Race and Property Law in Los Angeles from 1892 to 1948
Race and Property Law in Los Angeles - 1892 to 1948
Legal Research
This project involved research into the development of legal arguments and caselaw relating to racially restrictive covenants (RRCs) in Los Angeles, California.
Illustrating Historic Legal Cases: I created a visual representation of the properties involved in Fairchild v. Raines, 24 Cal. 2d 818 (1944), using data from historic case materials and a plat map from LA County’s online land databases. The illustration was produced in Adobe Illustrator in a standard Power Point size. Similar illustrations were used by RRC attorneys in the materials which I reviewed, though they were, of course, hand drawn.
Historical Case Review: Archival Requests and Online Databases – The historical materials of more than 20 cases were reviewed in order to assess both the legal outcomes (in trial court and upon appeal) and the arguments and strategies utilized by attorneys. The cases were decided during the period from 1892 to 1948. For most of these cases, I submitted requests with the California Archives in order to acquire the materials. I subsequently scanned and ran basic text recognition in Adobe Acrobat, and then reviewed and submitted exerts to the managing professor. For other cases, information was obtained from reprints of court decisions in newspapers or in other historic publications.
Social Perspectives Considered: This project was as much about the Black attorneys leading the early fight against RRCs as is was about the development of the law.1In the 1940s, the social arguments against RRCs were increasingly used as legal arguments (public policy arguments but also out of the box legal arguments which were labeled the “education method” by the NAACP). Archived newspapers, periodicals, and law journals were reviewed in order to bring in the then-existing social perspective to the study. I used dozens of databases to accomplish this task and submitted several hundred pages of choice excerpts and articles. Material was also submitted from more recently written books and published law journals, in order to recognize and build upon the works of other scholars.
Information Management and Reporting: Throughout my posting as a research assistant, I submitted written reports and met with the professor. At the conclusion of my post, excerpts from cases, historic publications, and recent publications were indexed and placed into three master pdf files that, in total, exceed 1000 pages. Source documents were organized and saved to shared folder. Generally, file naming procedures were closely adhered to (especially for historic news and case materials).
