Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Law
Section 2 After Section 5: Voting Rights And The Race To The Bottom, Ellen D. Katz
Section 2 After Section 5: Voting Rights And The Race To The Bottom, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
Five years ago, Shelby County v. Holder released nine states and fifty-five smaller jurisdictions from the preclearance obligation set forth in section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This obligation mandated that places with a history of discrimination in voting obtain federal approval—known as preclearance—before changing any electoral rule or procedure. Within hours of the Shelby County decision, jurisdictions began moving to reenact measures section 5 had specifically blocked. Others pressed forward with new rules that the VRA would have barred prior to Shelby County.
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
Articles
False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but …
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …
Why Counting Votes Doesn't Add Up: A Response To Cox And Miles' Judging The Voting Rights Act, Ellen D. Katz, Anna Baldwin
Why Counting Votes Doesn't Add Up: A Response To Cox And Miles' Judging The Voting Rights Act, Ellen D. Katz, Anna Baldwin
Articles
In Judging the Voting Rights Act, Professors Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles report that judges are more likely to find liability under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) when they are African American, appointed by a Democratic president, or sit on an appellate panel with a judge who is African American or a Democratic appointee. Cox and Miles posit that their findings “contrast” and “cast doubt” on much of the “conventional wisdom” about the Voting Rights Act, by which they mean the core findings we reported in Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 …
Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Comparative Fiscal Federalism: What Can The U.S. Supreme Court And The European Court Of Justice Learn From Each Other's Tax Jurisprudence?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Articles
In October 2005, a group of distinguished tax experts from the European Union and the United States, who had never met before, convened at the University of Michigan Law School for a conference on "Comparative Fiscal Federalism: Comparing the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Justice Tax Jurisprudence." The purpose of the conference was to shed comparative light on the very different approaches taken by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the U.S. Supreme Court to the question of fiscal federalism. The conference was sponsored by the U-M Law School, U-M's European Union Center, and Harvard Law School's …
Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus
Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Under the doctrine of reverse incorporation, generally identified with the Supreme Court's decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, equal protection binds the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. Since Bolling, however, the courts have almost never granted relief to litigants claiming unconstitutional racial discrimination by the federal government. Courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on nonracial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against racial minorities, Boiling has virtually no …
Race And The Right To Vote After Rice V. Cayetano, Ellen D. Katz
Race And The Right To Vote After Rice V. Cayetano, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
Last Term, the Supreme Court relied on Gomillion [v. Lightfoot] to hold that Hawaii, like Alabama before it, had segregated voters by race in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The state law at issue in Rice v. Cayetano provided that only "Hawaiians" could vote for the trustees of the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs ("OHA"), a public agency that oversees programs designed to benefit the State's native people. Rice holds that restricting the OHA electorate to descendants of the 1778 inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands embodied a racial classification that effectively "fenc[ed] out whole classes of ...ci tizens from decisionmaking …
The Constitutionality Of Taxing Compensatory Damages For Mental Distress When There Was No Accompanying Physical Injury, Douglas A. Kahn
The Constitutionality Of Taxing Compensatory Damages For Mental Distress When There Was No Accompanying Physical Injury, Douglas A. Kahn
Articles
Since 1919, statutory tax law has excluded from gross income compensatory damages received on account of a personal injury or sickness.1 The current version of that exclusion is set forth in section 104 (a) (2) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.2 The construction of that exclusion, both by the courts and by the Commissioner, underwent significant alterations over the 80-year period that the provision has existed.3 The statute itself was amended several times, most recently in 1996.4 It is the 1996 amendment that has raised a constitutional issue concerning the validity of a portion of the statute.5
Scholars' Reply To Professor Fried, Yale Kamisar, Lee C. Bollinger, Judith C. Areen, Barbara A. Black
Scholars' Reply To Professor Fried, Yale Kamisar, Lee C. Bollinger, Judith C. Areen, Barbara A. Black
Articles
As Solicitor General of the United States, Charles Fried, like any good advocate, was often in the position of attempting to generate broad holdings from relatively narrow and particularistic Supreme Court decisions. This was especially true in affirmative action cases. There, the Department of Justice argued that cautious precedents actually stood for the broad proposition that measures designed to put members of disadvantaged groups on a plane of equality should, for constitutional purposes, be treated the same as measures intended to stigmatize or subordinate them. The Supreme Court, however, has consistently rejected this reading of its precedents and the broad …
Constitutionality Of Segregation Ordinances, John B. Waite
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 …