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Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker May 1999

Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker

Michigan Law Review

Hate crimes are nothing new: crimes in which the victim is selected because of the victim's membership in some distinctive group (be it racial, ethnic, religious, or other) have been with us as long as such groups have coexisted within legal systems. What is relatively new is their recognition and designation as a discrete phenomenon. But as appellations like "sexual harassment" and "community policing" have begun to teach us, words are only the beginning of the life cycle of a new socio-legal concept. What follows are debates about whether the new category is really a coherent one, what activities should …


Which Queue?, Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko May 1999

Which Queue?, Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko

Michigan Law Review

It is annoying when one is in a long line - at a ticket counter, at a supermarket, at a bank - and someone "jumps the queue," taking a position in line ahead of other people who lined up first. The title of Mark Kelman and Gillian Lester's book, Jumping the Queue, gives the reader advance warning of the authors' position on people who edge ahead in line. But the topic of their book is not ticket, supermarket, or bank lines, but rather the line to enjoy the benefits of society. And the focus of the analysis of queue-jumpers is …


Race, Class, Caste…? Rethinking Affirmative Action, Clark D. Cunningham, N.R. Madhava Menon Mar 1999

Race, Class, Caste…? Rethinking Affirmative Action, Clark D. Cunningham, N.R. Madhava Menon

Michigan Law Review

Many who oppose affirmative action programs in the United States because they use "racial" categories such as black, African American, or Latino, claim that equally effective and more equitable programs can be developed using only class categories, such as "low income." A key test case for the "race v. class" debate is admission to law schools, made urgent by recent legal prohibitions on the use of "race" in the admission procedures to state universities in California, Washington, and Texas. An empirical study by Linda Wightman, the former director of research for the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), has shown that …


Affirmative Action, Caste, And Cultural Comparisons, Cass R. Sunstein Mar 1999

Affirmative Action, Caste, And Cultural Comparisons, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

What is permitted, and what is prohibited, by the equality principle of a liberal democracy? Does affirmative action run afoul of that principle? And where should we look to answer these questions? Many critics of affirmative action take it as axiomatic that affirmative action violates the equality principle. But this is far from clear. Every law classifies. The current law of equality itself classifies by, for example, treating discrimination on the basis of race differently from discrimination on the basis of age. No one thinks that the law of equality is, for this reason, inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause. …


Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath Jan 1999

Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath

Michigan Law Review

There is a familiar egalitarian constitutional tradition and another we have largely forgotten. The familiar one springs from Brown v. Board of Education; its roots lie in the Reconstruction era. Court-centered and countermajoritarian, it takes aim at caste and racial subordination. The forgotten one also originated with Reconstruction, but it was a majoritarian tradition, addressing its arguments to lawmakers and citizens, not to courts. Aimed against harsh class inequalities, it centered on decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic independence and democracy. Borrowing a phrase from its Progressive Era proponents, I will call it the social …