Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Law
Localities As Equality Innovators, Robin A. Lenhardt
Localities As Equality Innovators, Robin A. Lenhardt
Faculty Scholarship
This Article thus argues that instead of regarding cities and localities that, like Seattle and Louisville, try to develop serious solutions to existing racial disparities as "bad cities" no different from those whose notorious policies spurred the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, we should be regarding them as potential "equality innovators.” Their on-the-ground experience with the realities of race and its operation in the twenty-first century arguably places them in a better position than courts to develop innovative approaches to the structural racial inequities with which so many municipalities must grapple. Existing doctrine limits dramatically the ability …
Race Audits, Robin A. Lenhardt
Race Audits, Robin A. Lenhardt
Faculty Scholarship
The U.S. Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence suffers from a stunning lack of imagination where possibilities for meaningful local government involvement in combating structural racial inequality are concerned. Cases such as Parents. and Ricci limit dramatically the freedom that localities have to address racial inequity within their borders. Instead of constraints on local efforts in the race context, Professor Lenhardt argues that what we need, if persistent racial inequalities are ever to be eliminated, is greater innovation and experimentation. In this article, Professor Lenhardt thus introduces an extra-judicial tool called the race audit, which would permit individual cities or a regional …
Beyond Analogy: Perez V. Sharp, Antimiscegenation Law, And The Fight For Same-Sex Marriage, Robin A. Lenhardt
Beyond Analogy: Perez V. Sharp, Antimiscegenation Law, And The Fight For Same-Sex Marriage, Robin A. Lenhardt
Faculty Scholarship
Conversations about the constitutionality of prohibitions on marriage for same-sex couples invariably reduce to the question of whether a meaningful analogy can be drawn between restrictions on same-sex marriage and antimiscegenation laws. In an effort to refocus this debate, this article considers the California Supreme Court's 1948 decision in Perez v. Sharp and its use by advocates in recent litigation to secure marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. Opponents of marriage rights for members of the LGBT *840 community frequently assert that dispatching Perez in these cases distorts the meaning of that decision and other similar precedents by drawing …
Understanding The Mark: Race, Stigma, And Equality In Context, Robin A. Lenhardt
Understanding The Mark: Race, Stigma, And Equality In Context, Robin A. Lenhardt
Faculty Scholarship
In its Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, the Supreme Court regards intentional discrimination as the principal source of racial injury in the United States. In this Article, R.A. Lenhardt argues that racial stigma, not intentional discrimination, constitutes the main source of racial harm and that courts must take the social science insight that most racialized conduct or thought is unconscious, rather than intentional, into account in their constitutional analyses of acts or policies challenged on the grounds of race. Drawing on the social science work of Erving Goffman and the ground-breaking work of Charles H. Lawrence, Professor Lenhardt argues that courts should …
Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury
Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court increasingly has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a mandate for the state to treat citizens as if they were equal-as a limitation on the state's ability to draw distinctions on the basis of characteristics such as race and, to a lesser extent, gender. In the context of race, the Court has struck down not only race-specific policies designed to harm the historically oppressed, but race conscious policies designed to foster racial equality. Although in theory the Court has left open the possibility that benign uses of race may be constitutional under some set of facts, in …
Racial Reflections: Dialogues In The Direction Of Liberation , Derrick Bell, Tracy Higgins, Sung-Hee Suh
Racial Reflections: Dialogues In The Direction Of Liberation , Derrick Bell, Tracy Higgins, Sung-Hee Suh
Faculty Scholarship
"New voices" of future lawyers are particularly important in the area of civil rights because racial problems are theirs to confront in the next decades. Teaching techniques developed by Paulo Freire have facilitated the enlistment of students in the racial struggle. By these techniques teachers, as well as students, learn through sharing, and students become active participants, rather than passive observers, in the learning process. The educational process, Freire counsels, ''must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. In the fall of 1988, two …