Law Commons^™

The Punishment Of Hate: Toward A Normative Theory Of Bias-Motivated Crimes, Frederick M. Lawrence

Michigan Law Review

This article explores how bias crimes differ from parallel crimes and why this distinction makes a crucial difference in our criminal law. Bias crimes differ from parallel crimes as a matter of both the resulting harm and the mental state of the offender. The nature of the injury sustained by the immediate victim of a bias crime exceeds the harm caused by a parallel crime. Moreover, bias crimes inflict a palpable harm on the broader target community of the crime as well as on society at large, while parallel crimes do not generally cause such widespread injury.

The distinction between …

Employment Discrimination Testing: Theories Of Standing And A Reply To Professor Yelnosky, Leroy D. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Professor Clark addresses the legal issues surrounding the use of testers-individuals who deliberately apply for employment to detect sex and race discrimination. He surveys three theoretical justifications for granting standing to organizations that run testing programs. Professor Clark then responds to a previous article by Professor Yelnosky, disputing some of his conclusions. Professor Clark indicates that testing is just as necessary in higher-level employment as lower-level employment; shows that testers can obtain meaningful relief from the courts; analyzes the impact of the 1991 Civil Rights Act amendments; and encourages Congress to authorize the EEOC to run tester …

Salvaging The Opportunity: A Response To Professor Clark, Michael J. Yelnosky

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Professor Yelnosky responds to Professor Clark's critique of his previous article, Filling an Enforcement Void: Using Testers to Uncover and Remedy Discrimination in Hiring for Lower-Skilled, Entry-Level Jobs. Professor Yelnosky first clarifies that Professor Clark has adopted several of the points Professor Yelnosky originally made in his earlier article. He then responds to the portions of Professor Clark's article that challenge his prior conclusions. He builds on and defends his previous arguments that: (1) testing is best suited to uncover hiring discrimination for lower-skilled jobs; (2) disincentives to bringing tester lawsuits make it unwise to rely …

Employment Discrimination Claims Under Erisa Section 510: Should Courts Require Exhaustion Of Arbitral And Plan Remedies?, Jared A. Goldstein

Michigan Law Review

This Note examines whether courts should require section 510 claimants to exhaust either plan-based or arbitral remedies before seeking judicial relief. It begins by comparing the basis for an exhaustion requirement with respect to benefits claims with the basis for such a requirement with respect to statutory claims - like those under section 510. Part I examines the rationale courts have offered for requiring exhaustion of plan remedies for benefits claims. Part I concludes that federal courts have correctly determined that Congress intended individuals bringing benefits claims to exhaust the remedies provided by the plan before seeking judicial relief. Part …

Employment Discrimination Law In Perspective: Three Concepts Of Equality, John J. Donohue Iii

Michigan Law Review

The essay begins with a discussion of which groups deserve the protection of employment discrimination law. With the protected categories of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act etched into the American consciousness, many might consider the appropriate categories to be fully self-evident. But of course, they are not, and many jurisdictions continue to struggle over whether certain dispreferred groups merit the law's solicitude.

No Time For Trumpets: Title Vii, Equality, And The Fin De Sièchle, D. Marvin Jones

Michigan Law Review

My essay seeks to examine the internal architecture of the discursive barrier - the wall - that the Supreme Court has built within the doctrinal framework of Title VII and concomitantly within the discourse of equality. To understand how the Court has erected this discursive wall, we must begin with history. Equality, while historically a vehicle for national identity and contemporaneously for modernist conceptions of justice, is synchronically and diachronically indeterminate. Equality is a deeply sedimented concept with not one objective meaning but successive levels of meaning built up over time. Each of those historic understandings is itself a unity …

Structuralist And Cultural Domination Theories Meet Title Vii: Some Contemporary Influences, Martha Chamallas

Michigan Law Review

This essay first looks at three important theoretical approaches - motivational, structural, and cultural - that mark the scholarly discourses on workplace equality since 1965. The motivational or individual choice theory is well established and has dominated legal discourse throughout this period. I concentrate in this essay on the other two visions, dating structuralist accounts from the mid1970s and cultural domination theories from the mid-1980s.

Caste And The Civil Rights Laws: From Jim Crow To Same-Sex Marriages, Richard A. Epstein

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I address the notion of caste in two separate contexts: in the traditional disputes over race and sex, and in the more modem disputes over sexual orientation. In both cases the idea of caste and its kindred notions of subordination and hierarchy are used to justify massive forms of government intervention. In all cases I think that these arguments are incorrect. In their place, I argue that the idea of caste should be confined to categories of formal, or legal, distinctions between persons before the law. This more limited notion of caste supplies no justification for the …

Title Vii And The Complex Female Subject, Kathryn Abrams

Michigan Law Review

One strength of Title VII has been its capacity to accommodate the changing conceptions of discrimination and the self-conceptions of subject groups. In the first decades of its enforcement, advocates have raised - and courts have endorsed - a range of contrasting conceptions in order to broaden the employment opportunities of protected groups. This flexibility is particularly evident with respect to women.

