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Full-Text Articles in Law
Keynote Speech: A Letter From The Original Cause Lawyer, F. Michael Higginbotham
Keynote Speech: A Letter From The Original Cause Lawyer, F. Michael Higginbotham
All Faculty Scholarship
This symposium speech is a short piece which talks about why there is a need for law students to become cause lawyers, the symposium being: cause lawyers and cause lawyering in the sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education. The writer creates an allegorical scene where he's snowed in in his home during a snowstorm, lightning strikes his computer, and the computer comes to life in the form a message being typed, and "channeled" to him by Thurgood Marshall. The former Justice of the Supreme Court proceeds to state the many reasons why there is still a need for …
Weather Permitting: Incrementalism, Animus, And The Art Of Forecasting Marriage Equality After U.S. V. Windsor, Jeremiah A. Ho
Weather Permitting: Incrementalism, Animus, And The Art Of Forecasting Marriage Equality After U.S. V. Windsor, Jeremiah A. Ho
All Faculty Scholarship
Within LGBT rights, the law is abandoning essentialist approaches toward sexual orientation by incrementally de-regulating restrictions on identity expression of sexual minorities. Simultaneously, same-sex marriages are become increasingly recognized on both state and federal levels. This Article examines the Supreme Court’s recent decision, U.S. v. Windsor, as the latest example of these parallel journeys. By overturning DOMA, Windsor normatively revises the previous incrementalist theory for forecasting marriage equality’s progress studied by William Eskridge, Kees Waaldijk, and Yuval Merin. Windsor also represents a moment where the law is abandoning antigay essentialism by using animus-focused jurisprudence for lifting the discrimination against the …
Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, And The Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice System, Tyler Rose Clemons
Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, And The Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice System, Tyler Rose Clemons
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This statement by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007 is alluring in both its grammatical symmetry and its logical simplicity. Yet it encapsulates the naiveté of the view of racial discrimination currently held by the majority of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice Roberts’s assertion contains the implied assumption that the only racial discrimination that exists—or at least the only kind that matters under the Constitution—is explicit and susceptible to conscious control. Decades of …
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene
Faculty Scholarship
Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …
Conferring Dignity: The Metamorphosis Of The Legal Homosexual, Noa Ben-Asher
Conferring Dignity: The Metamorphosis Of The Legal Homosexual, Noa Ben-Asher
Faculty Publications
The legal homosexual has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past three decades, culminating in United States v. Windsor, which struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 1986, the homosexual was a sexual outlaw beyond the protection of the Constitution. By 2013, the homosexual had become part of a married couple that is “deemed by the State worthy of dignity.” This Article tells the story of this metamorphosis in four phases. In the first, the “Homosexual Sodomite Phase,” the United States Supreme Court famously declared in Bowers v. Hardwick that there was no right …
The Diversity Feedback Loop, Patrick Shin, Devon Carbado, Mitu Gulati
The Diversity Feedback Loop, Patrick Shin, Devon Carbado, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
At some point in the near future, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the permissible scope of affirmative action to increase workplace diversity. Undoubtedly, many scholars will argue that if affirmative action is good for colleges and universities, it is good for workplaces as well. One cannot assess whether this “transplant” argument is right without understanding the complex ways in which diversity initiatives at colleges and universities interact with diversity initiatives at work. The university and the workplace are not separate and distinct institutional settings in which diversity is or is not achieved. They are part of an interconnected …