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Trending @ Rwu Law: Mikela Almeida's Post: Esther Clark Competition Held In R. I. Supreme Court, Mikela Almeida
Trending @ Rwu Law: Mikela Almeida's Post: Esther Clark Competition Held In R. I. Supreme Court, Mikela Almeida
Law School Blogs
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Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri
Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …
Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri
Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …
Bait And Switch: Why United States V. Morrison Is Wrong About Section Five, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
Bait And Switch: Why United States V. Morrison Is Wrong About Section Five, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
All Faculty Scholarship
As the title suggests, the article examines Morrison’s creation of the rule that the Section Five power cannot be used to regulate private individuals. This is one of the most meaningful and, thus far, durable constraints that the Court has placed on federal power. It is the more surprising, then, that it turns out to be based on essentially nothing at all. The Morrison Court asserted that its rule was derived by—indeed, “controlled by”—precedent, but a closer reading of the Reconstruction-era decisions it cites shows that this is simply not the case. An independent evaluation of the rule against regulation …
Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren Lenard Hutchinson
Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren Lenard Hutchinson
UF Law Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court requires that equal protection plaintiffs prove defendants acted with discriminatory intent. The intent rule has insulated from judicial invalidation numerous policies that harmfully impact racial and ethnic minorities. Court doctrine also mandates that state actors generally remain colorblind. The colorblindness doctrine has led to the judicial invalidation of policies designed to ameliorate the conditions of racial inequality. Taken together, these two equality doctrines facilitate racial domination. The Court justifies this outcome on the ground that the Constitution does not protect “group rights.”
Constitutional law theorists have criticized these aspects of equal protection doctrine. Recently, however, some theorists …
Contraception As A Sex Equality Right, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel
Contraception As A Sex Equality Right, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
Challenges to federal law requiring insurance coverage of contraception are occurring on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. It is a good time to reflect on the values served by protecting women’s access to contraception.
In 1965, the Court ruled in Griswold that a law criminalizing the use of contraception violated the privacy of the marriage relationship. Griswold offered women the most significant constitutional protection since the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, constitutional protection as important as the cases prohibiting sex discrimination that the Court would …