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Full-Text Articles in Law
Beyond More Accurate Algorithms: Takeaways From Mccleskey Revisited, Ngozi Okidegbe
Beyond More Accurate Algorithms: Takeaways From Mccleskey Revisited, Ngozi Okidegbe
Michigan Law Review
A Review of McCleskey v. Kemp. By Mario Barnes, in Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law 557, 581. Edited by Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R.A. Lenhardt and Angela Onwuachi-Willig.
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 …
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 …
The New Impartial Jury Mandate, Richard Lorren Jolly
The New Impartial Jury Mandate, Richard Lorren Jolly
Michigan Law Review
Impartiality is the cornerstone of the Constitution’s jury trial protections. Courts have historically treated impartiality as procedural in nature, meaning that the Constitution requires certain prophylactic procedures that secure a jury that is more likely to reach verdicts impartially. But in Peña- Rodriguez v. Colorado, 137 S. Ct. 855 (2017), the Supreme Court recognized for the first time an enforceable, substantive component to the mandate. There, the Court held that criminal litigants have a Sixth Amendment right to jury decisions made without reliance on extreme bias, specifically on the basis of race or national origin. The Court did not …
Snyder V. Louisiana: Continuing The Historical Trend Towards Increased Scrutiny Of Peremptory Challenges, John P. Bringewatt
Snyder V. Louisiana: Continuing The Historical Trend Towards Increased Scrutiny Of Peremptory Challenges, John P. Bringewatt
Michigan Law Review
In March 2008, the Supreme Court decided Snyder v. Louisiana, the latest in the line of progeny of Batson v. Kentucky. This Note demonstrates that Snyder is part of a historical pattern of Supreme Court decisions concerning the use of peremptory challenges in which the Court has moved away from permitting the unfettered use of the peremptory challenge in favor of stronger Equal Protection considerations. Snyder alters the requirements for trial judges in deciding Batson challenges by requiring them to provide some explanation of their reasons for accepting a prosecutor's justification of a peremptory challenge. Snyder is the …
Turning The Page On Section 5: The Implication Of Multiracial Coalition Districts On Section 5 Of The Voting Rights Act, Daniel A. Zibel
Turning The Page On Section 5: The Implication Of Multiracial Coalition Districts On Section 5 Of The Voting Rights Act, Daniel A. Zibel
Michigan Law Review
This Note analyzes the use of coalition districts in light of current section 5 and equal protection jurisprudence and argues that, in some circumstances, the Equal Protection Clause compels the use of coalition districts to achieve non retrogression under section 5. Part I examines the use of coalition districts, using the litigation in Page v. Bartels as an example. It then argues that the Supreme Court's opinion in Georgia v. Ashcroft permits jurisdictions to create viable racial coalition districts to comply with section 5. Part II argues that while Georgia v. Ashcroft permits the use of coalition districts to achieve …
First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, And Participation, Daniel P. Tokaji
First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, And Participation, Daniel P. Tokaji
Michigan Law Review
The tension between equality and discretion lies at the heart of some of the most vexing questions of constitutional law. The considerable discretion that many official decisionmakers wield raises the spectre that violations of equality norms will sometimes escape detection. This is true in a variety of settings, whether discretion lies over speakers' access to public fora, implementation of the death penalty, or the recounting of votes. Is the First Amendment violated, for example, when a city ordinance gives local officials broad discretion to determine the conditions under which political demonstrations may take place? Is equal protection denied where the …
Reinforcing Representation: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments In The Rehnquist And Waite Courts, Ellen D. Katz
Reinforcing Representation: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments In The Rehnquist And Waite Courts, Ellen D. Katz
Michigan Law Review
A large body of academic scholarship accuses the Rehnquist Court of "undoing the Second Reconstruction," just as the Waite Court has long been blamed for facilitating the end of the First. This critique captures much of what is meant by those generally charging the Rehnquist Court with "conservative judicial activism." It posits that the present Court wants to dismantle decades' worth of federal antidiscrimination measures that are aimed at the "reconstruction" of public and private relationships at the local level. It sees the Waite Court as having similarly nullified the civil-rights initiatives enacted by Congress following the Civil War to …
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Barnes
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Barnes
Michigan Law Review
Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: "Today . . . the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with that. " Williams condemned racial profiling - "As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It …
A Rational Basis For Affirmative Action: A Shaky But Classical Liberal Defense, Richard A. Epstein
A Rational Basis For Affirmative Action: A Shaky But Classical Liberal Defense, Richard A. Epstein
Michigan Law Review
