Hispanic law reviews provide an outlet to address Latino issues overlooked by other law reviews.
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.
“The specialized Latino law reviews have been very helpful for us in expanding consideration of civil rights beyond the traditional binary paradigm of Black and White,” Delgado adds.
Says Stefancic: “They provide an outlet for specialized pieces that other law reviews pass over.” Launched on the heels of the Mexican American-based Chicano movement, the UCLA-based review later expanded its focus and changed its name to the Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review. In 1983, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal published its first issue. And in 1992 and 1994, respectively, the other two joined the legal scholarship scene: the Hispanic Law Journal at the University of Texas at Austin, now the Texas Hispanic Journal of Law & Policy, as well as the Harvard Latino Law Review.
