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Full-Text Articles in Law
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.
Which Radicals?, Cass R. Sunstein
Which Radicals?, Cass R. Sunstein
Michigan Law Review
Review of Jeremy McCarter's Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals.
Why Markets? Welfare, Autonomy, And The Just Society, Hanoch Dagan
Why Markets? Welfare, Autonomy, And The Just Society, Hanoch Dagan
Michigan Law Review
Review of Eric A. Posner's Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
Stealth Advocacy Can (Sometimes) Change The World, Margo Schlanger
Stealth Advocacy Can (Sometimes) Change The World, Margo Schlanger
Michigan Law Review
Scholarship and popular writing about lawsuits seeking broad social change have been nearly as contentious as the litigation itself. In a normative mode, commentators on the right have long attacked change litigation as imperialist and ill informed, besides producing bad outcomes. Attacks from the left have likewise had both prescriptive and positive strands, arguing that civil rights litigation is “subordinating, legitimating, and alienating.” As one author recently summarized in this Law Review, these observers claim “that rights litigation is a waste of time, both because it is not actually successful in achieving social change and because it detracts attention and …
Inequality In The Twenty-First Century, Saul Levmore
Inequality In The Twenty-First Century, Saul Levmore
Michigan Law Review
Rising inequality in the developed world has become a hot topic, especially in the shadow of the Great Recession in the United States. Social movements (“We are the 99%!”), university courses, documentary films, and best-selling books have capitalized on—and contributed to—the heat. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the most significant and probably best received of these books, is provocative, data driven, very French, pessimistic, widely reviewed, admirable, and maddening. In contrast to many other works on inequality, it is organized around a single idea. The thesis predicts growing inequality of wealth in the absence of external shocks or …
Diverging Destinies Redux, Amy L. Wax
Diverging Destinies Redux, Amy L. Wax
Michigan Law Review
My recent “where to live” conversation with a newly hired colleague yielded an unsurprising list of “possibles”: selected blocks of Mount Airy and Germantown, plus the Main Line towns of Bryn Mawr, Ardmore, Haverford, Villanova, Gladwyne, and so forth. Despite my colleague’s professed open mind about potential neighborhoods, Jenkintown — my own somewhat obscure and distinctly unfashionable (but much more affordable) suburb — drew a blank stare, as did a dozen other solidly middleclass areas I mentioned. By my calculation, there are over 400 zip codes within a thirty-mile radius of Rittenhouse Square, which is in the center of downtown …
Tyrone Garner's Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman
Tyrone Garner's Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman
Michigan Law Review
Dale Carpenter's Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas has been roundly greeted with well-earned praise. After exploring the book's understanding of Lawrence v. Texas as a great civil rights victory for lesbian and gay rights, this Review offers an alternative perspective on the case. Built from facts about the background of the case that the book supplies, and organized in particular around the story that the book tells about Tyrone Garner and his life, this alternative perspective on Lawrence explores and assesses some of what the decision may mean not only for sexual orientation equality but also for …
Disgust And The Problematic Politics Of Similarity, Courtney Megan Cahill
Disgust And The Problematic Politics Of Similarity, Courtney Megan Cahill
Michigan Law Review
Martha Nussbaum's latest book, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law, could not have come at a more opportune time in the history of gay rights in the United States. All signs point to progress toward "humanity," from same-sex couples' successful bids for marriage equality in a handful of states to the public's increasing acceptance of the prospect of gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. Even if recent cognitive science research indicates that same-sex relationships provoke more than a little disgust in some people, landmark marriage-equality victories in a few states suggest that the law is …
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
One of the striking and original achievements of the Michigan Law Review in its first century was the publication in 1989 of a Symposium entitled Legal Storytelling. Organized by the remarkable editor-in-chief, Kevin Kennedy - who tragically died not long after his graduation - the Symposium not only brought an important topic to the forefront of legal thinking, it did so in an extraordinarily interesting way. For this was not a mere collection of papers; the authors met in small editorial groups to discuss their work in detail, and as a result the whole project has a remarkable coherence and …
Poverty And Equality: A Distant Mirror, Gene R. Nichol
Poverty And Equality: A Distant Mirror, Gene R. Nichol
Michigan Law Review
In one sense, Joel Schwartz's new effort, Fighting Poverty with Virtue, is tremendously timely. Bill Clinton's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was designed to "end welfare as we know it," turning greater attention to poor people's habits than to their pocketbooks. George Bush's compassionate conservatism is meant to pick up the pace, overtly seeking "to save and change lives." The White House's ominously entitled "Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" is apparently set to unleash new waves of moral reformers. Schwartz's book seeks to provide moral, philosophical and historical sustenance for these initiatives. He focuses on …
Saying No To Stakeholding, Jeffrey S. Lehman, Deborah C. Malamud
Saying No To Stakeholding, Jeffrey S. Lehman, Deborah C. Malamud
