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Articles 1 - 30 of 446
Full-Text Articles in Law
A Democracy Story: Reframing A Free Speech Landmark, Thomas Healy
A Democracy Story: Reframing A Free Speech Landmark, Thomas Healy
Michigan Law Review
A review of Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan. By Samantha Barbas.
Scrutinizing The Bathroom Binary: Equal Protection Theories For Nonbinary Students, Annie Schuver
Scrutinizing The Bathroom Binary: Equal Protection Theories For Nonbinary Students, Annie Schuver
Michigan Law Review
Over the past decade, transgender students have challenged discriminatory school bathroom policies under the Equal Protection Clause with varying success. But another group of students, facing similar discrimination, has yet to see its day in court. Like their transgender peers, nonbinary students often lack access to gender-appropriate restrooms at school. Many K–12 schools offer only “boys” and “girls” restrooms, ignoring the needs of students who identify as neither boys nor girls, as both of those genders, or as something else entirely. Forced to use sex-segregated bathrooms (or no bathroom at all), nonbinary students suffer adverse health, safety, and educational outcomes. …
Title Vii’S Failures: A History Of Overlooked Indifference, Elena S. Meth
Title Vii’S Failures: A History Of Overlooked Indifference, Elena S. Meth
Michigan Law Review
Nearly sixty years after the adoption of Title VII and over thirty since intersectionality theory was brought into legal discourse by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently failed to meaningfully implement intersectionality into its decisionmaking. While there is certainly no shortage of scholarship on intersectionality and the Court’s failure to recognize it, this remains an overlooked failure by the Supreme Court. This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I provides an overview of Title VII and intersectional discrimination theory. I then explain how the EEOC and the Supreme Court have historically handled intersectional discrimination cases. Part II …
Policing Queer Sexuality, Ari Ezra Waldman
Policing Queer Sexuality, Ari Ezra Waldman
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall. By Anna Lvovsky.
Civil Rights In Times Of Uncertainty (The Anthropocene), Jeffrey Omari
Civil Rights In Times Of Uncertainty (The Anthropocene), Jeffrey Omari
Michigan Law Review
Although there have been significant civil rights gains made in recent decades, the United States is now experiencing a resurgence of many of the societal ills that have plagued the country for decades. From an insurrection that was seemingly inspired by white supremacist ideology to ongoing examples of police brutality against Black people, anti-Asian violence, anti-LGBTQ violence, and recurring islamophobia, the country sits at an apparent crossroads. There is an urgent need to advance a civil rights agenda that addresses the impact of these societal ills on the affected communities. At the same time, however, we are confronting these ills …
Lawyering The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Wenona T. Singel
Lawyering The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Wenona T. Singel
Michigan Law Review
This Article describes how the statutory structure of child welfare laws enables lawyers and courts to exploit deep-seated stereotypes about American Indian people rooted in systemic racism to undermine the enforcement of the rights of Indian families and tribes. Even when Indian custodians and tribes are able to protect their rights in court, their adversaries use those same advantages on appeal to attack the constitutional validity of the law. The primary goal of this Article is to help expose those structural issues and the ethically troublesome practices of adoption attorneys as the most important Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case …
Enduring Exclusion, Daiquiri J. Steele
Enduring Exclusion, Daiquiri J. Steele
Michigan Law Review
Economic justice has long been a part of the civil rights agenda, and minimum labor standards statutes play a crucial role in eradicating the exploitation and subordination of historically marginalized workers. While statutes establishing labor standards are characterized as “universal,” their effect has been anything but universal. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, and those at the intersection experience disproportionate violations of labor standards laws concerning minimum wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health. Through legislative maneuvering dating back to the New Deal era, Congress carved out many female workers and workers of color from core protections of minimum labor standards …
Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri
Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri
Michigan Law Review
Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District …
Bigotry, Civil Rights, And Lgbtq Child Welfare, Jordan Blair Woods
Bigotry, Civil Rights, And Lgbtq Child Welfare, Jordan Blair Woods
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. By Linda C. McClain.
Disparate Discrimination, Leah M. Litman
Disparate Discrimination, Leah M. Litman
Michigan Law Review
This Article explains and analyzes a recent trend in the Supreme Court’s cases regarding unintentional discrimination, where the argument is that a law has the effect of producing a disadvantage on members of a particular group. In religious discrimination cases, the Court has held that a law is presumptively unconstitutional if the law results in a comparable secular activity being treated more favorably than religious activity. Yet in racial discrimination cases, the Court has said the mere fact that a law more severely disadvantages racial minorities as a group does not suffice to establish unlawful discrimination.
