Purpose of the group
This Group provides a unique opportunity to convene scholars working on different fields and areas of law to create novel and illuminating intersections for understanding how the multifaceted and complex phenomena of race, ethnicity and identity are conceptualized and operationalized. The challenge and goal is to bridge and cross-fertilize discourses and narratives on race (in the US), ethnicity (in various jurisdictions), the continental European framework of (collective claim-based) national minority rights, and the conceptual and policy toolkit of aboriginal/indigenous law – along the assessment of how substantive or procedural law encapsulates identity (claims, disclosures or validations.)
Scholarship on a wide variety of issues is discussed under the auspices of the RG: scrutinizing existing legal definitions for race, ethnicity, nationality or even religion in ethno-racial census categories, the definitions used for national minorities or indigenous/aboriginal groups and castes, as well as enumerated racial or ethnic groups for anti-discrimination, hate crime legislation, affirmative action, and other forms of preferential treatment, as well as the assessment of policies on the political participation of minorities, minority policies in the fields of education and employment, naturalization policies, just as the question of how family law introduces and operationalizes racial or ethno-religious identity in creating separate clusters for jurisdiction and substantive law.
Questions may either concern the groups or affiliation criteria, and include discussions on whether hate crimes are “minority-”, or ”identity protection” instruments, or how “particular social group” is operationalized in refugee law. Discussions may include the “return of biology” in the post-Human Genome Project-era: that is how the concept of race is operationalized by genetically informed accounts of difference in the biomedical field of marketing race-specific drugs, in law enforcement by forensic DNA phenotyping, commercial ancestry tests, or assisted reproductive technologies to establish genetic ethnicity in litigation and policy making. etc.
In all areas the scrutiny of conceptualization may include definitions, classification, registration and targeting policies. Inquiries may also include defining the titular (ethno-)national majority in various forms of “constitutional nationalism” and constitutional identities, or how the “agency” of the respective communities is factored into legislation or policy-making. Discussions may include the investigation of box-ticking, racial fraud, ethnocorruption, or simply the process and ethics of creating legislative frameworks for national minorities by delineating deserving and non-deserving groups and creating “hierachies of ethnicity”, or how race/ethnicity is rendered invisible in failing to prosecute hate crimes or combating systematic or institutional discrimination.