"This blog is maintained by Pamela Oliver. I am a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. My specialties are collective action and social movements race and ethnicity and racial disparities in criminal justice."

"Prompted by several recent high-visibility killings by police officers the U.S. civil rights enforcement regime is the subject of focused attention at the national state and local levels."

"The New York State Bar Association is launching a task force focused on examining and addressing structural racism and other types of prejudice as part of its latest effort to resolve broader national social problems."

"To help reduce this massive prison population and to promote human dignity and growth over punishment and retribution WITNESS is supporting advocates lawyers and incarcerated individuals in using video for sentencing mitigation and to advocate for decarceration through clemency and parole."

"The legal profession which was almost entirely white slowly began to crack open its doors to lawyers of color in the 1970s. The 1972-73 Prelaw Handbook (p. 9) noted that "the number of lawyers from minority groups is still disproportionately small" but there were "signs of change." "

"Law Schools and Bar associations are sharing some excellent stories as part of black history month."

"An armed robber walks into seven stores in Indiana and Michigan during a three-week crime spree in October 2017. Investigators get from the robber's phone carrier real-time cell site location information (CSLI) that show his phone's pings to nearby cell towers which help the investigators geolocate their suspect. The robber gets arrested and charged in federal court with five counts of robbery and several accompanying weapons charges. And the rest of the world gets an opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on one of the many questions that the Supreme Court left open when it decided its seminal privacy-related opinion Carpenter v. United States 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)."