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Editors' Note: For nearly 75 years, the Vanderbilt Law Review has sought to publish rigorous, intellectually honest scholarship. In publishing the following Essay, we seek to provide an equally unflinching look at one way in which Vanderbilt Law School and its graduates have participated in the creation of inequities that persist today. The Law School has produced legions of graduates committed to the pursuit of justice. Some alumni's legacies, however, are more complicated. Brown, Massive Resistance, and the Lawyer's View: A Nashville Story tells the story of one such alumnus. In many ways, Cecil Sims is a model of an engaged lawyer-citizen. A 1914 Vanderbilt Law School graduate, he was deeply involved in Nashville's civil society, serving as an advisor to Vanderbilt University, Meharry Medical College, and the Davidson County Board of Education. Sims was a driving force in reopening Vanderbilt Law School after World War II--without his efforts, the school might not even exist. Today, the Law School's most prominent annual lecture series still bears the Sims name. Vanderbilt Law School's history is intertwined with Sims's story. Sims's story, in turn, is intertwined with the racial oppression and inequality still present in Nashville today. Sims was a key architect of the city's school desegregation plan, which, though in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education, effectively maintained racial apartheid in public schools. If Sims's legacy includes his contributions to the Law School, so too does it encompass his role in helping to create Nashville's still-segregated school system. An honest account of Sims's life--and of Vanderbilt Law School's institutional history--requires both stories. Cecil Sims shows us that lawyers are not merely passive participants in the legal and political systems in which we work. Lawyers are leaders, for good or for ill. Stories like that of Cecil Sims, when told honestly, help us to think critically about our own roles as students, professionals, and scholars in the legal system. As Professor Sharfstein writes, lawyers construct worlds. We share this history in the hope that we may build better ones., INTRODUCTION 1436 I. SIMS BEFORE BROWN-. THE SOUTHERN STATES' ATTEMPT TO TAKE OVER MEHARRY MEDICAL COLLEGE IN THE 1940S 1448 II. SIMS AFTER BROWN. MODERATE BY DEFAULT 1454 CONCLUSION 1462 [...]

The city of Inglewood, population 140,000, lies in the southwest corner of the Los Angeles sprawl. It has the features of almost every other L.A. suburb--long commercial strips of burger [...]

In liberal, democratic Ghana, the independent newspapers vie to print the most lurid scandals involving government officials, in stark contrast to the bland state-owned newspapers, which cover development projects, spiced […]

Beginning with the assumption that race is a conceptual blur, this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies" argues that race conflates what is plain to see with something that is invisible. Race roots today's policy decisions in a remote and often imagined past. It blurs agency and overwhelming structural inequality. It is a set of categories that people define for themselves and that, at the same time, others - strangers, neighbors, government officials - relentlessly impose upon them. For four hundred years, the meaning of racial categories in North America has remained unstable. A central question underlying the history of race in the United States is how people could acknowledge the incoherence of racial categories while still structuring their lives, communities, politics, and culture around the idea of race. At a fundamental level, race has functioned as a set of rules and rights-and legal entitlements and disabilities are a primary source of meaning for racial categories. The law provides a starting point for understanding how there could be so much consensus regarding such a blur. Legal decision making is itself a process that blurs what is objective and subjective, scientific and social, precise and penumbral. Taken together, the pervasive fuzziness of race and law ensured the resilience of clear and definable regimes of discrimination and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal’s “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors’ assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” (on Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel) with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist (and sinologist) François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers his insight on the historical narratives of the property scholarship of historian Carol Rose. He is fascinated by the discussions of Rose on storytelling mode in property theory. He finds it hard to classify the histories of Rose as she integrated political, intellectual and doctrinal legal history with the cultural and social context. He adds that Rose's works involve incidents and concepts from ancient Greece and Rome, the European Enlightenment, and the Middle Ages.