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Time To Slapp Back: Advocating Against The Adverse Civil Liberties Implications Of Litigation That Undermines Public Participation, Jennifer Safstrom

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Defamation law is a catchall term encompassing civil claims for reputational harm to an individual, including slander and libel. Defamation claims originated in English common law and have since evolved within the American legal system. Scholars have characterized the law of defamation as “a forest of complexities, overgrown with anomalies, inconsistencies, and perverse rigidities” and as a “‘fog of fictions, inferences, and presumptions.’” Amid these inherent variations and complexities of defamation law and litigation — including the largely state-specific nature of tort law development — emerges a disturbing trend across jurisdictions. In the modern era, defamation claims have been used …

Law School News: Welcome, Professor Bernard Freamon 04-20-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Examining Civil Rights Litigation Reform, Part I: Qualified Immunity, Alexander A. Reinert

Testimony

The U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties issued the following testimony by Alexander A. Reinert, professor of litigation and advocacy at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, involving a hearing on March 31, 2022, entitled "Examining Civil Rights Litigation Reform, Part 1: Qualified Immunity."

Muslims In Prison: Advancing The Rule Of Law Through Litigation Praxis, Spearit

Articles

Islamic ideas about justice and equality directly informed the development of prison law jurisprudence in the United States. Since the early 1960s, when federal courts began to hear claims by state prisoner-petitioners, Muslims began to look to courts to establish Islam in prison and inaugurated an ongoing campaign for civil rights. The trend is significant when considering Muslims represent a relatively small percentage of the American population. Decades of persistent litigation by Muslims in courts have been integral to developing the prisoners’ rights movement in America. The Muslim impact on prison law and culture is an underappreciated phenomenon that involves …

Civil Rights Catch 22s, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

Law School News: Lynette Labinger: Doctor Of Laws, Honoris Causa 05-16-2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 04-2021, Michael M. Bowden, Barry Bridges, Political Roundtable

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

What Is Cultural Misappropriation And Why Does It Matter? 03-31-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

2nd Annual Women In Law Leadership Lecture: A Fireside Chat With Debra Katz, Esq. 03-03-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Professor Gonzalez Is 2020 Rhode Island Lawyer Of The Year 01/11/21, Barry Bridges, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Procedural Law, The Supreme Court, And The Erosion Of Private Rights Enforcement, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Law Symposium: Adjudicating Sexual Misconduct On Campus: Title Ix And Due Process In Uncertain Times, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Grappling With Law On Campus Sexual Misconduct 11-08-2019, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse: Origins And Goals, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (http://clearinghouse.net) solves a significant information deficit related to civil rights litigation by posting information about thousands of ongoing and closed large-scale civil rights cases. Documents are OCR’d and searchable; cases are searchable by metadata tags as well as full-text searching. Each case has a litigation summary by a law student. We live in a civil rights era—a time when people are using the courts, among other strategies, to fight for civil rights. The Clearinghouse posts the records of those fights, the stories of civil rights cases—across topics, across regions, across organizations—and makes them searchable, usable, …

Sleep: A Human Rights Issue, Clark J. Lee

Homeland Security Publications

Recognition of sleep as a human rights issue by governmental and legal entities (as illustrated by recent legal cases in the United States and India) raises the profile of sleep health as a societal concern. Although this recognition may not lead to immediate public policy changes, it infuses the public discourse about the importance of sleep health with loftier ideals about what it means to be human. Such recognition also elevates the work of sleep researchers and practitioners from serving the altruistic purpose of improving human health at the individual and population levels to serving the higher altruistic purpose of …

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Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Trial Jurors And Variables Influencing Why They Return The Verdicts They Do - A Guide For Practicing And Future Trial Attorneys, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professionalism And Advocacy At Trial – Real Jurors Speak In Detail About The Performance Of Their Advocates, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Private Attorney General: Equality Directives In American Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

American civil rights regulation is generally understood as relying on private enforcement in courts rather than imposing positive duties on state actors to further equity goals. This Article argues that this dominant conception of American civil rights regulation is incomplete. American civil rights regulation also contains a set of "equality directives," whose emergence and reach in recent years have gone unrecognized in the commentary. These federal-level equality directives use administrative tools of conditioned spending, policymaking, and oversight powerfully to promote substantive inclusion with regard to race, ethnicity, language, and disability. These directives move beyond the constraints of the standard private …

Reinventing The Eeoc, Nancy M. Modesitt

All Faculty Scholarship

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has struggled to be a meaningful force in eradicating employment discrimination since its inception. The primary reasons for this are structural in nature. The EEOC was designed to react to discrimination complaints by investigating and conciliating all of the thousands of complaints filed annually. The EEOC has never been able to investigate all these complaints despite using the vast majority of its resources attempting to do so. The devotion of resources to managing and investigating the huge volume of complaints prevents the EEOC from taking more effective steps to eliminate discrimination. This article proposes …

Disparate Impact Discrimination: The Limits Of Litigation, The Possibilities For Internal Compliance, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Fighting Discrimination While Fighting Litigation: A Tale Of Two Supreme Courts, Scott A. Moss

Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued an odd mix of pro-plaintiff and pro-defendant employment law rulings. It has disallowed harassment lawsuits against employers even with failed antiharassment efforts, construed statutes of limitations narrowly to bar suits about ongoing promotion and pay discrimination, and denied protection to public employee internal complaints. Yet the same Court has issued significant unanimous rulings easing discrimination plaintiffs' burdens of proof.

This jurisprudence is often miscast in simple pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant terms. The Court's duality traces to its inconsistent and unaware adoption of competing policy arguments:

Policy 1: Employees must try internal dispute resolution before suing--or …

Testamentary Incorrectness: A Review Essay, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing Samuel P. King & Randall W. Roth, Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, & Political Manipulation at America's Largest Charitable Trust (2006)

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

Jack And Jill Go To Court: Litigating A Peer Sexual Harassment Case Under Title Ix, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

Title IX peer sexual harassment cases present challenges to litigators because of the unique educational environment in which these cases arise. This Article attempts to educate litigators on the prima facie case, evidentiary issues, and the overall presentation of peer sexual harassment cases.

What Is Affirmative Action?, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

There is no rigorous definition of affirmative action. This Article argues that this remarkable circumstance has distorted and undercut American antidiscrimination law.

Though affirmative action is vigorously and widely debated, it has not been defined in the rigorous manner legal commentators would normally demand. Rather, commentators have deferred to policymakers' descriptions of affirmative action programs and employed those “definitions” to set the terms of policy debates over the propriety of affirmative action. Typically, commentators take for granted that affirmative action is “discriminatory” and seek to justify its use in certain contexts. This approach is also prominent in the United States …

“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

“’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 …

Foreward: Is Civil Rights Law Dead?, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

This forward to The Louisiana Law Review’s Spring 2003 Symposium on civil rights presents a hypothetical that highlights the perils of civil rights litigation.

The Activist Insecurity And The Demise Of Civil Rights, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

Civil rights law is today moribund. An impressive edifice, built upon the ruins of Jim Crow, with the blood and sweat of the civil rights movement, and intended to both dismantle that system and ensure the civil liberties that Jim Crow illustrated were all too easily lost, civil rights law was to be the lasting monument of the civil rights struggle. Fortified by this legacy, civil rights law retains a symbolic value, implying that there are formidable forces working to protect citizens from abusive state action, to ensure a broad anti-discrimination ethic, and to fix the wrongs of Jim Crow. …

Litigation Narratives: Why Jensen V. Ellerth Didn't Change Sexual Harassment Law, But Still Has A Story Worth Telling, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.