I am honored to participate in a symposium on the occasion of the lOOth anniversary of one of America's preeminent law reviews. I am saddened, however, to write, at what should be a moment of celebration, with the knowledge that both the Law School and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts are enmeshed in extensive litigation over the critical and explosive issue of affirmative action. To find striking evidence of the deep split of learned judicial views on this issue, it is necessary to look no further than the sequence of opinions in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter …
Integration Without Classification: Moving Toward Race-Neutrality In The Pursuit Of Public Elementary And Secondary School Diversity, Paul Diller
Michigan Law Review
Ever since the Supreme Court's invalidation of racially segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, America has wrestled with the challenge of successfully dismantling educational apartheid. In recent years, the federal judiciary has largely retreated from enforcing desegregation in school districts that were once under court supervision for engaging in intentional racial discrimination, finding that the vestiges of past discrimination have been satisfactorily ameliorated. In some such unitary school districts, as well as in districts in which no intentional segregation was ever identified by the courts, boards of education, have voluntarily implemented student assignment plans designed to increase …
The Racial Origins Of Modern Criminal Procedure, Michael J. Klarman
The Racial Origins Of Modern Criminal Procedure, Michael J. Klarman
Michigan Law Review
The constitutional law of state criminal procedure was born between the First and Second World Wars. Prior to 1920, the Supreme Court had upset the results of the state criminal justice system in just a handful of cases, all involving race discrimination in jury selection. By 1940, however, the Court had interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate state criminal convictions in a wide variety of settings: mob-dominated trials, violation of the right to counsel, coerced confessions, financially-biased judges, and knowingly perjured testimony by prosecution witnesses. In addition, the Court had broadened its earlier decisions forbidding …
Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji
Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji
Michigan Law Review
Once again, issues of race, ethnicity, and class within our criminal justice system have been thrust into the public spotlight. On both sides of the country, in our nation's two largest cities, police are being called to account for acts of violence directed toward poor people of color. In New York City, a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four white police officers, who fired forty-one bullets at the unarmed man as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in a poor section of the Bronx. Did race influence the officers' decisions to fire the …
Affirmative Action, Caste, And Cultural Comparisons, Cass R. Sunstein
Affirmative Action, Caste, And Cultural Comparisons, Cass R. Sunstein
Michigan Law Review
What is permitted, and what is prohibited, by the equality principle of a liberal democracy? Does affirmative action run afoul of that principle? And where should we look to answer these questions? Many critics of affirmative action take it as axiomatic that affirmative action violates the equality principle. But this is far from clear. Every law classifies. The current law of equality itself classifies by, for example, treating discrimination on the basis of race differently from discrimination on the basis of age. No one thinks that the law of equality is, for this reason, inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause. …
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Michigan Law Review
There is a familiar egalitarian constitutional tradition and another we have largely forgotten. The familiar one springs from Brown v. Board of Education; its roots lie in the Reconstruction era. Court-centered and countermajoritarian, it takes aim at caste and racial subordination. The forgotten one also originated with Reconstruction, but it was a majoritarian tradition, addressing its arguments to lawmakers and citizens, not to courts. Aimed against harsh class inequalities, it centered on decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic independence and democracy. Borrowing a phrase from its Progressive Era proponents, I will call it the social …
Race, Rights, And Remedies In Criminal Adjudication, Pamela S. Karlan
Race, Rights, And Remedies In Criminal Adjudication, Pamela S. Karlan
Michigan Law Review
Once upon a time, back before the Warren Court, criminal procedure and racial justice were adjacent hinterlands in constitutional law's empire. In 1954, the fifth edition of Dowling's constitutional law casebook contained one chapter on "procedural due process" in which six of the eight cases were about criminal justice, and three of those - Powell v. Alabama, Moore v. Dempsey, and Bailey v. Alabama - were as much about race as they were about crime. A few pages later, two slender chapters on the "national protection of civil rights" and "equal protection of the laws" contained seven and nine decisions, …
The Unwelcome Judicial Obligation To Respect Politics In Racial Gerrymandering Remedies, Jeffrey L. Fisher
The Unwelcome Judicial Obligation To Respect Politics In Racial Gerrymandering Remedies, Jeffrey L. Fisher
Michigan Law Review
Like it or not, the attack on "bizarrely" shaped majority-minority electoral districts is now firmly underway. Nearly four years have passed since the Supreme Court first announced in Shaw v. Reno that a state's redistricting plan that is "so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting" may violate the Equal Protection Clause. Such a district, the Court held, reinforces racial stereotypes, carries us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters, and "threatens to undermine our system of …