The two tracks for …
Through A Glass, Darkly: Systemic Racism, Affirmative Action, And Disproportionate Minority Contact, Robin Walker Sterling
Through A Glass, Darkly: Systemic Racism, Affirmative Action, And Disproportionate Minority Contact, Robin Walker Sterling
Michigan Law Review
This Article is the first to describe how systemic racism persists in a society that openly denounces racism and racist behaviors, using affirmative action and disproportionate minority contact as contrasting examples. Affirmative action and disproportionate minority contact are two sides of the same coin. Far from being distinct, these two social institutions function as two sides of the same ideology, sharing a common historical nucleus rooted in the mythologies that sustained chattel slavery in the United States. The effects of these narratives continue to operate in race-related jurisprudence and in the criminal legal system, sending normative messages about race and …
On Time, (In)Equality, And Death, Fred O. Smith Jr.
On Time, (In)Equality, And Death, Fred O. Smith Jr.
Michigan Law Review
In recent years, American institutions have inadvertently encountered the bodies of former slaves with increasing frequency. Pledges of respect are common features of these discoveries, accompanied by cultural debates about what “respect” means. Often embedded in these debates is an intuition that there is something special about respecting the dead bodies, burial sites, and images of victims of mass, systemic horrors. This Article employs legal doctrine, philosophical insights, and American history to both interrogate and anchor this intuition.
Law can inform these debates because we regularly turn to legal settings to resolve disputes about the dead. Yet the passage of …
Municipal Reparations: Considerations And Constitutionality, Brooke Simone
Municipal Reparations: Considerations And Constitutionality, Brooke Simone
Michigan Law Review
Demands for racial justice are resounding, and in turn, various localities have considered issuing reparations to Black residents. Municipalities may be effective venues in the struggle for reparations, but they face a variety of questions when crafting legislation. This Note walks through key considerations using proposed and enacted reparations plans as examples. It then presents a hypothetical city resolution addressing Philadelphia’s discriminatory police practices. Next, it turns to a constitutional analysis of reparations policies under current Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, discussing both race-neutral and race-conscious plans. This Note argues that an antisubordination understanding of the Equal Protection Clause would better allow …
Social Norms In Fourth Amendment Law, Matthew Tokson, Ari Ezra Waldman
Social Norms In Fourth Amendment Law, Matthew Tokson, Ari Ezra Waldman
Michigan Law Review
Courts often look to existing social norms to resolve difficult questions in Fourth Amendment law. In theory, these norms can provide an objective basis for courts’ constitutional decisions, grounding Fourth Amendment law in familiar societal attitudes and beliefs. In reality, however, social norms can shift rapidly, are constantly being contested, and frequently reflect outmoded and discriminatory concepts. This Article draws on contemporary sociological literatures on norms and technology to reveal how courts’ reliance on norms leads to several identifiable errors in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
Courts assessing social norms generally adopt what we call the closure principle, or the idea that …
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Michigan Law Review
Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of …
Reviving Negotiated Rulemaking For An Accessible Internet, Julie Moroney
Reviving Negotiated Rulemaking For An Accessible Internet, Julie Moroney
Michigan Law Review
Web accessibility requires designing and developing websites so that people with disabilities can use them without barriers. While the internet has become central to daily life, websites have overwhelmingly remained inaccessible to the millions of users who have disabilities. Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to combat discrimination against people with disabilities. Passed in 1990, it lacks any specific mention of the internet Courts are split as to whether the ADA applies to websites, and if so, what actions businesses must take to comply with the law. Further complicating matters, the Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated the rulemaking …
Excluding 'Undesirable' Immigrants: Public Charge As Disability Discrimination, Alessandra N. Rosales
Excluding 'Undesirable' Immigrants: Public Charge As Disability Discrimination, Alessandra N. Rosales
Michigan Law Review
Public charge is a ground of inadmissibility based upon the likelihood that a noncitizen will become dependent on government benefits in the future. Once designated as a public charge, a noncitizen is ineligible to be admitted to the United States or to obtain lawful permanent residence. In August 2019, the Trump Administration published a regulation regarding this inadmissibility ground. Among its mandates, the rule expanded the definition of a public charge to include any noncitizen who receives one or more public benefits for more than twelve months in a thirty-six-month period It also instructed immigration officers to weigh medical conditions …
The Meaning Of Sex: Dynamic Words, Novel Applications, And Original Public Meaning, William N. Eskridge Jr., Brian G. Slocum, Stefan Th. Gries
The Meaning Of Sex: Dynamic Words, Novel Applications, And Original Public Meaning, William N. Eskridge Jr., Brian G. Slocum, Stefan Th. Gries
Michigan Law Review
The meaning of sex matters. The interpretive methodology by which the meaning of sex is determined matters Both of these were at issue in the Supreme Court’s recent landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, where the Court held that Title VII protects lesbians, gay men, transgender persons, and other sexual and gender minorities against workplace discrimination. Despite unanimously agreeing that Title VII should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning in 1964, the opinions in Bostock failed to properly define sex or offer a coherent theory of how long-standing statutes like Title VII should be interpreted over …
The Geopolitics Of American Policing, Andrew Lanham
The Geopolitics Of American Policing, Andrew Lanham
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. by Stuart Schrader.
