Law Commons^™

Litigated Learning, Law's Limits, And Urban School Reform Challenges, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article assesses the likely efficacy of litigation efforts seeking to enhance equal educational opportunity by improving student academic achievement in the nation's urban public schools. Past education reform litigation efforts focusing on school desegregation and finance met with mixed success. Current litigation efforts seeking to improve student academic achievement promise to be even less successful because student academic achievement involves variables and activities located further from the reach of litigation than such variables as a school's racial composition and per pupil spending levels. Moreover, efforts to improve student achievement in the nation's urban public schools--especially high poverty schools--face additional …

The 2006 Winthrop And Frances Lane Lecture: The Unintended Legal And Policy Consequences Of The No Child Left Behind Act, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Reproduction And Religious Reproduction: A Democratic-Communitarian Analysis Of The Yoder Problem, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1972, Wisconsin v. Yoder presented the Supreme Court with a sharp clash between the state's interest in social reproduction through education -- that is, society's interest in using the educational system to perpetuate its collective way of life among the next generation -- and the parents' interest in religious reproduction -- that is, their interest in passing their religious beliefs on to their children. This Article will take up the challenge of that clash, a clash which continues to be central to current debates over issues like intelligent design in the classroom. This Article engages with the competing theories …

Wishing Petitioners To Death: Factual Misrepresentations In Fourth Circuit Capital Cases, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Equal Protection Of Free Exercise: Two Approaches And Their History, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Contrary to critics of the Supreme Court's current equal protection approach to religious liberty, this Article contends that, from the very first federal free exercise cases, the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses have been mutually intertwined. The seeds of an equal protection analysis of free exercise were, indeed, planted even before the Fourteenth Amendment within the constitutional jurisprudence of the several states. Furthermore, this Article argues, equal protection approaches should not be uniformly disparaged. Rather, the drawbacks that commentators have observed result largely from the Supreme Court's application of an inadequate version of equal protection. By ignoring the lessons …

Exporting U.S. Anti-Terrorism Legislation And Policies To The International Law Arena, A Comparative Study: The Effect On Other Countries' Legal Systems, Olga Kallergi

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 set in motion a new era all over the world: an era of a world uniting against a common enemy, but also an era of insecurity and fear. Laws have been changed worldwide, nations have united against a common threat, legal theories and beliefs of centuries have been questioned, and civil liberties have been replaced by a need for national safety. Has this worldwide effort worked? Is our world a better place now that we are all fighting the same enemy? Did we learn from our past …

Education And Interrogation: Comparing Brown And Miranda, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Ross Feldmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although the Warren Court had its share of grand decisions, perhaps it should be known instead for its grand goals--particularly the goals of ending America's shameful history of segregation and of providing a broad array of constitutional rights to persons accused of committing crimes. Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona, the two most well-known decisions of the Warren Court (and possibly the two most well-known decisions in the history of the Supreme Court), best capture the Court's labor in the rocky fields of our nation's legal, political, and cultural life. In this Article, we explore certain parallels …

The Supreme Court, Guantanamo Bay And Justice Fix-It, Ronald W. Meister

Cornell Law School Berger International Speaker Papers

In the summer of 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled on three cases involving individuals detained as "enemy combatants." Given the issues of Presidential power, habeas corpus and individual rights involved, there was a lot of speculation about the historical importance of the decisions. This presentation examines these three decisions and what they teach us about the Supreme Court and government in the 21st century.

How Employment Discrimination Plaintiffs Fare In Federal Court, Kevin M. Clermont, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article presents the full range of information that the Administrative Office’s data convey on federal employment discrimination litigation. From that information, the authors tell three stories about (1) bringing these claims, (2) their outcome in the district court, and (3) the effect of appeal. Each of these stories is a sad one for employment discrimination plaintiffs: relatively often, the numerous plaintiffs must pursue their claims all the way through trial, which is usually a jury trial; at both pretrial and trial these plaintiffs lose disproportionately often, in all the various types of employment discrimination cases; and employment discrimination litigants …

Human Rights Treaty Drafting Through The Lens Of Mental Disability: The Proposed International Convention On Protection And Promotion Of The Rights And Dignity Of Persons With Disabilities, Aaron A. Dhir

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

In this piece I explore whether, if established, the proposed International Convention on Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities will be an effective way to limit abuses of the rights of persons diagnosed with mental disabilities. In Section I, I discuss the failure of international human rights law to effectively address these abuses to date. In Section II, I consider the debate surrounding the need for a disability-specific Convention. In Section III, I argue that in order for the proposed Convention to be effective, and not simply a hollow mechanism, it must reject the …

Profiling With Apologies, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Domestic Violence And The Politics Of Privacy, By Kristin A. Kelly [Book Review], Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Grutter V. Bollinger/Gratz V. Bollinger: View From A Limestone Ledge, Gerald Torres

