Law Commons^™

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Big Data And Discrimination, Talia B. Gillis, Jan L. Speiss

Faculty Scholarship

The ability to distinguish between people in setting the price of credit is often constrained by legal rules that aim to prevent discrimination. These legal requirements have developed focusing on human decision-making contexts, and so their effectiveness is challenged as pricing increasingly relies on intelligent algorithms that extract information from big data. In this Essay, we bring together existing legal requirements with the structure of machine-learning decision-making in order to identify tensions between old law and new methods and lay the ground for legal solutions. We argue that, while automated pricing rules provide increased transparency, their complexity also limits the …

We Still Have Not Learned From Anita Hill's Testimony, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty-seven years after Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her, and as Christine Blasey Ford prepares to testify that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, we still have not learned our mistakes from that mess in 1991.

Most people recognized that it looked bad, a black woman fending for herself in front of a group of white men. Yet we can’t acknowledge the central tragedy of 1991 – the false tension between feminist and antiracist movements.

We are still ignoring the unique vulnerability of black women.

Unjust Cities? Gentrification, Integration, And The Fair Housing Act, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

What does gentrification mean for fair housing? This article considers the possibility that gentrification should be celebrated as a form of integration alongside a darker narrative that sees gentrification as necessarily unstable and leading to inequality or displacement of lower-income, predominantly of color, residents. Given evidence of both possibilities, this article considers how the Fair Housing Act might be deployed to minimize gentrification’s harms while harnessing some of the benefits that might attend integration and movement of higher-income residents to cities. Ultimately, the article urges building on the fair housing approach but employing a broader set of tools to advance …

An Intersectional Critique Of Tiers Of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches To Equal Protection, Devon W. Carbado, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

For the past forty years, Justice Powell’s concurring opinion in University of California v. Bakke has been at the center of scholarly debates about affirmative action. Notwithstanding the enormous attention Justice Powell’s concurrence has received, scholars have paid little attention to a passage in that opinion that expressly takes up the issue of gender. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, this Essay explains several ways in which its reasoning is flawed. The Essay also shows how interrogating Justice Powell’s “single axis” race and gender analysis raises broader questions about tiers of scrutiny for Black women. Through a hypothetical of a …

Reevaluating School Searches Following School-To-Prison Pipeline Reforms, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court held in New Jersey v. T.L.O. that school officials could search students without a warrant and with only reasonable suspicion, not probable cause, because of schools’ need for discipline and the relationship between educators and students. That case belongs to a body of Fourth Amendment cases involving, in T.L.O.’s terms, “special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement.” What Fourth Amendment standard, then, governs searches involving one of the roughly 20,000 school resource officers (SROs) in American schools? Most state courts to decide the issue in the 1990s and 2000s found that T.L.O. applied …

Fiscal Pressures And Discriminatory Policing: Evidence From Traffic Stops In Missouri, Allison P. Harris, Elliott Ash, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides evidence of racial variation in traffic enforcement responses to local government budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri from 2001 through 2012. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates; we also find an increase in traffic-stop arrest rates. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among White (rather than Black or Latino) drivers. The results are robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates and a variety of model specifications, including a regression discontinuity examining bare budget shortfalls. Considering potential mechanisms, we …

Police, Race, And The Production Of Capital Homicides, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to …

Rights As Trumps?, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Rights are more than mere interests, but they are not absolute. And so two competing frames have emerged for adjudicating conflicts over rights. Under the first frame, rights are absolute but for the exceptional circumstances in which they may be limited. Constitutional adjudication within this frame is primarily an interpretive exercise fixed on identifying the substance and reach of any constitutional rights at issue. Under the second frame, rights are limited but for the exceptional circumstances in which they are absolute. Adjudication within this frame is primarily an empirical exercise fixed on testing the government’s justification for its action. In …

The Legacy Of Civil Rights And The Opportunity For Transactional Law Clinics, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously paraphrased abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker stating, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The implication of the phrase is that the social justice goals of the Civil Rights Movement would eventually be achieved. His prayer was that servants of justice would be rewarded in due time. In other words, that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement would be achievable at some point in the future. President Obama resurrected the phrase throughout …

Sparking King's Revolution, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., protested our country’s counterinsurgency war in Vietnam. King passionately decried the bombings and civilian deaths, the destruction of families and villages, and the herding of the population into “concentration camps.” King denounced our imperialist arrogance and urged “a radical revolution of values.” From the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City, King declared: “These are revolutionary times.” Indeed they were. And if anything, they have become even more so today.

