Law Commons^™

The Michael Jackson Pill: Equality, Race, And Culture, Jerome Mccristal Culp Jr.

Michigan Law Review

This chronicle is in tribute to the work of Derrick Bell, past, present, and future. I have borrowed his character Geneva Crenshaw as part of that tribute, and I hope she helps me raise some of the issues that he has taught us are important.

All characters in this chronicle are fictional, including Professor Culp and Professor Bell. Any relationship they may have to the real Professor Bell and Professor Culp is dictated by the requirements of creativity and the extent to which reality and fiction necessarily merge. I know that the real Derrick Bell is wiser than the one …

Power From The People, Milner S. Ball

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano's Vision of Progressive Law Practice by Gerald P. López

State Responses To Task Force Reports On Race And Ethnic Bias In The Courts, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

While several states have embarked on studies of race and ethnic bias in their courts, Minnesota is only the sixth to publish its report to date. As Minnesota joins the ranks of states with published reports, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of the five earlier published reports from other states. Final reports have been published in Michigan (1989), Washington (1990), New York (1991), Florida (1991) and New Jersey (1992). The published reports make findings and provide several specific recommendations for change. This article will review the published findings and recommendations of the task forces and will discuss the …

Courts And Cultural Distinctiveness, Marie R. Deveney

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The claim that minority ethnic and religious groups are culturally distinct from the dominant society is often, either implicitly or explicitly, a key element of demands these groups make to courts and legislatures for accommodation of their needs. In such cases, the decision maker's understanding of what constitutes "cultural distinctiveness" is crucial, for it can strongly influence the outcome of the accommodation question. In this brief Essay related to Peter Welsh's and Joseph Carens's papers and Dean Suagee's remarks delivered at the Preservation of Minority Cultures Symposium, I contrast these panelists' subtle and sophisticated understandings of cultural distinctiveness with the …

Minority Cultures And The Cosmopolitan Alternative, Jeremy Waldron

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

I have chosen not to talk in this Article about the warning that Rushdie is sounding in his essay In Good Faith, but to discuss more affirmatively the image of the modern self that he conveys. Still, I hope that we do not lose sight of the warning. The communitarianism that can sound cozy and attractive in a book by Robert Bellah or Michael Sandel can be blinding, dangerous, and disruptive in the real world, where communities do not come ready-packaged and where communal allegiances are as much ancient hatreds of one's neighbors as immemorial traditions of culture.

Rhetorical Slavery, Rhetorical Citizenship, Gerald L. Neuman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion by Judith N. Shklar

Chutzpah, David A. Nacht

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Chutzpah by Alan M. Dershowitz

Victimization, The Poor, And Payne V. Tennessee, Richard Bender Abell

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action As A Majoritarian Device: Or, Do You Really Want To Be A Role Model?, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

Have you ever noticed how affirmative action occupies a place in our system of law and politics far out of proportion to its effects in the real world? Liberals love talking about and sitting on committees that define, oversee, defend, and give shape to it. Conservatives are attached to the concept for different reasons: they can rail against it, declare it lacking in virtue and principle, and use it to rally the troops. Affirmative action is something they love to hate. The program also generates a great deal of paper, conversation, and jobs probably more of the latter for persons …

English-Only Rules And The Right To Speak One's Primary Language In The Workplace, Juan F. Perea

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article analyzes the issues raised by English-only rules and the decisions discussing these rules. Part I reviews the leading cases on English-only rules. The Article then explores several issues that must be considered in deciding any English-only rule case under Title VII. Part II addresses whether speaking one's primary language should constitute a protected right as an aspect of national origin under Title VII. This Article argues that primary language should be protected under Title VII for several reasons: the courts and the EEOC construe the term "national origin" broadly; primary language constitutes a fundamental aspect of ethnicity and …

Public Response To Racist Speech: Considering The Victim's Story, Mari J. Matsuda

Michigan Law Review

The threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi skinheads goes beyond their repeated acts of illegal violence. Their presence and the active dissemination of racist propaganda means that citizens are denied personal security and liberty as they go about their daily lives. Professor Richard Delgado recognized the harm of racist speech in his breakthrough article, Words That Wound, in which he suggested a tort remedy for injury from racist words. This Article takes inspiration from Professor Delgado's position, and makes the further suggestion that formal criminal and administrative sanction - public as opposed to private …

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.

The Final Report: Harvard's Affirmative Action Allegory, Derrick Bell

Michigan Law Review

Harvard's affirmative action allegory written for this symposium.

The Politics Of Victimization Makes Strange Bedfellows, Jennifer L. Hochschild

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims by Kristin Bumiller, and Plural But Equal: Blacks and Minorities in America's Plural Society by Harold Cruse

Social Enquiry Reports And Sentencing, Jenny M. Roberts, Colin Roberts

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Changing, But Not Declining, Significance Of Race, Thomas F. Pettigrew

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions by William Julius Wilson

Judicial Protection Of Minorities, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

In United States v. Carolene Products Co., Justice Stone suggested by indirection that there "may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality" when courts are called upon to determine the validity "of statutes directed at particular religious . . . or national . . . or racial minorities."' In such cases, he explained, "prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry."' Forty years later, …

Bakke: A Compelling Need To Discriminate, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Two of America's most cherished values collided head-on a few months ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court began to come to grips with the most significant civil rights suit since the school desegregation cases of 1954. Arrayed on one side is the principle of governmental "color-blindness," the appealing notion that the color of a person's skin should have nothing to do with the distribution of benefits or burdens by the state. Set against it is the goal of a truly integrated society, and the tragic realization that this objective cannot be achieved within the foreseeable future unless race and color …

Packer & Ehrlich: New Directions In Legal Education, Richard C. Maxwell

Michigan Law Review

A Review of New Directions in Legal Education by Herbert L. Packer and Thomas Ehrlich