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The Nonpartisan Freedom Of Expression Of Public Employees, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Governmental activities affect each of us in a myriad of ways. The government's role as employer may pale in comparison with the more glamorous activities of the government as national defender, law enforcer, and allocator of scarce resources. Yet the legal ramifications of public employment-where the public interest in efficient governmental operation often conflicts with the public employee's freedom-have a profound influence upon American society.

In 1968, the Supreme Court in Pickering v. Board of Education formulated a test designed to balance these interests in defining the scope of a public employee's freedom of expression. In examining the nonpartisan free …

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 …