Monday, April 27, 2009

Expanding the Conversation


Expanding the Conversation: They’re not the topics found in a conventional law review: An Austinbased journal delved into the reproductive rights of Hispanic women entering into commercial surrogacy contracts.

The next issue of a University of California, Berkeley-based journal will probe the Voting Rights Act — and how it affects Puerto Ricans. A Harvard-based review once took on taxation of undocumented immigrants. And at the University of California, Los Angeles, this semester, the review will turn a mirror on itself and others with a historical look back at Hispanic law reviews.

Not your traditional topics. And that, precisely, has been the point of the four Hispanic- focused, student-edited publications that began with the first, UCLA’s Chicano Law Review, in 1972.

“Too often, civil rights scholarship means writing about the issues and problems of Blacks. Not immigrants. Not people who are Spanish-speaking,” says Seattle University law professor Richard Delgado, whose new book Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials, co-authored with Seattle University research professor Jean Stefancic and University of Florida law professor Juan Perea, will be dissected in the next issue of the Harvard Latino Law Review.