{"id":6419,"date":"2026-11-04T19:50:46","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T19:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/?p=6419"},"modified":"2026-11-04T19:54:34","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T19:54:34","slug":"law-as-reparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/2026\/11\/04\/law-as-reparations\/","title":{"rendered":"Law as Reparations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WALTER: Don\u2019t cry, Mama. Understand. That white man is going to walk in that door able to write checks for more money than we ever had. It\u2019s important to him and I\u2019m going to help him . . .<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAMA: Son\u2014I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers\u2014but ain\u2019t nobody in my family never let nobody pay \u2019em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn\u2019t fit to walk the earth . . . <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I know the money don\u2019t really make me whole . . . <\/em>
\u2014Noname<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This Article contends that we should understand law as a powerful force for reparations, considering legal, philosophical, and critical theorists in addition to legal analysis of historical case studies. The creation of group-specific legal rights and remedies, which allow individuals to exercise greater power and agency in shaping their lives, are a form of reparations that may be preferable to most of the proposals currently discussed (which rely largely upon financial or in-kind assistance). Part I introduces the concepts of reparations and reconciliation. Part II explores recent attempts to use Charles Mills\u2019 Racial Contract framework as a justification for reparations. The Article asserts that a proper reading of Mills requires making Black Americans more than mere beneficiaries of a \u201crestored\u201d social contract and must make them contract makers. Part III explores what it means to be a contract maker, looking at the work of Mills, James Baldwin, and principles of contract law. Part IV posits that law and legal rights are a powerful form of reparations because they uniquely help recipients become contract makers in society. It considers how the original intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was reparative but has since become co-opted by color-blind, \u201creverse-racism\u201d arguments. These amendments are contrasted with federal and state-level laws in Hawai\u02bbi that explicitly provide unique rights and benefits to Native Hawaiians (with mixed success). Drawing from the author\u2019s experience working in civil rights in Hawai\u02bbi, the Article contends that the presence of targeted reparative laws has empowered Native Hawaiians with the tools to control their fate in a way that one-time payments could not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read this Article, please click here: Law as Reparations<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WALTER: Don\u2019t cry, Mama. Understand. That white man is going to walk in that door able to write checks for more money than we ever had. It\u2019s important to him and I\u2019m going to help him . . . MAMA: Son\u2014I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers\u2014but ain\u2019t nobody in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,14,715,709],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-print-issue","category-articles","category-issue-6-print-volume-111","category-print-volume-111"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6419"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6428,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6419\/revisions\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}