Law Commons^™

Resolving The Original Sin Of Bolling V. Sharpe, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that for the first time categorically held that racial segregation in public schools was per se unlawful – Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe. Ostensibly, both cases dealt with a same question; however, in Brown the entity accused of discrimination was a creature of the State of Kansas, while in Bolling the discrimination was practiced by the federal government. The problem that the Supreme Court faced was the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, by its own terms, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” only vis-à-vis …

The Case Of Dixon V. Alabama: From Civil Rights To Students' Rights And Back Again, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

On February 25, 1960, African American students from Alabama State College participated in a sit-in at a segregated lunch grill at the Montgomery County Courthouse. The lunch grill refused to serve the students and ordered them to leave. The students left and went to the courthouse corridor, where they remained for an hour before going back to campus.

When Alabama State College learned of the students’ actions, it summarily expelled them without notice or hearing. In expelling the students, the college relied on Alabama State Board of Education regulations that allowed it to expel students for “conduct unbecoming a student …

A Lawyer Looks At Civil Disobedience: How Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Reframed The Civil Rights Revolution, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reconstructs Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s thoughts on the civil rights movement by focusing on a series of little-known speeches that he delivered in the 1960s lamenting the practice of civil disobedience endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Convinced that the law had done all it could for blacks, Powell took issue with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, impugning its invocation of civil disobedience and rejecting its calls for compensatory justice to make up for slavery and Jim Crow. Dismissive of reparations, Powell developed a separate basis for supporting diversity that hinged on distinguishing American pluralism from Soviet totalitarianism. …

The New Jim Crow? Recovering The Progressive Origins Of Mass Incarceration, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This article revisits the claim that mass incarceration constitutes a new form of racial segregation, or JimCrow. Drawing from historical sources, it demonstrates that proponents of the analogy miss an important commonality between the two phenomena, namely the debt that each owe to progressive and/or liberal politics. Though generally associated with repression and discrimination, both Jim Crow and massincarceration owe their existence in part to enlightened reforms aimed at promoting black interests; albeit with perverse results. Recognizing the aspirational origins of systematic discrimination marks an important facet of comprehending the persistence of racial inequality in the United States.

Gerald Bard Tjoflat: A Profile, Daniel S. Bowling Iii

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What We Disagree About When We Disagree About School Choice, Aaron J. Saiger

Faculty Scholarship

The debate over school vouchers, charter schools, and other varieties of school choice has become a bit stale. It would improve were advocates on all sides to acknowledge several crucial realities that they too often obfuscate. First, the debate is fundamentally normative, not empirical. The desirability of choice depends primarily upon how we weigh competing claims of equality and liberty in education. Second, all participants in the debate should acknowledge both that constrained choice is still genuine choice, and that how and to what extent parental decisions are constrained are fundamental issues in choice policy. Finally, with respect to the …