Individually, Loyola University Chicago School of Law professors Steven A. Ramirez and Neil G. Williams are change agents for social justice. Together, they’re building a new legacy for the School of Law through their anti-racist teaching and scholarship. They’ve co-authored two powerful articles in the Case Western Reserve Law Review: “On the Permanence of Racial Injustice and the Possibility of Deracialization“ (2018) and “Deracialization and Democracy“ (2019). They’re writing a third article that highlights some of the great dissents by the likes of U.S. Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others, that would have created pathways to dismantling America’s racial hierarchy.

Ending the war on drugs

An expert in law and poverty, race and the law, and business law, Ramirez has published extensively in the areas of law and macroeconomics, corporate governance, and financial regulation. His focus on the destruction of human capital implicit in our racial hierarchy led him to work on diversity and anti-racism. Part of Ramirez’s anti-racist scholarship currently focuses on ending the war on drugs, a goal that stems from racial injustices he witnessed in high school. “It bothered me that so many people of color were being carted off to jail for doing the same thing that their white counterparts were doing in more prosperous areas,” Ramirez says. “Ending the war on drugs would be a huge step in the right direction for those of us who know that race is a social construct, and our racial hierarchy ought to be deconstructed and disrupted.” Ramirez’s latest article (co-authored with andre cummings), “Roadmap for Anti-racism: First Unwind the War on Drugs Now,” will be published in the Tulane Law Review later this year.

History of eradicating discrimination in contracts

An expert in contract law, Williams has written a proposal for a model to eradicate discrimination throughout the bargaining process, as well as a model for awarding damages under promissory estoppel. That path-breaking work appeared in the Washington Law Review (1995). His article “A Reflection on Integration” was selected to be part of the forthcoming Volume XVII of the Journal of Critical Law Studies of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico.

Williams still finds inspiration in his mentor, civil rights titan Norman Amaker, who worked with Thurgood Marshall on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund before serving on Loyola University Chicago’s law faculty for 25 years. “Loyola really is on its way to living up to being an anti-racist law school,” says Williams. “It’s in our bones and in our blood.”