it's not up to me

The applications are complete.

I've done all that I can do for the grad school apps. It's now in the hands of the registrars who are forwarding my transcripts and my professors who are writing letters of recommendation.

I have yet to finalize the law school applications for Penn and Tulane. Or take the LSAT; that fateful experience is slated to occur on 12/5. But that's okay, because my deadlines for those applications are not immediately upon me.

And so the waiting begins. My future is in the hands of the various admissions committees.

Acceptance decisions aren't usually made until Spring, so I'm in for a long dark winter of uncertainty.

flappers of color

I recently read Flapper, by Josh Zeitz, for my American History class, and came to the realization that the lives of flappers of color is a topic that is ripe for dissertation-type research.

While I find this incredibly interesting, I'm not immediately drawn to it as a research topic for myself because I haven't yet found a connection to the law.

Unless it would be the relative freedom that women of color had to embrace a flapper lifestyle because they were not bound to the virtue of white womanhood... but is this a real legal freedom or simply a cultural freedom?

That's the initial research question, I suppose.

miscegenation

I want to research the sticky situation of mixed race children in America. I've done this in the past, with a focus on slavery times, but without a specific, coherent research strategy. (It was, in fact, the first upper-level research paper I authored!) Next time I aim to do it better.

The thing is that the existence of mixed race children in a racially stratified society is an affront to the power hierarchy of that society, and I'm curious to better learn how America has dealt with this problem.

I know from my previous research that antebellum America's solution -- assigning the status, slave or free, of a child based on that of its mother -- did not solve the problems that arose because of miscegenation.

What I'd like to research next is the legal status of mulatto bastards during Reconstruction and up to the Great Depression. I wonder what legal recourse did the mothers - black and white - have to seek financial support from the putative fathers? And in an era before genetic testing, what was the legal standard for proving paternity? How did this impact the lives of these children?