After exploring recent doctrinal efforts to respond to complex claimants, I address these questions and assess the prospects of change. Although the unitary or categorical notions of group identity under which Title VII has historically been enforced might …

Only Girls Wear Barrettes: Dress And Appearance Standards, Community Norms, And Workplace Equality, Katharine T. Bartlett

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I study both the judicial rationales and the scholarly criticisms thereof, agreeing with critics that community norms are too discriminatory to provide a satisfactory benchmark for defining workplace equality, but also questioning the usual implications of this critique. Critics assume that it is possible, and desirable, to evaluate dress and appearance rules without regard to the norms and expectations of the community - that is, according to stable or universal versions of equality that are uninfected by community norms. I question this assumption, arguing that equality, no less than other legal concepts, cannot transcend the norms of …

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 …

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 …

Only Words, David C. Dinielli

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Only Words by Catharine A. MacKinnon

No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging A New Civil Rights Movements, Cheryl A. Leighty

Michigan Law Review

A Review of No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement by Joseph P. Shapiro

Race Against The Court: The Supreme Court And Minorities In Contemporary America, Melissa Nicholson Starkey

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Race Against the Court: The Supreme Court and Minorities in Contemporary America by Girardeau A. Spann

Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra Ann Livingston

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force by Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe

The Lenses Of Gender: Transforming The Debate On Sexual Inequality, Jill M. Dahlmann

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality by Sandra Lipsitz Bem

The Public Policy Exclusion And Insurance For Intentional Employment Discrimination, Sean W. Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that courts choosing to apply the public policy exclusion to insurance for intentional employment discrimination liability should nevertheless permit employers to enforce insurance covering negligent supervision liability and liability imputed to an employer as a result of the intentional discrimination committed by its employees. Part I establishes a framework for understanding the cases in which courts have invoked public policy to refuse enforcement of insurance contracts, arguing that the rationale behind the public policy exclusion is utilitarian and that courts refuse to enforce insurance for liability arising out of intentional wrongdoing on the grounds that such insurance …

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act: A Parent's Perspective And Proposal For Change, Martin A. Kotler

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For two years, beginning in the fall of 1991, I was involved in an ongoing legal battle with the Delaware County, Pennsylvania Intermediate Unit No. 25 regarding the "appropriateness" of preschool programming for my son. To a large degree, the following Article has its origin in that battle.

Nevertheless, the point of this Article is neither to get even for wrongs, real or imagined, nor to utilize these pages to supplement the already extensive briefs and formal arguments made in that case. Rather, I believe that my position as a law professor, lawyer, litigant, and parent of a disabled child …

Toward A More Perfect Union: A Federal Cause Of Action For Physician Aid-In-Dying, Todd David Robichaud

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Part I of this Note investigates the possible foundations of a constitutional right to physician aid-in-dying triggering section 1983 protection and the opposing state interests in preventing suicide. Part II examines the nature and scope of and obstacles to a request for section 1983 relief. Finally, Part III focuses on the public policy implications associated with recognizing a federal cause of action.

Verbal Sexual Harassment As Equality-Depriving Conduct, Keith R. Fentonmiller

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Part I of this Note argues that commentators like Browne and some courts have mischaracterized the harm of verbal sexual harassment as mere "offense." Rather, the true harm of a sexually hostile environment created by words and expressive conduct extends beyond offense, emotional distress, and economic displacement; at bottom, the harm is equality-deprivation.

Part II explains how a sexually hostile environment is equality-depriving by arguing that words which create a sexually hostile environment must be understood in historical and social context. Words can be used not only to communicate ideas but also to perform acts of coercion and sexual abuse. …

Universal Versus Islamic Human Rights: A Clash Of Cultures Or A Clash With A Construct?, Ann Elizabeth Mayer

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article examines the recent trend proposing that Islam and Islamic culture mandate a distinctive approach to human rights. It offers critical assessments of selected civil and political rights in two recent products of this trend: (1) the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, issued by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and endorsed by Iran and Saudi Arabia; and (2) the rights provisions in the Saudi Arabian Basic Law promulgated in 1992. These legislative initiatives will be examined in conjunction with constructs of an Islamic culture necessarily at odds with international human rights norms. These constructs have …

The Key To Unlocking The Clubhouse Door: The Application Of Antidiscrimination Laws To Quasi-Private Clubs, Sally Frank

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article focuses on discrimination in quasi-private clubs and the impact of laws and the United States Constitution on that discrimination. For the purposes of this article, a quasi-private club is any organization that claims to be private but which might in fact be viewed as public. The term "quasi-private" is used because litigation concerning discrimination in such organizations often rests on whether the entity is private, and therefore cannot be regulated.