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Two Approaches To Equality, With Implications For Grutter, Keith N. Hylton
Two Approaches To Equality, With Implications For Grutter, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
The question “what is equality?”, applied to the distribution of resources across races, suggests the following answer: when there appears to be no need for a policy that focuses on improving the welfare of one race relative to another. There is another way to approach the same question: equality is when traditionally-recognized paths to advancement do not give preference to or disadvantage an individual because of his race. Notice the difference here is between end-state and process-based notions of equality, a distinction Nozick emphasized in his examination of justice in distribution. Nozick rejected end-state theories of justice in distribution. I …
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert L. Tsai
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This essay examines the Supreme Court's stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie …
The Unnecessary And Unfortunate Focus On “Animus,” “Bare Desire To Harm,” And “Bigotry” In Analyzing Opposition To Gay And Lesbian Rights, James E. Fleming
The Unnecessary And Unfortunate Focus On “Animus,” “Bare Desire To Harm,” And “Bigotry” In Analyzing Opposition To Gay And Lesbian Rights, James E. Fleming
Faculty Scholarship
I am delighted to participate in this symposium on Professor Linda C. McClain’s wonderful new book, Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. All of the other papers in this symposium focus on Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (and thus connect with Chapter Eight of her book, on claims of religious exemptions from protections of gay and lesbian rights), while my piece will join issue with the related Chapter Seven, on bigotry, motives, and morality in the Supreme Court’s gay and lesbian rights cases. In this brief Essay, I cannot do justice …
Immigration Unilateralism And American Ethnonationalism, Robert L. Tsai
Immigration Unilateralism And American Ethnonationalism, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This paper arose from an invited symposium on "Democracy in America: The Promise and the Perils," held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Spring 2019. The essay places the Trump administration’s immigration and refugee policy in the context of a resurgent ethnonationalist movement in America as well as the constitutional politics of the past. In particular, it argues that Trumpism’s suspicion of foreigners who are Hispanic or Muslim, its move toward indefinite detention and separation of families, and its disdain for so-called “chain migration” are best understood as part of an assault on the political settlement of the …
The Case For Lgbt Equality: Reviving The Political Process Doctrine And Repurposing The Dormant Commerce Clause, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby
The Case For Lgbt Equality: Reviving The Political Process Doctrine And Repurposing The Dormant Commerce Clause, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
From Outlaw To Outcast To In-Law? Contesting The Perils Of Marriage Equality, Linda C. Mcclain
From Outlaw To Outcast To In-Law? Contesting The Perils Of Marriage Equality, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
I am pleased to offer the opening commentary in this BU Law Review Annex symposium on Professor Katherine Franke’s provocative new book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. As previewed by the book’s additional subtitle, “How African Americans and Gays Mistakenly Thought the Right to Marry Would Set Them Free,” Franke aims to provide “cautionary tales” gleaned, or lessons learned, from juxtaposing post-Civil War regulation of the marriages of African Americans freed from slavery with today’s movement for marriage equality for gay men and lesbians.3 Long a skeptic about the gay community’s focus on the goal of marriage—its (in …
Reynolds Reconsidered, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer
Reynolds Reconsidered, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Symposium: Building The Arc Of Justice: The Life And Legal Thought Of Derrick Bell: Foreword, Matthew H. Charity
Symposium: Building The Arc Of Justice: The Life And Legal Thought Of Derrick Bell: Foreword, Matthew H. Charity
Faculty Scholarship
The four articles in this Symposium issue pay tribute to the work of Professor Derrick Bell by building on his challenges to the permanence of racial domination, to the potential limitations of good will inherent in the concept of interest convergence, and to the question of permanence not just of racism, but of other systemic biases since recognized, written on, and litigated. The articles range from the 19th century to the hegemonic war on terror, from Latin identity as a disruptive force, to recognition of subjugated identities allowing for the creation of coalitions to end oppression.