Pregnancy And The Carceral State, Khiara M. Bridges
Pregnancy And The Carceral State, Khiara M. Bridges
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. by Michele Goodwin.
The Lost Promise Of Disability Rights, Claire Raj
The Lost Promise Of Disability Rights, Claire Raj
Michigan Law Review
Children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable students in public schools. They are the most likely to be bullied, harassed, restrained, or segregated. For these and other reasons, they also have the poorest academic outcomes. Overcoming these challenges requires full use of the laws enacted to protect these students’ affirmative right to equal access and an environment free from discrimination. Yet, courts routinely deny their access to two such laws—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (section 504).
Courts too often overlook the affirmative obligations contained in these two disability rights …
Equal Protection Under Algorithms: A New Statistical And Legal Framework, Crystal S. Yang, Will Dobbie
Equal Protection Under Algorithms: A New Statistical And Legal Framework, Crystal S. Yang, Will Dobbie
Michigan Law Review
In this Article, we provide a new statistical and legal framework to understand the legality and fairness of predictive algorithms under the Equal Protection Clause. We begin by reviewing the main legal concerns regarding the use of protected characteristics such as race and the correlates of protected characteristics such as criminal history. The use of race and nonrace correlates in predictive algorithms generates direct and proxy effects of race, respectively, that can lead to racial disparities that many view as unwarranted and discriminatory. These effects have led to the mainstream legal consensus that the use of race and nonrace correlates …
Accommodating Absence: Medical Leave As An Ada Reasonable Accommodation, Sean P. Mulloy
Accommodating Absence: Medical Leave As An Ada Reasonable Accommodation, Sean P. Mulloy
Michigan Law Review
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is widely regarded as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. Among its requirements, Title I of the ADA prohibits employers from discriminating against people with disabilities and requires that employers make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals. Many questions about the scope of the reasonable-accommodation mandate remain, however, as federal circuit courts disagree over whether extended medical leave may be considered a reasonable accommodation and whether an employee on leave is a qualified individual. This Note argues that courts should presume finite unpaid medical leaves of absence are …
Civil Rights Ecosystems, Joanna C. Schwartz
Civil Rights Ecosystems, Joanna C. Schwartz
Michigan Law Review
The Philadelphia and Houston Police Departments are similarly sized, but over a recent two-year period, ten times more civil rights suits were filed against Philadelphia and its officers than were filed against Houston and its officers. Plaintiffs in cases brought against Philadelphia and its officers were awarded one hundred times more in settlements and judgments. What accounts for these differences? Although the frequency and severity of misconduct and injury may play some role, I contend that the volume and outcome of civil rights litigation against any given jurisdiction should be understood as a product of what I call its civil …
Equality's Understudies, Aziz Z. Huq
Equality's Understudies, Aziz Z. Huq
Michigan Law Review
Review of Robert L. Tsai's Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.
Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman
Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman
Michigan Law Review
Review of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories edited by Melissa Murray, Katherine Shaw, and Reva B. Siegel.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Title Ix And The Legitimacy Of The Administrative State, Samuel R. Bagentos
This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Title Ix And The Legitimacy Of The Administrative State, Samuel R. Bagentos
Michigan Law Review
Review of R. Shep Melnick's The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education.
For Cause: Rethinking Racial Exclusion And The American Jury, Thomas Ward Frampton
For Cause: Rethinking Racial Exclusion And The American Jury, Thomas Ward Frampton
Michigan Law Review
Peremptory strikes, and criticism of the permissive constitutional framework regulating them, have dominated the scholarship on race and the jury for the past several decades. But we have overlooked another important way in which the American jury reflects and reproduces racial hierarchies: massive racial disparities also pervade the use of challenges for cause. This Article examines challenges for cause and race in nearly 400 trials and, based on original archival research, presents a revisionist account of the Supreme Court’s three most recent Batson cases. It establishes that challenges for cause, no less than peremptory strikes, are an important—and unrecognized—vehicle of …
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Michigan Law Review
Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.
America's Paper Prisons: The Second Chance Gap, Colleen Chien
America's Paper Prisons: The Second Chance Gap, Colleen Chien
Michigan Law Review
Over the last decade, dozens of states and the federal government have enacted “second chance” reforms that increase the eligibility of individuals arrested, charged, or convicted of crimes to shorten their sentences, clear their criminal records, and/or regain the right to vote. While much fanfare has accompanied the increasing availability of “second chances,” little attention has been paid to their delivery. This study introduces the concept of the “second chance gap,” which it defines as the difference between eligibility and delivery of second chance relief; explores its causes; and approximates its size in connection with several second chance laws and …