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Rationality - And The Irrational Underinclusiveness Of The Civil Rights Laws, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Congress has enacted a series of civil rights laws designed to protect individuals from public an private forms of irrational discrimination. To be lawful, such civil rights statutes must conform with the definition of rationality required by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, in one fashion, these statutes are as irrational as the behavior they seek to control. The statutes protect only certain classes of individuals in limited instances. This article argues that the existing civil rights laws, although integral to a free society, are but a first step. The statute will never be fully rational, never completely fair, until …