Title Vii At 50: Contemporary Challenges For U.S. Employment Discrimination Law, Trina Jones
Title Vii At 50: Contemporary Challenges For U.S. Employment Discrimination Law, Trina Jones
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Objectivity: A Feminist Revisit, Katharine T. Bartlett
Objectivity: A Feminist Revisit, Katharine T. Bartlett
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …
Has The Roberts Court Plurality's Colorblind Rhetoric Finally Broken Brown's Promise?, Phoebe A. Haddon
Has The Roberts Court Plurality's Colorblind Rhetoric Finally Broken Brown's Promise?, Phoebe A. Haddon
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay examines the continuing significance of the Keyes decision to the judicial vision of equality and racial isolation in public education. By comparing efforts to promote educational equality from the Keyes era through today, this Essay asserts that the judiciary has wrongly embraced a colorblind interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause. In so doing, courts have impeded the progress of children in Denver and around the country, ignored highly instructive social science studies on the benefits of desegregation, and broken the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. For future policy makers and lawyers to address these persistent problems, legal educators …
Book Review, Darrell A. H. Miller
Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through The Lens Of The California Law Review, Katharine T. Bartlett
Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through The Lens Of The California Law Review, Katharine T. Bartlett
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay describes the evolution of feminist legal scholarship, using six articles published by the California Law Review as exemplars. This short history provides a window on the most important contributions of feminist scholarship to understandings about gender and law. It explores alternative formulations of equality, and the competing assumptions, ideals, and implications of these formulations. It describes frameworks of thought intended to compensate for the limitations of equality doctrine, including critical legal feminism, different voice theory, and nonsubordination theory, and the relationships between these frameworks. Finally, it identifies feminist legal scholarship that has crossed the disciplinary bound-aries of law. …
Beyond The Private Attorney General: Equality Directives In American Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Beyond The Private Attorney General: Equality Directives In American Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
American civil rights regulation is generally understood as relying on private enforcement in courts rather than imposing positive duties on state actors to further equity goals. This Article argues that this dominant conception of American civil rights regulation is incomplete. American civil rights regulation also contains a set of "equality directives," whose emergence and reach in recent years have gone unrecognized in the commentary. These federal-level equality directives use administrative tools of conditioned spending, policymaking, and oversight powerfully to promote substantive inclusion with regard to race, ethnicity, language, and disability. These directives move beyond the constraints of the standard private …
Showcasing: The Positive Spin, Katharine T. Bartlett
Showcasing: The Positive Spin, Katharine T. Bartlett
Faculty Scholarship
This Commentary outlines the positive case for showcasing diversity. Patrick Shin and Mitu Gulati criticize showcasing on the grounds that appointing women and minorities to board directorships is unreliable as a sign of true commitment to diversity and, further, that showcasing is detrimental to women and minorities because it treats them as objects or “prized trophies.” Drawing on social psychology, this Commentary highlights the mechanisms through which showcasing, despite the negative features emphasized by Shin and Gulati, also reinforces diversity values and strengthens the existing societal consensus in favor of diversity.
Showcasing Diversity, Mitu Gulati, Patrick S. Shin
Showcasing Diversity, Mitu Gulati, Patrick S. Shin
Faculty Scholarship
Diversity initiatives are commonplace in today’s corporate America. Large and successful firms frequently tout their commitments to diversity, sometimes appointing women and racial minorities to highly visible posts, including seats on their boards of directors. Why would a profit-minded firm engage in such behavior? One frequently voiced explanation is that by creating such diversity, firms send out a positive signal about their attributes: a firm’s willingness to expend resources on diversity shows its commitment to workplace fairness and equality, which makes it more attractive to potential employees, customers and financiers. This claim has considerable surface appeal not only as an …
A Post-Race Equal Protection?, Trina Jones, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky
A Post-Race Equal Protection?, Trina Jones, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky
Faculty Scholarship
Most vividly demonstrated in the 2008 election of the first African-American President of the United States, post-race is a term that has been widely used to characterize a belief in the declining significance of race in the United States. Post-racialists, then, believe that racial discrimination is rare and aberrant behavior as evidenced by America’s pronounced racial progress. One practical consequence of a commitment to post-racialism is the belief that governments - both state and federal - should not consider race in their decision making. One might imagine that the recent explosion in post-racial discourse also portends a revised understanding of …
