Faculty
Taunya Lovell Banks
Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence
Phone: (410) 706-3850Fax: (410) 706-6644
E-mail:
Office: 383
BA, 1965, Syracuse University
JD, 1968, Howard University
Taunya Lovell Banks is the Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence at the University of Maryland School of Law where she teaches constitutional law, torts, and seminars on law in popular culture (film or literature), citizenship and critical race theory. Prior to entering legal education in 1976, she worked as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, litigating voting rights and housing discrimination cases and providing technical assistance to black elected officials. During the 1979-1980 academic year she worked as a senior trial attorney for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Los Angeles, litigating some of the early sexual harassment cases under the interim guidelines.
Professor Banks' most recent publications explore the continuing impact of gender, race, racial formation and racial hierarchies on the quest for social equality. She also writes about law, lawyers and legal issues in film and on television. Earlier publications include several articles and book chapters on legal and public health issues facing women infected with the HIV virus; and an empirical study of gender bias in law school classrooms. She is a contributing co-editor of SCREENING JUSTICE- THE CINEMA OF LAW: FILMS OF LAW, ORDER, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. Her current research projects include a legal memoir exploring her and the nation’s changing views on race from the mid twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Professor Banks served on the Editorial Board of the JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION and the advisory committee of the LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW. She is a former member of the Association of American Law Schools’ Executive Committee, and two-term Trustee of the Law School Admissions Council.
Books
Contributing Editor, Screening Justice - The Cinema of Law: Films of Law, Order and Social Justice (2006) (with Rennard Strickland & Teree Foster). [Abstract]
Articles
Articles from 2000-present. For earlier publications, see my Selected Works page.
The Unfinished Journey - Education, Equality and Martin Luther King, Jr., Revisited, 58 Villanova Law Review 471 (2013). [Full Text]
Black Pluralism in Post Loving America, in Loving v. Virginia: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage in a "Post Racial" World (Kevin Noble Maillard & Rose Cuison Villazar eds., 2012). [Abstract]
Dark Justice: Women Legal Actors on Basic Cable, in Law and Justice on the Small Screen 135 (Peter Robson & Jessica Silbey eds., 2012). [Abstract]
Funding Race as Biology: The Relevance of "Race" in Medical Research, 12 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology 571 (2011). [Full Text]
Book Review, 44 Law & Society Review 881 (2010) (reviewing Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America). [Full Text]
Thurgood Marshall, the Race Man, and Gender Equality in the Courts, 18 Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law 15 (2010). [Full Text]
Troubled Waters: Mid-Twentieth Century American Society on "Trial" in the Films of John Waters, 39 Stetson Law Review 153 (2009). [Full Text]
A Few Random Thoughts About Socio-Economic "Rights" in the United States in Light of the 2008 Financial Meltdown, 24 Maryland Journal of International Law 163 (2009). [Full Text]
Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About the Internment of Japanese Americans, 42 Suffolk University Law Review 769 (2009). [Full Text]
Judging the Judges - Daytime Television's Integrated Reality Court Bench, in Lawyers on Television: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Michael Asimow ed., 2009) [Full Text]
Multi-Layered Racism: Courts’ Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims, in Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters (Evelyn Nakano Glenn ed., 2009). [Full Text]
Equality and Sorority during the Decade after Brown, in Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education 161 (Mildred Wigfall Robinson & Richard J. Bonnie eds., 2009). [Full Text]
Balancing Competing Individual Constitutional Rights: Raising Some Questions, in Law and Rights: Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Governance (Penelope Andrews & Susan Bazilli eds., 2008). [Full Text]
Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia, 41 Akron Law Review 799 (2008). [Full Text]
Here Comes the Judge! Gender Distortion on TV Reality Court Shows, 39 University of Baltimore Law Forum 38 (2008). [Full Text]
What Documentary Films Teach Us about the Criminal Justice System—Introduction, 8 University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class 1 (2008). [Full Text]
Trampling Whose Rights? Democratic Majority Rule and Racial Minorities: A Response to Chin and Wagner, 43 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 127 (2008). [Full Text]
To Kill a Mockingbird: Lawyering in an Unjust Society, in Screening Justice - The Cinema of Law: Films of Law, Order and Social Justice (Rennard Strickland et al. eds., 2006) []
Unreconstructed Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There is No Blackness, 15 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 199 (2006). [Full Text]
Lawrence Summers at the NBER Conference: The Real Deal, 11 Cardozo Women's Law Journal 501 (2005). [Full Text]
Brown at 50: Reconstructing Brown’s Promise, 44 Washburn Law Journal 31 (2005). [Full Text]
Setting the Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, 63 Maryland Law Review 752 (2004). [Full Text]
Exploring White Resistance to Racial Reconciliation in the United States, 55 Rutgers Law Review 903 (2003). [Full Text]
Two “Colored” Women's Conversation About the Relevance of Feminist Law Journals in the Twenty-First Century, 12 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 498 (2003) (with Penelope Andrews). [Full Text]
Both Edges of the Margin: Blacks and Asians in Mississippi Masala, Barriers to Coalition Building, 5 Asian Law Journal 7 (1998), reprinted in The Conflict and Culture Reader (Pat K. Chew, ed. 2001) and in Law Through Asian American Eyes: A Critical Inquiry for Multi-Racial America (Eric Yamamoto et al. eds., 2002). [Full Text]
Toward a Global Critical Feminist Vision: Domestic Work and the Nanny Tax Debate, 3 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 1 (1999), reprinted in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader (Adrien Wing ed., 2d ed. 2002), and in Beyond Essentialism: A Reader at the Intersections of Race, Class and Gender (Nancy Dowd & Michelle Jacobs eds., 2002). [Full Text]
Colorism: A Darker Shade of Pale, 47 U.C.L.A. Law Review 1705 (2000), reprinted in Mixed Race America: A Critical Reader (Kevin R. Johnson ed., 2002). [Full Text]
The Black Side of the Mirror: Black Women’s Physical Images and Workplace Discrimination, in Sister Circle: Black Women Represent Work (Sharon Harley ed., 2002). [Full Text]
What is a Community? Group Rights and the Constitution: The Special Case of African Americans, 1 Margins 51 (2001). [Full Text]
Race Talk, 20 Boston College Third World Law Journal 183 (2000) (reviewing Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1998)). [Full Text]
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