Religious Liberty For A Select Few, Sharita Gruberg, Frank J. Bewkes, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Claire Markham

Faculty Scholarship

This report discusses how the Department of Justice’s guidance opens the door to an extreme rewriting of the concept of religious liberty. The guidance — and the numerous agency rules, enforcement actions, and policies that it is influencing — will shift the balance of individual religious protections across the federal government toward a new framing that allows religious beliefs to be used as a weapon against minority groups.

Mutual Tolerance And Sensible Exemptions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter focuses on three general themes that bear on the need to understand one another in society and how that understanding bears on appropriate exemptions relating to abortions and same-sex marriage, two questions that continue to divide the American people.

First, there is a need for mutual tolerance toward others who see things differently. Second, a great deal in life is not subject to rational answers. Third, people should generally not be required to do directly what they believe is deeply wrong. However, society can work only if people do not refuse to help those who, they believe, have …

Bearing Faith: The Limits Of Catholic Health Care For Women Of Color, Kira Shepherd, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Elizabeth Boylan

Faculty Scholarship

This study finds that in nineteen out of the thirty-four states/territories that we studied, women of color are more likely than white women to give birth at hospitals bound by the ERDs. Women of color’s disproportionate reliance on Catholic hospitals in these states increases their exposure to restrictions that place religious ideology over best medical practices.

To determine whether women of color disproportionately give birth at hospitals operating under the ERDs, we compared the percentage of births to women of color at Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals. In over half of the states we studied (19 out of 33 states plus …

Overreach And Innovation In Equality Regulation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

At a time of heightened concern about agency overreach, this Article highlights a less appreciated development in agency equality regulation. Moving beyond traditional bureaucratic forms of regulation, civil rights agencies in recent years have experimented with new forms of regulation to advance inclusion. This new "inclusive regulation" can be described as more open ended, less coercive, and more reliant on rewards, collaboration, flexibility, and interactive assessment than traditional modes of civil rights regulation. This Article examines the power and limits of this new inclusive regulation and suggests a framework for increasing the efficacy of these new modes of regulation.

The Economic Justice Imperative For Transactional Law Clinics, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

The economic, political, and social volatility of the sixties and seventies, out of which clinical legal education was born, has certain mythical qualities for most law students, and perhaps some law professors. America still bears the scars of the economic policies of those previous eras, such as redlining, blockbusting, poverty and urban decay. While the realities of the era may seem out of reach for many of our students, those arising out of that era have contributed to the wealth gap in this country, which has worsened over the last twenty years. Now more than ever, society needs social justice …

Every Dollar Counts: In Defense Of The Obama Department Of Education's "Supplement Not Supplant" Proposal, James S. Liebman, Michael Mbikiwa

Faculty Scholarship

Evidence compellingly demonstrates – as Congress famously recognized in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) – that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds require more educational resources than other students. Yet, a half century later, many school districts still spend less money on high-poverty schools than on more privileged schools. In 2011, a study by the U.S. Department of Education discovered that nationwide, more than forty percent of schools eligible for Title I funding based on their high-poverty status receive less state and local funding for instructional and other personnel costs than non-Title I schools …

Race Liberalism And The Deradicalization Of Racial Reform, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasize the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices …

Equality Law Pluralism, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to the Constance Baker Motley Symposium examines the future of civil rights reform at a time in which longstanding limitations of the antidiscrimination law framework, as well as newer pressures such as the rise of economic populism, are placing stress on the traditional antidiscrimination project. This Essay explores the openings that nevertheless remain in public law for confronting persistent forms of exclusion and makes the case for greater pluralism in equality law frameworks. In particular, this Essay examines innovations that widen the range of regulatory levers for promoting inclusion, such as competitive grants, tax incentives, contests for labor …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

Inclusion, Exclusion, And The "New" Economic Inequality, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Is racial inequality an unwelcome intruder to the new discourse on economic inequality? The present discourse on economic inequality emphasizes decades-long trends that have increased economic inequality, whether as a result of reoccurring features in the structure of capitalist economies or more recent changes in institutional, structural, and economic conditions. Researchers direct us to the rising fortunes of the top earners and asset holders relative to the rest, the declining fortunes of the middle class harmed by stagnating wages, and the declining share of industries (like manufacturing) in the economy. This new economic inequality discourse has preoccupied economists, garnered its …

Wedlocked: The Perils Of Marriage Equality – The Author Meets Her Readers, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

You write a book and you wonder: “will anyone read it?” This Boston University Law Review Annex Symposium on Wedlocked answers my question. Not only did “someone” read the book, but those “someones” are some of the scholars I admire most, and they took the time and thought to engage Wedlocked’s arguments in this symposium. Thank you to each of the scholars who participated in this symposium, thank you to Professor Linda McClain for inviting their participation, and thank you to James Tobin, the Online Editor for the BU Law Review, for providing a home for this conversation about …