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Scottsboro Trials: A Legal Lynching (Part Ii), Faust Rossi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Certain Fundamental Truths”: A Dialectic On Negative And Positive Liberty In Hate-Speech Cases, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Scottsboro Trials: A Legal Lynching, Faust Rossi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Partial Defense Of An Anti-Discrimination Principle, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Over a quarter century ago, Professor Fiss proposed that the constitutional principle of equal protection should be interpreted to prohibit laws or official practices that aggravate or perpetuate the subordination of specially disadvantaged groups. Fiss thought that the anti-subordination principle could more readily justify results he believed normatively attractive than could the rival, anti-discrimination principle. In particular, anti-subordination would enable the courts to invalidate facially neutral laws that have the effect of disadvantaging a subordinate group and also enable them to uphold facially race-based laws aimed at ameliorating the condition of a subordinate group. Since Fiss’s landmark article appeared, Supreme …

Plaintiphobia In The Appellate Courts: Civil Rights Really Do Differ From Negotiable Instruments, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professors Clermont and Eisenberg conducted a systematic analysis of appellate court behavior and report that defendants have a substantial advantage over plaintiffs on appeal. Their analysis attempted to control for different variables that may affect the decision to appeal or the appellate outcome, including case complexity, case type, amount in controversy, and whether there had been a judge or a jury trial. Once they accounted for these variables and explored and discarded various alternate explanations, they came to the conclusion that a defendants' advantage exists probably because of appellate judges' misperceptions that trial level adjudicators are pro-plaintiff.

Hate And The Bar: Is The Hale Case Mccarthyism Redux Or A Victory For Racial Equality?, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The application of the constitutional free expression guarantee to the activities of the organized bar is one of the most important unexplored areas of legal ethics. In this essay I will consider in particular the question of whether an applicant may be denied admission to the bar for involvement with hateful or discriminatory activities. This question reveals the tension between the first amendment principle, established after the agonizing struggles of the McCarthy era, that no one may be denied membership in the bar because of his or her beliefs alone, and the plenary authority of bar associations to make predictive …

The Ideology Of Judging And The First Amendment In Judicial Election Campaigns, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Stopping A Moving Target, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rights And Rules: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Prior to recent decades, the United States Supreme Court often invoked the political question doctrine to avoid deciding controversial questions of individual rights. By the 1970s and 1980s, standing limits traced to Article III’s case-or-controversy language had replaced the political question doctrine as the favored justiciability device. Although both political question and standing doctrines remain tools in the Court’s arsenal of threshold decision making,3 in the last decade the Court has turned with increasing frequency to the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to perform the gatekeeping function. However, although there is a considerable body of scholarship concerning the conventional …

The Heterogeneity Of Rights, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What is the implication for the validity of governmental rules of the conclusion that the rule interferes with a constitutional right? This question has implications for two important doctrinal puzzles. The first is the question when, if ever, a litigant has a constitutional right to an exemption from a generally valid rule of law. Many constitutional rights are rule-dependent in the sense that they protect actors against certain kinds of governmental rules rather than shielding acts against governmental interference. This Article denies the claim by scholars and judges that this rule-dependence reflects a deep truth about the nature of constitutional …

Insane Fear: The Discriminatory Category Of "Mentally Ill And Dangerous", Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article considers the constitutional and moral implications of the distinction the law draws between different classes of dangerous people, depending upon their status as mentally ill or mentally well. Those who are mentally well benefit from the right to freedom from incarceration unless and until they commit a crime. By contrast, dangerous people who are mentally ill are subject to potentially indefinite "civil" preemptive confinement.

In a relatively recent case, Kansas v. Hendricks, the United States Supreme Court upheld the post-prison civil confinement of Leroy Hendricks, a man who had served prison time after pleading guilty to child molestation. …

Some Thoughts On The Conduct/Status Distinction, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Antidiscrimination Laws & Artistic Expression, Steven H. Shiffrin, Gregory R. Smith

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Unconscious Racism And The Criminal Law, Sheri Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Constitution Of Democratic Experimentalism, Michael C. Dorf, Charles F. Sabel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, Professors Dorf and Sabel identify a new form of government, democratic experimentalism, in which power is decentralized to enable citizens and other actors to utilize their local knowledge to fit solutions to their individual circumstances, but in which regional and national coordinating bodies require actors to share their knowledge with others facing similar problems. This information pooling, informed by the example of novel kinds of coordination within and among private firms, both increases the efficiency of public administration by encouraging mutual learning among its parts and heightens its accountability through participation of citizens in the decisions that …

The Limits Of Feminism, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Batson Ethics For Prosecutors And Trial Court Judges, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.