Mary Ellen Maatman

Harlow v. Fitzgerald: The Lower Courts Implement the New Standard for Qualified Immunity Under Section 1983

Mary Ellen Maatman — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:41:25 PST

Listening to Deaf Culture: A Reconceptualization of Difference Analysis Under Title VII

Mary Ellen Maatman — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:38:43 PST

Choosing Words and Creating Worlds: The Supreme Court’s Rhetoric and its Constitutive Effects on Employment Discrimination Law

Mary Ellen Maatman — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:35:51 PST

Speaking Truth to Memory: Lawyers and Resistance to the End of White Supremacy

Mary Ellen Maatman — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:52:12 PST

This article critically examines how elite lawyers built and defended the legal framework for White Supremacy in the Deep South both before and after Brown v. Board of Education. Although turn of the century commentators freely discussed how lawyers blocked African Americans' access to the ballot box, time has largely obliterated that story from our profession's memory. Some recent legal commentators have discussed post-Brown massive resistance, but few have specifically considered the role of lawyers qua lawyers in that movement. In contrast, this article analytically connects these eras to a decades-long program of legal work dedicated to defending and attempting to save White Supremacy. The elite lawyers of the Deep South who most deeply engaged in this work began by opposing the Supreme Court's 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that outlawed the white primary, and ended with assisting the defense of anti-miscegenation laws at issue in the Court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. Throughout two decades, the legal work I describe stemmed from the lawyers' belief in the racist assumptions underlying White Supremacy, and their desire to embed those assumptions in the law of the land.

I believe it is time for the legal profession to take full stock of its role in the progress of racial justice. Failure to do so falsely depicts the profession as a monolithic champion of justice. In turn, we are hobbled in our analysis of the role of law in hindering or promoting the progress of civil rights. To better understand our profession's history and our nation's civil rights progress, we must learn of, and challenge, the work of segregationist lawyers.

Justice Formation From Generation to Generation: Atticus Finch and the Stories Lawyers Tell Their Children

Mary Ellen Maatman — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:46:32 PST

This article entwines the story of To Kill a Mockingbird with the supremacist stories told and used by segregationist lawyers in the Deep South. Juxtaposing these stories reveals how stories about race and justice have been deliberately used to “affect [the] hearts and minds” of children “in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The shaping of a generation’s hearts and minds, through stories told to socialize and educate its children, produces in those children a vision of what a just world looks like. When that generation reaches adulthood, the stories its parents tell their children will replicate the vision anew. This process of intergenerational justice formation through storytelling affects the justice system itself, because each generation’s lawyers and judges have the power to inscribe their vision of justice into the law. Thus, storytelling’s power over justice formation poses dangers to justice: if, as in the case of race and justice storytelling, the dominant story is one that promotes a vision of justice that is in fact unjust, the law will fall prey to that vision. In that situation, restoring justice to the system depends upon the telling of counterstories that will promote a truer vision of justice.