The Long Civil Rights Act and Criminal Justice.