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This edition of Researching Law details the findings in Victoria Saker Woeste’s book, Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012).

In this article, Susan Shapiro explores conflicts in the relationships between patients and surrogate decision-makers for medical and end-of-life care.

A study done by ABF Research Professor Susan P. Shapiro found that 70 percent of Americans who require decisions about medical treatment in the final days of life lack decision-making capacity. Studies of intensive care units, where patients are much sicker, have found that of all decisions to withhold or withdraw life support, only 3 or 4 percent were made by the patients themselves; the others lacked decisional capacity. This edition of Researching Law explains how fiduciaries who act on behalf of those unable to make end-of-life decisions exercise their responsibilities.

Through a focus on Singapore, Jothie Rajah presents an analysis of authoritarian legalism in this book.

This paper, featuring Elizabeth Mertz, studies law professors’ perceptions of tenure fairness, revealing differing opinions based on gender and race.

This edition of Researching Law celebrates the ABF’s John P. Heinz and his 40 years of rigorous scholarship of the legal profession.

This report compiles audio clips of interviews used in ABF’s Employment Civil Rights Project by Laura Beth Nielsen and Ellen Berrey.

This article, with Laura Beth Nielsen, interviews judges, lawyers, and litigants to examine how the context of employment discrimination litigation affects the perception of justice and fairness.

This book, with co-author Traci Burch, analyzes the impact of immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and youth on the evolving understanding of race in the US.

  • Books

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America

Traci Burch, Jennifer H. Hochschild and Vesla M. Weaver
Learning and Practicing Law
February 2012

From Princeton University Press

The American racial order—the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation’s races and ethnicities—is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.