People of Color and the Promise Betrayed

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
New Science ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The Supreme Court

In its 1857 Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court ruled that “negroes” were not, and never had been, citizens of the United States. Two justices dissented, declaring that when the Constitution was adopted free blacks possessed the rights of citizens, including suffrage, in seven states. The rights of free blacks, like other citizens, were thereby protected. But the Court majority, conflating slavery with race, denied citizenship to people of color. In fact, starting in 1776 a majority of states recognized the rights of people of color for at least a generation. Only after the free black population grew into the tens of thousands did states north and south act to curtail those rights. The new restrictions rested on old prejudices reinforced by the new “science” of race. Nature, it was claimed, warranted the denial of equal rights. So in new northern states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan—as well as old ones like Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, equality was written out of law. By 1858, when Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas for election to the Senate from Illinois, some public figures explicitly denied the self-evident natural rights of the Declaration. But Lincoln made the Declaration’s self-evident truths his cornerstone. Regardless of race or nationality, he argued, natural rights applied to all men.

People of Color and Equal Rights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Professional Standards ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The U.S

In New England, if anywhere, equal rights might have included people of color. Free blacks comprised a small fraction of the population, and slave uprisings posed no threat. Yet in this region, as in others, racism prevailed. Discrimination in public business, including voting and education, was commonplace. But in criminal trials procedural safeguards and professional standards limited the effects of prejudice. Public opinion was not so restrained. And in rural New England vigilantes shut down New Hampshire’s racially integrated Noyes Academy and Prudence Crandall’s school for black girls in Connecticut. Connecticut banned schools like Crandall’s, she was jailed briefly, and the state’s supreme court denied equal rights for blacks, setting a precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling.

Save Our Senior Noncitizens: Extending Old Age Assistance to Immigrants in the United States, 1935–71

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Old Age ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Secure Access ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Old Age Assistance ◽  
Social Security Act

Abstract When do states grant social rights to noncitizens? I explore this question by examining the extension of Old Age Assistance (OAA) to noncitizens after the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. While the act contained no alienage-based restrictions, states were permitted to bar noncitizens from means-tested programs. In 1939, 31 states had alienage restrictions for OAA. By 1971, when the Supreme Court declared state-level alienage restrictions unconstitutional, only eight states still did. States with more Mexicans and Asians were slower to repeal restriction, however. Using in-depth case studies of New York, California, and Texas, I demonstrate the importance of federal and state institutional arrangements and immigrant political power for the extension of social rights to noncitizens. I also show that to secure access to OAA, immigrant advocates adapted their strategies to match the institutional and political context.

The Constitutionality of Involuntary Civil Commitment of Opiate Addicts

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Commitment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Involuntary Treatment ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Narcotic Trafficking ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Opiate Addicts ◽  
The 1960S

This paper deals with the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts. Although the first laws permitting involuntary treatment of opiate addicts were enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century, addicts were not committed in large numbers until California and New York enacted new civil commitment legislation in the 1960s. Inevitably, the courts were called upon to decide if involuntary treatment was constitutional. Both the California and New York courts decided that it was. These decisions were heavily influenced by statements made by the United States Supreme Court in Robinson v. California. The Robinson case did not actually involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment; it involved the question of whether it was constitutional for a state to make addiction a crime. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared (in a dictum) that a state might establish a program of compulsory treatment for opiate addicts either to discourage violation of its criminal laws against narcotic trafficking or to safeguard the general health or welfare of its inhabitants. Presumably because the Robinson case did not involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts, the Supreme Court did not go into that question as deeply as it might have. The California and New York courts, in turn, relied too much on this dictum and did not delve deeply into the question. The New York courts did a better job than the California courts, but their work too was not as good as it should have been.

Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp.

1989 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-568
Author(s):  
Carlos M. Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
District Court ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
Southern District ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Argentine Republic ◽  
Federal Jurisdiction

Plaintiffs and respondents, Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. and United Carriers, Inc., were respectively the charterer and owner of the Hercules, a crude oil tanker that was bombed in international waters by Argentine military aircraft during the war over the Malvinas or Falkland Islands. The ship was severely damaged and had to be scuttled off the coast of Brazil. After unsuccessfully seeking relief in Argentina, the companies filed suit against defendant and appellant, the Argentine Republic, in the Southern District of New York. Plaintiffs argued that the federal courts had jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute (28 U.S.C. §1350 (1982)), which confers federal jurisdiction over “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” The district court dismissed the suit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, holding that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (28 U.S.C. §§1330, 1602-1611 (1982)) (FSIA) is by its terms the sole basis of federal jurisdiction over cases against foreign states. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed. The Supreme Court (per Rehnquist, C.J.) unanimously reversed the Second Circuit and held that the FSIA provides the exclusive basis of federal jurisdiction over suits against foreign states.

Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

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