Law Commons^™

Freedom, Democracy, And The Right To Education, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

While litigation continues in an effort to establish a fundamental right to education under the U.S. Constitution, the full historical justification for this right remains missing—a fatal flaw for many jurists. This Article fills that gap, demonstrating that the central, yet entirely overlooked, justification for a federal right to education resides in America’s education story during the era of slavery and Reconstruction.

At that time, education was first and foremost about freedom. The South had criminalized education to maintain a racialized hierarchy that preserved slavery. Many African Americans, seeing education as the means to both mental and physical freedom, made …

The Contradiction Between Equal Protection's Meaning And Its Legal Substance: How Deliberate Indifference Can Cure It, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

This Article highlights the inherent ambiguities of racial antidiscrimination’s core legal language: “equal protection under the law” and “discrimination based on race.” It then analyzes how and why the Court has never answered fundamental questions regarding the meaning of these terms. Thus, this Article answers these fundamental questions itself by exploring the original intent behind the Equal Protection Clause. Against this backdrop, this Article reveals how the Court’s standard for assessing discrimination claims, the intent doctrine, assumes a meaning for equal protection that is inconsistent with its original meaning. Rather than reflecting equal protection’s meaning, the standard lacks any basis …