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Full-Text Articles in Law
Bakke’S Lasting Legacy: Redefining The Landscape Of Equality And Liberty In Civil Rights Law, Rachel F. Moran
Bakke’S Lasting Legacy: Redefining The Landscape Of Equality And Liberty In Civil Rights Law, Rachel F. Moran
Faculty Scholarship
The fortieth anniversary of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke is worth commemorating simply because the decision has survived. The United States Supreme Court’s opinion upholding the use of race in admissions has had remarkable staying power, even as other programs of affirmative action, for example, in government contracting, have been struck down as unconstitutional. That longevity might seem surprising because Bakke set forth an exacting standard of strict scrutiny under equal protection law that renders all race-based classifications suspect, whether government officials are motivated by benign or invidious purposes. That standard is one that few programs can …
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …
Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …
The Land Crisis In Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond The Myopic Focus Upon Black & White, Thomas W. Mitchell
The Land Crisis In Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond The Myopic Focus Upon Black & White, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
This article deconstructs the role that race played in the land crisis in Zimbabwe that occurred in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s and earls 2000s. The article makes it clear that the government of Zimbabwe did not extend robust property rights to its black majority population for the most part even as it took land from large white landowners. This is revealing given that the government's primary justification for taking land from large white landowners was that the black majority unjustly owned little property in Zimbabwe as a result of colonialist and neocolonialist, discriminatory polices.
Justice For Rodney King, Scott C. Burrell, Alan R. Dial, Thomas W. Mitchell
Justice For Rodney King, Scott C. Burrell, Alan R. Dial, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
May 1992 letter from three Howard University School of Law students to President George H.W. Bush advocating that the United States Department of Justice invoke the Petite Policy to initiate a criminal action against the Los Angeles Police Department police officers responsible for brutally beating Rodney King despite the fact that these offers had been acquitted in a California state court. The letter, which was read in front of the White House by Thomas Mitchell to hundreds of people who had gathered to urge the federal government to take action, sets forth a clear legal basis to permit the Justice …