An Interpretive History Of Modern Equal Protection, Michael Klarman
An Interpretive History Of Modern Equal Protection, Michael Klarman
Michigan Law Review
My enterprise here is to write a limited history of modem equal protection - one that will facilitate understanding of the important conceptual shifts that have occurred over time. By "modem" I mean the period following the switch-in-time in 1937 that signaled the demise of the Lochner era. By "limited" I mean an account that falls substantially short of a full-scale history of equal protection, which would, for example, necessarily encompass a good deal of political and social history. My aim here, rather, is to tell a story about the evolution of equal protection as a legal concept; I shall, …
Strict Construction And Judicial Review Of Racial Discrimination Under The Equal Protection Clause: Meeting Raoul Berger On Interpretivist Grounds, Paul R. Dimond
Michigan Law Review
In the face of this common understanding of the vagueness of much of the constitutional text, Berger bears the burden of proving that the equal protection clause was intended to enumerate specific, narrow protections against racial discrimination. This Article examines several contemporary sources to determine whether he has accomplished that task. It proceeds in six parts. Part I analyzes the text of the fourteenth amendment and contemporaneous congressional views on judicial review. Contrary to Berger's construction, the equal protection clause is not limited by its terms to the privileges or immunities clause or to the specific rights enumerated in the …
Unconstitutional Racial Classification And De Facto Segregation, Joseph A. Milchen
Unconstitutional Racial Classification And De Facto Segregation, Joseph A. Milchen
Michigan Law Review
Classification along racial lines, when involving state action, is unconstitutional. Such classification may violate the due process or equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment or the fifteenth amendment, and it has been held invalid in the fields of education, transportation, voting, recreational facilities, ownership and use of real property, and jury selection.
Residency Requirements For Voting And The Tensions Of A Mobile Society, John R. Schmidhauser
Residency Requirements For Voting And The Tensions Of A Mobile Society, John R. Schmidhauser
Michigan Law Review
It is the purpose of this article to determine the extent to which persons otherwise qualified to vote are disenfranchised by the complex of state residency requirements and to assess the practical and constitutional aspects of any statutory prospects for change.
Political Thickets And Crazy Quilts: Reapportionment And Equal Protection, Robert B. Mckay
Political Thickets And Crazy Quilts: Reapportionment And Equal Protection, Robert B. Mckay
Michigan Law Review
If asked to identify the two most important cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in the twentieth century, informed observers would be likely to name, in whichever order, Brown v. Board of Education and Baker v. Carr.
Legislative Apportionment And Representative Government: The Meaning Of Baker V. Carr, Jo Desha Lucas
Legislative Apportionment And Representative Government: The Meaning Of Baker V. Carr, Jo Desha Lucas
Michigan Law Review
In three recent cases the Supreme Court has reopened the question of the extent to which federal courts will review the general fairness of state schemes of legislative apportionment. It is a question on which the Court has had nothing to say for over a decade, leaving the bar to patch together the current state of the law from the outcome of cases disposed of without opinion considered against a backdrop of language used in earlier decisions.
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Segregation Of Spectator Seating In Courtroom, Thomas W. Van Dyke
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Segregation Of Spectator Seating In Courtroom, Thomas W. Van Dyke
Michigan Law Review
Defendant, judge of a municipal court in Virginia, assigned seating on the basis of race in that part of his courtroom reserved for spectators and for those awaiting the call of their business before the court. The same number of seats were provided for Negroes as for whites. There was no separation of the races in the area immediately before the bench nor was there any complaint of discrimination in the administration of justice. Plaintiffs are Negroes who have been required on more than one occasion to occupy seats in the spectator section on a racially-segregated basis. In a suit …
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, …
Constitutional Law- State Action And The Equal Protection Clause - Status Of Lessee Of Public Property, Stephen Bard
Constitutional Law- State Action And The Equal Protection Clause - Status Of Lessee Of Public Property, Stephen Bard
Michigan Law Review
Defendant Wilmington Parking Authority was a tax-exempt state agency organized under the Delaware Parking Authority Act to build and operate a public off-street parking facility. Financing of the project was accomplished primarily by the issuance of self-liquidating bonds, but fifteen percent of the necessary capital was advanced by the City of Wilmington from its public funds. The state agency had statutory authority to lease space in the facility for private commercial uses, but only to the extent that the rentals thereby obtained were needed to meet the state requirement that the facility be self-supporting. In accordance with this authority space …