Is There Really A Sex Bureaucracy?, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay identifies several features of the higher-education context that can enrich The Sex Bureaucracy‘s account of why colleges and universities have adopted new policies and trainings to address sexual assault on their campuses. These features include: 1) schools’ preexisting systems for addressing student conduct; 2) the shared interest of schools in reducing impediments to education, including nonconsensual sexual contact; and 3) the pedagogical challenges of developing trainings that are engaging and effective. Taking these three factors into account, we can see that while federal Title IX intervention has had a profound effect, it is also important not to …

Reflections On Obergefell And The Family-Recognition Framework's Continuing Value, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Unlike a typical law review essay, I offer reflections here based largely on my own past work in LGBT rights advocacy. Together with related scholarship, I rely on these experiences to argue that the 'family recognition" framework underlying earlier advocacy has value going forward, even after the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of nationwide marriage equality.

#Sayhername Captured: Using Video To Challenge Law Enforcement Violence Against Women, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

Recorded encounters between women of color and police officers have been invaluable in bringing the reality of these interactions into the living rooms of otherwise unknowing Americans. The recordings are instrumental pieces of documentation and evidence, with the power to impact verdicts and galvanize the domestic struggle for human rights outside of the courtroom. They also are fraught with ethical issues that must be addressed by attorneys and activists hoping they effect change. Complexities such as implicit biases, editing and sourcing of videos, anonymity for those attacked and bystanders, and vicarious trauma on affected communities complicate use of violent police …

Testimony On Pennsylvania Sb1306: No Additional Protections For Religious Freedom, Katherine M. Franke, Burton Caine, Lenore F. Carpenter, Eric A. Feldman, Thersa Glennon, Nancy J. Knauer, Jules Lobel, Wendell Pritchett, Dara E. Purvis, Brishen Rogers, Victor C. Romero, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

On behalf of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project (PRPCP) at Columbia Law School I offer the following legal analysis of Senate Bill 1306. Overall, the current version of the bill promises to modernize Pennsylvania’s Human Relations Act by expanding antidiscrimination protections in employment to include sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination. Were the Pennsylvania legislature to pass SB 1306, the Commonwealth would join twenty-two states that include sexual orientation and nineteen states that include gender identity in their laws assuring equal employment opportunities for their citizens.

Testimony Regarding The First Amendment Defense Act (Fada), Katherine M. Franke, Elizabeth A. Sepper, Ariela Gross, Sylvia A. Law, Martin S. Flaherty, Suzanne B. Goldberg, Carol Sanger, J. Stephen Clark, Florens Wagman Roisman, Gregory Magarian, Caroline Mala Corbin, Nomi Stolzenberg, Carlos A. Ball, Aaron Ezra Waldman, Aziza Ahmed, Jennifer A. Drobac, Deborah Widiss, Arthur S. Leonard, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

My testimony today is delivered on behalf of twenty leading legal scholars who have joined me in providing an in depth analysis of the meaning and likely effects of the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), were it to become law. We feel particularly compelled to provide testimony to this Committee because the first legislative finding set out in FADA declares that: “Leading legal scholars concur that conflicts between same-sex marriage and religious liberty are real and should be addressed through legislation.” As leading legal scholars we must correct this statement: we do not concur that conflicts between same-sex marriage and …

Memorandum On Mississippi House Bill 1523, Katherine M. Franke, Michèle Alexandre, Deborah A. Challener, Judith J. Johnson, Richard Gershon, Elizabeth A. Sepper, Noa Ben-Asher, Daria Roithmayr, Nomi M. Stolzenberg

Faculty Scholarship

As legal scholars with expertise in matters of religious freedom, civil rights, and the interaction between those fields, we offer our opinion on the scope and meaning of Mississippi House Bill 1523, which was signed into law today by Governor Phil Bryant. Specifically, we wish to call attention to language in the law that we believe conflicts with the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. We share the view of Justice Kennedy when he expressed that “a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest,” and would add that neither can …

The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …

The Local Turn; Innovation And Diffusion In Civil Rights Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Is the future of civil rights subnational? If one is looking for civil rights innovation, much of this innovation might be happening through legislation, regulatory frameworks, and policies adopted by state and local governments. In recent years, states and cities have adopted legislation banning discrimination in housing based on the source of an individual's income, regulating the consideration of arrest or conviction in employment decisions, and prohibiting discrimination in employment based on an applicant's credit history.

This deployment of subnational power is not new to civil rights. Many of the laws and regulatory frameworks that are now core to the …