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Full-Text Articles in Law
When Claims Collide: Students For Fair Admissions V. Harvard And The Meaning Of Discrimination, Cara Mcclellan
When Claims Collide: Students For Fair Admissions V. Harvard And The Meaning Of Discrimination, Cara Mcclellan
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This term, the Supreme Court will decide Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA v. Harvard), a challenge to Harvard College’s race-conscious admissions program. While litigation challenging the use of race in higher education admissions spans over five decades, previous attacks on race-conscious admissions systems were brought by white plaintiffs alleging “reverse discrimination” based on the theory that a university discriminated against them by assigning a plus factor to underrepresented minority applicants. SFFA v. Harvard is distinct from these cases because the plaintiff organization, SFFA, brought a claim alleging that Harvard engages in intentional discrimination …
Reckoning With Race And Disability, Jasmine E. Harris
Reckoning With Race And Disability, Jasmine E. Harris
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Our national reckoning with race and inequality must include disability. Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history. Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy. This approach has ignored the ways in which states have relied on disability as a tool of subordination, leading to the invisibility of disabled people of color in civil rights movements and an incomplete theoretical and remedial framework for contemporary justice initiatives. Legal scholars …
Velvet Rope Discrimination, Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Velvet Rope Discrimination, Shaun Ossei-Owusu
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Public accommodations are private and public facilities that are held out to and used by the public. Public accommodations were significant battlegrounds for the Civil Rights Movement as protesters and litigators fought for equal access to swimming pools, movie theaters, and lunch counters. These sites were also important for the Women’s Rights Movement, which challenged sexist norms that prohibited their service in bars and restaurants if they were unaccompanied by men. Tragically, public accommodation law has fallen off the civil rights race and gender agenda. This inattention exists despite media accounts, case law, and empirical data that demonstrate that discrimination …
Prosecuting Civil Asset Forfeiture On Contingency Fees: Looking For Profit In All The Wrong Places, Louis S. Rulli
Prosecuting Civil Asset Forfeiture On Contingency Fees: Looking For Profit In All The Wrong Places, Louis S. Rulli
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Civil asset forfeiture has strayed far from its intended purpose. Designed to give law enforcement powerful tools to combat maritime offenses and criminal enterprises, forfeiture laws are now used to prey upon innocent motorists and lawful homeowners who are never charged with crimes. Their only sins are that they are carrying legal tender while driving on busy highways or providing shelter in their homes to adult children and grandchildren who allegedly sold small amounts of low-level drugs. Civil forfeiture abuses are commonplace throughout the country with some police even armed with legal waivers for property owners to sign on the …
Dismantling “Dilemmas Of Difference” In The Workplace, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Sarah Heberlig, Lindsay Holcomb
Dismantling “Dilemmas Of Difference” In The Workplace, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Sarah Heberlig, Lindsay Holcomb
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Over the course of six months, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s class “Women, Law, and Leadership” interviewed 55 women between the ages of 25 and 85, all leaders in their respective fields. Nearly half of the women interviewed were women of color, and 10 of the women lived and worked in countries other than the U.S., spanning across Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Threading together the common themes touched upon in these conversations, we gleaned a number of novel insights, distinguishing the leadership trajectories pursued by women who have risen to the heights of their professions. Through thousands …
Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts
Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts
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In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
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Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …
Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri
Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri
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No abstract provided.
Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts
Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts
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This Article is part of a Howard Law Journal Symposium on “Collateral Consequences: Who Really Pays the Price for Criminal Justice?,” as well as my larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011). It considers state and federal government expansion of genetic surveillance as a collateral consequence of a criminal record in the context of a new biopolitics of race in America. Part I reviews the expansion of DNA data banking by states and the federal government, extending the collateral impact of a criminal record—in the form …
Preface To Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, And Big Business Re-Create Race In The Twenty-First Century, Dorothy E. Roberts
Preface To Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, And Big Business Re-Create Race In The Twenty-First Century, Dorothy E. Roberts
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Fatal Invention documents the emergence of a new biopolitics in the United States that relies on re-inventing race in biological terms using cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnologies. Some scientists are defining race as a biological category written in our genes, while the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries convert the new racial science into race-based products, such as race-specific medicines, ancestry tests, and DNA forensics, that incorporate false assumptions of racial difference at the genetic level. The genetic understanding of race calls for technological responses to racial disparities while masking the continuing impact of racism in a supposedly post-racial society. Instead, I …
Associational Privacy And The First Amendment: Naacp V. Alabama, Privacy And Data Protection, Anita L. Allen
Associational Privacy And The First Amendment: Naacp V. Alabama, Privacy And Data Protection, Anita L. Allen
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No abstract provided.
Stereotype Threat: A Case Of Overclaim Syndrome?, Amy L. Wax
Stereotype Threat: A Case Of Overclaim Syndrome?, Amy L. Wax
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The theory of Stereotype Threat (ST) predicts that, when widely accepted stereotypes allege a group’s intellectual inferiority, fears of confirming these stereotypes cause individuals in the group to underperform relative to their true ability and knowledge. There are now hundreds of published studies purporting to document an impact for ST on the performance of women and racial minorities in a range of situations. This article reviews the literature on stereotype threat, focusing especially on studies investigating the influence of ST in the context of gender. It concludes that there is currently no justification for concluding that ST explains women’s underperformance …
Women’S Unequal Citizenship At The Border: Lessons From Three Nonfiction Films About The Women Of Juárez, Regina Austin
Women’S Unequal Citizenship At The Border: Lessons From Three Nonfiction Films About The Women Of Juárez, Regina Austin
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There is no better illustration of the impact of borders on women’s equal citizenship than the three documentaries reviewed in this essay. All three deal with the femicides that befell the young women of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico between 1993 and 2005. Juarez is just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Performing the Border (1999) stimulates the viewer’s imagination regarding the ephemeral nature of borders and their impact on the citizenship of women who live at the intersection of local, regional, national and international legal regimes. Señorita Extraviada (2001) is an intimate portrait of the victims which illustrates why the …
Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax
Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax
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The past 30 years have witnessed a dramatic divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. This article reviews the data on these trends, explores their significance, and assesses social scientists’ recent attempts to explain them. The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children’s life prospects for decades to …
The Pimple On Adonis's Nose: A Dialogue On The Concept Of Merit In The Affirmative Action Debate, Tobias Barrington Wolff, Robert Paul Wolff
The Pimple On Adonis's Nose: A Dialogue On The Concept Of Merit In The Affirmative Action Debate, Tobias Barrington Wolff, Robert Paul Wolff
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Efforts at progressive educational reform in general, and affirmative action in particular, frequently encounter a rhetorically powerful objection: Merit. The story of merit proclaims that high-achieving applicants - those who have already made effective use of educational opportunities in the past and demonstrated a likelihood of being able to do so in the future - enjoy a morally superior claim in the distribution of scarce educational resources. Past achievement, in other words, entitles an applicant to a superior education. This moral framework of merit serves as a constant counterpoint in debates over affirmative action, including those contained in the Court's …
“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin
“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin
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“’Black People’s Money’: The Impact of Law, Economics, and Culture in the Context of Race on Damage Recoveries” is one of a series of articles by the author dealing with black economic marginalization; prior work considered such topics as shopping and selling as forms of deviance, street vending, restraints on leisure, and the importance of informality in loan transactions. This article deals with the linkage between the social significance of black people’s money and its material value. It analyzes the construction of “black money,” its association with cash, and the taboos and cultural practices that assure that black money will …
Deadweight Costs And Intrinsic Wrongs Of Nativism: Economics, Freedom, And Legal Suppression Of Spanish, William W. Bratton, Drucilla L. Cornell
Deadweight Costs And Intrinsic Wrongs Of Nativism: Economics, Freedom, And Legal Suppression Of Spanish, William W. Bratton, Drucilla L. Cornell
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No abstract provided.