UMass Law News UMass Law News: UMass Law professor publishes essay on equal protection and reparative policy

Lisa Lucile Owens introduces the “Historical Racial Nexus” framework as a historically grounded approach to race-conscious policymaking within modern constitutional doctrine

Assistant Professor of Law Lisa Lucile Owens recently published a new Essay, Race as Evidence: The Historical Racial Nexus and Equal Protection, introducing the Historical Racial Nexus ("HRN") framework and contributing to ongoing conversations surrounding equal protection, reparative policy, and constitutional law. Recently published in the online edition of the Washington University Law Review, the Essay enters the discussion at a moment when courts are increasingly skeptical of race-conscious policymaking following decisions such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The Essay proposes HRN as a framework designed to operate within the constraints of contemporary strict scrutiny doctrine while offering a more historically grounded approach to race-conscious policy. Rather than treating race as a fixed identity category, HRN conceptualizes race as evidence of specific, documented government-inflicted harm and ties remedial eligibility to identifiable historical and causal connections. Through discussions of the Evanston, Illinois, reparations initiative and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Owens argues that historically specific remedies may satisfy modern equal protection requirements when carefully tailored to past constitutional injury. The Essay also addresses the longstanding tension between social scientific understandings of race as fluid and socially constructed and the law's tendency to treat race as fixed and essential.

The Essay builds on Owens' broader body of scholarship examining the intersection of property law, constitutional law, and inequality. In earlier work, including An Argument for Housing Reparations, Owens explored how legal structures governing property ownership, housing access, and state action have contributed to enduring racial disparities — and how law might more meaningfully address those harms. The Historical Racial Nexus framework extends those concerns into equal protection doctrine by offering a constitutional model for historically grounded remediation.