Law Commons^™

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …

A Tale Of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of judges in holding government acts unconstitutional? The conventional paradigm is "judicial review." From this perspective, judges have a distinct power to review statutes and other government acts for their constitutionality. The historical evidence, however, reveals another paradigm, that of judicial duty. From this point of view, presented in my book Law and Judicial Duty, a judge has an office or duty, in all decisions, to exercise judgment in accord with the law of the land. On this understanding, there is no distinct power to review acts for their constitutionality, and what is called "judicial review" …

Integration, Reconstructed, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines Parents Involved for the light it sheds on integration's continuing relevance to educational and social equity. Part I examines the story of school integration in Jefferson County and shows how this largely successful metropolitan integration plan challenges claims of racial integration's futility. Part II puts forward the empirical evidence that plaintiffs in Parents Involved used in seeking to establish that school boards have a compelling interest in promoting racial integration and avoiding the harm of racially isolated schools. This part argues that the empirical case for racial integration, while not without limitations, moves beyond stigmatization, psychological harm, …

What Does A White Woman Look Like? Racing And Erasing In Law, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In significant ways, legal texts produce a narrative of national identity. They weave stories about who we are, what we are committed to, and what we expect of one another, individually and collectively. The concept of justiciability can be understood as a set of rules determining what stories courts are allowed to tell about who we are and who we can be. In this sense, Ronald Dworkin's account of judging as writing ongoing chapters in a chain novel provides a compelling conception of law as both describing where we have been and directing where we are going. If the salience …

Militants, Moderates, And Social Change, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of this paper is a simple generalization: To the extent that social protest draws attention to its form rather than to the grievance it seeks to redress, it is likely to be unproductive. I add a quick qualification. In offering this generalization, I am assuming that the protester is genuine in seeking to redress one or more grievances and that he is not using the grievance as a subterfuge to pick a fight. If the purpose of the protest is in fact to provoke a repressive response, then, of course, my generalization is inapplicable.

We obviously have a …