Law Commons^™

Gay Rights Through The Looking Glass: Politics, Morality, And The Trial Of Colorado's Amendment 2, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Courts have long struggled to resolve the question of how far a community may go in exercising its power to treat minority members differently. Popular prejudice, "community morality" and invidious stereotypes repeatedly have had their day in court as judges work to reconcile equal protection and privacy rights with their own attitudes about the place of people of color, women and gay people in society. In the early 1990s, the tension between the American ideal of equality and the reality of human diversity starkly emerged. A national wave of citizen-sponsored initiatives seeking to amend state constitutions and local charters to …

The Victims Of Nimby, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

It is a syndrome, a pejorative, and an acronym of our times: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard. It has a political arm, NIMTOO (Not In My Term Of Office), an object of attack, LULUs (Locally Undesired Land Uses), and an extreme form, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). Acronyms aside, however, the question remains as to whether or not NIMBY has victims. Is anyone hurt by NIMBY?

Many leading voices in the environmental justice movement believe that minority communities are victims of NIMBY. For example, Professor Robert D. Bullard has written that "[t]he cumulative effect of not-in-my-backyard …