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Columbia Law School

Faculty Scholarship

2013

Civil rights

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw Jan 2013

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate.


The Dignity Of Equality Legislation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson Jan 2013

The Dignity Of Equality Legislation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In Congressional Power to Effect Sex Equality, Patricia Seith argues that legal and social science commentary on the ratification failure of the Equal Rights Amendment ("ERA") does not properly account for the legislative gains achieved by the Economic Equity Act ("Equity Act"). In drawing attention to the Equity Act, Seith's account challenges common explanations of the source of women's equality gains, particularly the narratives offered by legal commentators who typically focus on the role of the Constitution and the courts. As Seith points out, the conventional account in legal history focuses on the effectuation of a "de facto ERA," …