Law Commons^™

Segregation In St. Louis: Dismantling The Divide, For The Sake Of All [In Collaboration With], Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Ascend Stl Inc., Community Builders Network Of Metro St. Louis, Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing And Opportunity Council (Ehoc), Team Tif

All Faculty Scholarship

Place matters. Where people live in St. Louis has been shaped by an extensive history of segregation that was driven by policies at multiple levels of government and practices across multiple sectors of society. The effect of segregation has been to systematically exclude African American families from areas opportunity that support economic, educational, and health outcomes.

Open Source: The Enewsletter Of Rwu Law 09-22-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Racism Didn't Stop At Jim Crow, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Reviews

Nearly 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission famously declared that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The picture has changed distressingly little since then. In the 1950 Census, the average African American in a metropolitan area lived in a neighborhood that was 35 percent white—the same figure as in the 2010 Census. In 2010, the average white American still lived in a neighborhood that was more than 75 percent white. America’s largest metropolitan areas—particularly, but not exclusively, in the North—continue to score high on many common measures of racial segregation. And racial segregation …

Can The Government Deport Immigrants Using Information It Encouraged Them To Provide?, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay describes the legal and policy issues raised by any systematic effort to deport unauthorized immigrants based on information the government invited them to provide. Part I briefly surveys some of the major laws, regulations, and programs that encourage unauthorized immigrants to identify themselves. Part II analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the statutory and constitutional arguments that immigrants could raise as a defense against deportations based on self-reported data. Part III explains that even if the government’s systematic use of such data to deport unauthorized immigrants is legal, doing so would be a poor policy choice for any …

It's Not Just Ferguson: Missouri Supreme Court Should Consolidate The Municipal Court System, Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Joshua Feinzig, Chris Mcallister

All Faculty Scholarship

The Missouri Supreme Court's unprecedented decision to take control of Ferguson's Municipal Court was based primarily on issues raised during sustained protest following the killing of Mike Brown and reports published by ArchCity Defenders and the Department of Justice. These reports highlighted racial disparity in traffic stops, excessive revenue generation, and excessive warrants and arrests and confirmed the lived experiences of poor and Black people in St. Louis: there is a racially discriminatory and profit-driven approach to law enforcement made possible only by the collaborative efforts of local government, police, and courts.

These condemned practices are not unique to Ferguson. …

Administering Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court's evisceration of section …

The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra ‘Preclearance’ After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This Article proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and who vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that …

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, And Housing Discrimination, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

In the face of federal inability to effectively police our national borders and to remove unauthorized immigrants, many local governments have recently sought to take measures into their own hands by passing anti-illegal immigrant ("AII") ordinances. These ordinances usually contain a combination of provisions restricting housing, employment, and public benefits for unauthorized immigrants, among other things.This Article focuses on AII provisions that are targeted at private rental housing, which typically take the form of sanctions against landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants.

Domestic Violence And The Workplace: The Explosion Of State Legislation And The Need For A Comprehensive Strategy, Deborah A. Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In recent years, domestic violence legislation has migrated out of its traditional locus in family law and criminal law to include a rapidly growing body of employment law. The new laws respond to a relatively simple problem: Economic security is one of the most important factors in whether a victim of domestic violence will be able to separate from an abusive partner, but domestic violence often interferes with victims' ability to maintain jobs, thus causing job loss that further traps victims in abusive relationships. By providing supports to victims and empowering employers to take direct legal action against perpetrators of …

Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Professional sports organizations' relationships with their players are, like other employer-employee relationships, subject to scrutiny under the antidiscrimination mandates embedded in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professional sports organizations are, however, unique among employers in many respects. Most notably, unlike other employers, professional sports organizations attract avid supporters who identify deeply with the teams and their players. To the extent an organization racially discriminates, therefore, such discrimination creates the risk that fans will identify with the homogenous or racially disproportionate roster that results. The consequences of such race-based team identification are wide-reaching and potentially tragic. Through …

Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …

Family Law And Gay And Lesbian Family Issues In The Twentieth Century, David L. Chambers, Nancy D. Polikoff

Articles

Over these thirty years, lesbians and gay men have increasingly challenged conventional definitions of marriage and the family. In this brief article, we tell the story of gay people and family law in the United States across this period. We divide our discussion into two sections: issues regarding the recognition of the same-sex couple relationship and issues regarding gay men and lesbians as parents. These issues overlap, of course, but since family law discussions commonly treat adult-adult issues of all sorts separately from parent-child issues, we believe it convenient and helpful to do so as well.

Whose Federalism, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article examines briefly the Seminole Tribe and City of Boerne decisions. Part II then focuses on the ADA and the reasons why Congress made it applicable to government conduct as well as private conduct. Finally, Part III examines the argument, based on the new federalism, that the ADA should not apply to state entities. It does not appear that the Court's new federalism has had a liberty-enhancing effect for some of the most vulnerable persons in our society. The Court's revitalized federalism jurisprudence has led to questions about the continuing validity of many of our civil rights statutes as …

Car Wars: The Fourth Amendment's Death On The Highway, David A. Harris

Articles

In just the past few terms, the Supreme Court has issued several decisions that have increased police discretion to stop and question drivers and passengers and search both these persons and their vehicles. These cases are only the latest in a line that has slowly but surely made it ever easier for police to do these things without being concerned with procedural or constitutional obstacles.

This article traces the history of those cases, and argues that, however much protection the Fourth Amendment might accord to an ordinary citizen in his or her home or even walking down the street, it …

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 …

The Distrust Of Politics, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

In this Article, Dean Sandalow considers the justifications advanced by those who favor the removal of certain political issues from the political process by extending the reach of judicial review. He begins by examining the distrust of politics in a different context, discussing the proposals made by the Progressives for reforming municipal government, as a vehicle to expose the assumptions underlying the current debate. His comparison of the two historical settings reveals many similarities between the Progressives' reform proposals and the contemporary justiflcations.[or the displacement of politics with constitutional law. Dean Sandalow concludes that the distrust of politics rests not …

Nonpopulation Factors Relevant To An Acceptable Standard For Apportionment, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Of the many problems left unanswered in Baker v. Carr,' the one that has received the most attention both from lower courts and commentators is that of prescribing a specific standard for determining what constitutes a denial of "equal protection" in legislative apportionment.2 The starting point universally accepted - indeed, probably required by Baker - for attacking this problem is the definition of apportionment equality in terms of mathematical measurement of the individual's "voting power."3 Perfect equality in apportionment is viewed as requiring that each election district contain an equal population, so that every individual's vote in his district will …

On Charting A Course Through The Mathematical Quagmire: The Future Of Baker V. Carr, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

The Tennessee reapportionment decision, Baker v. Carr,' has been popularly characterized as one of the "very few judicial decisions which have fundamentally reshaped our constitutional system."'2 Newspaper and magazine commentators generally have predicted that the decision of last March is likely to "change the course of our history" by producing a drastic alteration in the balance of power on the state political scene.3 While this end may be desirable,4 any such estimate of the future impact of the Baker decision, at least insofar as its legal consequence is concerned,5 seems not only premature but somewhat exaggerated. The future significance of …

Constitutionality Of Segregation Ordinances, John B. Waite

Articles

The effort of various southern states to segregate white persons and colored ones into mutually exclusive residential districts has received a final quietus, unless the Supreme Court of the United States shall reverse itself, by the decision in Buchanan v. Warley, handed down November 5, 1917. The suit in this case was for specific performance of a contract to buy land. The contract expressly stipulated that the buyer, a colored man, was not to be held to his purchase unless he had "the right under the laws of the state of Kentucky and the city of Louisville to ocupy said …