Do We Care Enough About Racial Inequality? Reflections On The River Runs Dry, Guy-Uriel Charles
Do We Care Enough About Racial Inequality? Reflections On The River Runs Dry, Guy-Uriel Charles
Faculty Scholarship
In response to Kimberly West-Faulcon, The River Runs Dry: When Title VI Trumps State Anti–Affirmative Action Laws, 157 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1075 (2009)
To Kill A Mockingbird Perspectives, Sherrilyn A. Ifill
To Kill A Mockingbird Perspectives, Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Faculty Scholarship
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most influential and widely acclaimed legal novels in American history. It tells the story of a small-town white lawyer who is appointed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is one of the great legal heroes of American fiction. The story, told from the perspective of Atticus' daughter Scout, explores race, class, gender, family and law. Most of all it is a both critical and loving account of the white South. This article is a personal story about the influence of …
Constitutional Tipping Points: Civil Rights, Social Change, And Fact-Based Adjudication, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Constitutional Tipping Points: Civil Rights, Social Change, And Fact-Based Adjudication, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
This Article offers an account of how courts respond to social change, with a specific focus on the process by which courts "tip" from one understanding of a social group and its constitutional claims to another. Adjudication of equal protection and due process claims, in particular, requires courts to make normative judgments regarding the effect of traits such as race, sex, sexual orientation, or mental retardation on group members' status and capacity. Yet, Professor Goldberg argues, courts commonly approach decisionmaking by focusing only on the 'facts" about a social group, an approach that she terms 'fact-based adjudication." Professor Goldberg critiques …
On The Path To Inclusion, John D. Feerick
On The Path To Inclusion, John D. Feerick
Faculty Scholarship
It is an honor for me to be invited to address you at this Annual Luncheon. You have worked hard to bring opportunities to members of the minority community. You have made possible the realization of many aspirations while continuing the struggle toward equal opportunity for all people.* Thirty-nine years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to the soul of the nation, sharing his vision of an America that would "one day...rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed-'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all [persons] are created equal." His idea and the opportunity …
Marriage As A Trade: Bridging The Private/Private Distinction, Martha M. Ertman
Marriage As A Trade: Bridging The Private/Private Distinction, Martha M. Ertman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Deliberative Democracy, Overlapping Consensus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain
Deliberative Democracy, Overlapping Consensus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
A pressing concern in political and constitutional theory is how to construct a model of justification in law and politics that offers methods for securing agreement and social cooperation in the face of moral pluralism. A common goal of this work is to elaborate the requirements of deliberative democracy, that is, a model of democratic self-government that "asks citizens and officials to justify public policy by giving reasons that can be accepted by those who are bound by it."' Two fundamental questions are: (1) are there any limits to the grounds to which citizens may appeal or the reasons that …
Toleration, Autonomy, And Governmental Promotion Of Good Lives: Beyond 'Empty' Toleration To Toleration As Respect, Linda C. Mcclain
Toleration, Autonomy, And Governmental Promotion Of Good Lives: Beyond 'Empty' Toleration To Toleration As Respect, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
This Article considers discontent with liberal toleration as being both too empty, because it fails to secure respect and appreciation among citizens who tolerate each other, and too robust, because it precludes government from engaging in a formative project of helping citizens to live good, self-governing lives. To meet these criticisms, the Article advances a model of toleration as respect, as distinguished from a model of empty toleration, drawing on three rationales for toleration: the anti-compulsion rationale, the jurisdictional rationale, and the diversity rationale. It defends toleration as respect against some common criticisms-emanating from feminist, civic republican, and liberal perfectionist …
The Poverty Of Privacy?, Linda C. Mcclain
The Poverty Of Privacy?, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
This Article has two aims. First, it defends a continuing role for the right of privacy in arguments -for women's reproductive freedom against charges that privacy is an impoverished concept. Second, it raises cautions about certain feminist critiques of privacy that would ground this freedom in notions of reproductive responsibilities. As this Article was first presented at a conference, "Reproductive Issues in a Post-Roe' World," held in the wake of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services,2 the first question is: Are we now, given the Supreme Court's recent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey,' in a "post-Roe world"? Furthermore, what remains …