Michigan Law Review
What if America were to make good on its promise of equal opportunity by [XXX]? That's the bold proposal set forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott.... The quotation above is from the Yale University Press announcement describing Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's new book, with one change: we have substituted "[XXX]" for the authors' catchphrase summary of their proposal. What do you think the missing words might be? How would you enable America "to make good on its promise of equal opportunity"? As you ponder that question, you might consider the following feature of the Ackerman/ …
The Anticaste Principle, Cass R. Sunstein
The Anticaste Principle, Cass R. Sunstein
Michigan Law Review
In this essay, I seek to defend a particular understanding of equality, one that is an understanding of liberty as well. I call this conception "the anticaste principle." Put too briefly, the anticaste principle forbids social and legal practices from translating highly visible and morally irrelevant differences into systemic social disadvantage, unless there is a very good reason for society to do so. On this view, a special problem of inequality arises when members of a group suffer from a range of disadvantages because of a group-based characteristic that is both visible for all to see and irrelevant from a …
The Substance Of Equality, Jeremy Waldron
The Substance Of Equality, Jeremy Waldron
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Speaking of Equality: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Force of "Equality" in Moral and Legal Discourse by Peter Westen
Shattered Mirrors: Our Search For Identity And Community In The Aids Era, William J. Aseltyne
Shattered Mirrors: Our Search For Identity And Community In The Aids Era, William J. Aseltyne
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era by Monroe E. Price
The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay On Formal Equal Opportunity, Patricia Williams
The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay On Formal Equal Opportunity, Patricia Williams
Michigan Law Review
I am struck by the Court's use of the word "equality" in the last line of its holding. It seems an extraordinarily narrow use of "equality," when it excludes from consideration so much clear inequality. It, again, resembles the process by which the Parol Evidence Rule limits the meaning of documents or words by placing beyond the bounds of reference anything that is inconsistent, or, depending on the circumstances, even that which is supplementary. It is this lawyerly language game of exclusion and omission that is the subject of the rest of this essay.
In Defense Of Equality: A Reply To Professor Westen, Erwin Chemerinsky
In Defense Of Equality: A Reply To Professor Westen, Erwin Chemerinsky
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this essay analyzes Professor Westen's arguments that the concept of equality is unnecessary. My contention is that Professor Westen never demonstrates that equality is meaningless; his arguments only prove the obvious, that equality by itself is insufficient. Part II argues that equality is a necessary principle: It is the only concept that tells us that different treatment of people does matter. Part III addresses Professor Westen's suggestion that equality is misleading and points out that none of his criticisms of the idea of equality are in any way inherent to that concept. Finally, Part IV demonstrates that …
Is Equality A Totally Empty Idea?, Anthony D'Amato
Is Equality A Totally Empty Idea?, Anthony D'Amato
Michigan Law Review
Professor Peter Westen's essay asserting that the concept of equality has no substantive content whatsoever usefully brushes aside much of the equal-protection rhetoric that, as Westen carefully explains, appropriately belongs to substantive due process. However, his absolutist position is open to challenge. I would like to posit one hypothetical case that I used in my classes when I taught Constitutional Law that I think contradicts Professor Westen's thesis. If it does, then there will be other cases as well, and his position cannot stand as the logically tight construct that he repeatedly asserts that it is.
The Meaning Of Equality In Law, Science, Math, And Morals: A Reply, Peter Westen
The Meaning Of Equality In Law, Science, Math, And Morals: A Reply, Peter Westen
Michigan Law Review
I shall set forth my thesis in Part I, using the Declaration of Independence ("all men are created equal") to illustrate that the emptiness of equality inheres in its very meaning, and that the confusions of equality result from neglecting its meaning. In Part II, I respond to Professors Chemerinsky's and D' Amato's reasons for believing that equality has independent normative content of its own. In Part III, I respond to Professor Chemerinsky's separate reasons for believing that equality is rhetorically useful.
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Discrimination And The Role Of The State, William C. Griffith S.Ed.
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Discrimination And The Role Of The State, William C. Griffith S.Ed.
Michigan Law Review
Constitutional history from the 1857 Dred Scott decision to the 1954 Brown decision records "a movement from status to contract" for the American Negro. Although uncertainty clouds the definition of "state action," the civil rights of the Negro under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment have been clearly established. The Negro citizen has arrived; the Negro minority group remains one of the gravest social problems of twentieth century America. De facto school segregation, limited economic opportunity, and inadequate housing are problems not solved by invocation of the fourteenth amendment or incantation of the Declaration of Independence. Solution, …
Greenberg: Race Relations And American Law, Spencer L. Kimball
Greenberg: Race Relations And American Law, Spencer L. Kimball
Michigan Law Review
A Review of RACE RELATIONS AND AMERICAN LAW. By Jack Greenberg.