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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Color Of Property And Auto Insurance: Time For Change, Jennifer B. Wriggins
The Color Of Property And Auto Insurance: Time For Change, Jennifer B. Wriggins
Faculty Publications
Insurance company executives issued statements condemning racism and urging change throughout society and in the insurance industry after the huge Black Lives Matter demonstrations in summer 2020. The time therefore is ripe for examining insurance as it relates to race and racism, including history and current regulation. Two of the most important types of personal insurance are property and automobile. Part I begins with history, focusing on property insurance, auto insurance, race, and racism in urban areas around the mid-twentieth century. Private insurers deemed large areas of cities where African Americans lived to be “blighted” and refused to insure all …
Response To Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Jennifer Wriggins
Response To Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Jennifer Wriggins
Faculty Publications
Issues of race and racism in the U.S. torts system continue to deserve much more attention from legal scholarship than they receive, and Keeping Cases from Black Juries is a valuable contribution. Studying racism as it infects the torts system is difficult because explicit de jure exclusions of black jurors are in the past; race is no longer on the surface of tort opinions; and court records do not reveal the race of tort plaintiffs, defendants, or jurors. Yet it is essential to try and understand the workings of race and racism in the torts system. The authors pose a …
Who Says You're Disabled? The Role Of Medical Evidence In The Ada Definition Of Disability, Deirdre M. Smith
Who Says You're Disabled? The Role Of Medical Evidence In The Ada Definition Of Disability, Deirdre M. Smith
Faculty Publications
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), enacted by Congress seventeen years ago, offered disabled people a hope of equality and access that has not been fulfilled. 1 Court decisions halt an overwhelming majority of claims, particularly in the employment context, at the summary judgment stage. 2 A key mechanism for fencing out disabled people's claims is the pernicious requirement, based upon the very construction of disability that the ADA's proponents aimed to dispel, that medical evidence is required as a threshold matter to demonstrate that the plaintiff is entitled to seek protection under the statute. 3 The medical evidence requirement …
The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith
The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith
Faculty Publications
Both medicine and the law devote considerable concern to drawing lines, that is, to classifying and making distinctions. In medicine, such line-drawing occurs when a person is designated healthy or ill, normal or disordered. In the law, such line-drawing determines who does and does not bear legal responsibility for a given situation. This Article reviews the demarcation drawn by psychiatry and the courts between disfavored personality and mental illness, a dichotomy not based upon empirical science and therefore, wholly susceptible to social construction and implementation. While society may pathologize noxious personalities, thus making them disabilities, it is loath to extend …