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Reckoning with Race and Disability: Guardianship and Racial Extraction

Our national reckoning with racial injustice will be incomplete until we contend with the relationship between race and disability as legal categories in American law and policy. This discussion offers an opportunity to explore the intersection of race and disability through the history of one specific institution –guardianship. I argue that the racial extraction of labor, land, and sovereignty was made possible by the imposition of legal labels of disability and incapacity. While a robust literature details the history of extraction in the context of indigenous land and sovereignty and recognizes the fraught status of free Black Americans during the antebellum period, these stories live primarily in the histories of racial justice and do not attend to the operation of disability as the legal throughline. This discussion will reframe known historical moments through a disability lens and argue why guardianship sits at the heart of these stories with lessons for how we think about legal constructions of incapacity and personhood today.

Jasmine E. Harris is a law and inequality legal scholar with expertise in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. Her work seeks to address the relationship between law and equality with a focus on law’s capacity to advance social norms of inclusion in the context of disability.

Her recent academic articles have or will appear in such publications as the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, Cornell Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, and the Journal of Legal Education. Harris recently joined leading evidence law experts as a co-editor of the preeminent evidence treatise, McCormick on Evidence.

Harris also writes frequently about disability and equality law for popular audiences. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Magazine, and Tribune Wire, in addition to academic blogs such as the American Constitution Society’s Expert Forum and Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center’s Bill of Health. She is regularly interviewed and has been widely quoted in publications and media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, CNBC, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, Chronicle of Higher Education, Guardian, Harper’s BAZAAR, and USA Today.

Harris consults with federal and state lawmakers and legal advocates on issues of legislative and policy reforms related to disability laws. She also serves on the Board of Directors for The Arc of the United States and as Chair of the Legal Advocacy Subcommittee to advise the organization on impact litigation.

Harris graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American & Caribbean Studies. She received her juris doctorate from Yale Law and clerked for the late Honorable Harold Baer, Jr., United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. She has worked in both private and public interest law. Harris practiced complex commercial litigation, securities, and government investigations as a Senior Associate with WilmerHale. She also worked as a staff attorney at Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, where she assisted grassroots advocacy campaigns to advance racial justice in education and address the school to prison pipeline through legal, policy, and communications efforts.

More information to follow. Please contact Onell Berrios with any questions.