Law Commons^™

Child, Family, State, And Gender Equality In Religious Stances And Human Rights Instruments: A Preliminary Comparison, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recently began its third decade. Why has the United States still not ratified the CRC, celebrated as the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history? Once again, this question is on the table: Congressional resolutions that President Obama should not transmit the CRC to the Senate for advice and consent rapidly followed intimations that the Obama Administration had some qualms about the U.S. keeping company only with Somalia in not ratifying it. Some scholars contend that enlisting the unique resources of religions would help to ground a culture …

Ricci V. Destefano And Disparate Treatment: How The Case Makes Title Vii And The Equal Protection Clause Unworkable, Allen R. Kamp

Allen R. Kamp

ABSTRACT

Ricci v. DeStefano and Disparate Treatment: How the Case Makes Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause Unworkable

Although early commentators have focused on Ricci’s discussion of disparate impact, I see what Ricci is saying about disparate treatment as being more important. The majority and concurring opinions make proving disparate treatment much easier than under prior law, in a way that may utterly defeat that cause.

One can see Ricci as the case in which the Court came down in favor of one of two competing interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VII, “anti-subordination” and “anti-classification.” The …

Did A Switch In Time Save Nine?, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing plan of 1937 and the “switch in time that saved nine” animate central questions of law, politics, and history. Did Supreme Court Justice Roberts abruptly switch votes in 1937 to avert a showdown with Roosevelt? Scholars disagree vigorously about whether Roberts’s transformation was gradual and anticipated or abrupt and unexpected. Using newly collected data of votes from the 1931–1940 terms, we contribute to the historical understanding of this episode by providing the first quantitative evidence of Roberts’s transformation. Applying modern measurement methods, we show that Roberts shifted sharply to the left in the 1936 term. The …

British Politics, The Welfare State, And Tort Liability Of Public Authorities, Dan Priel

All Papers

There has been a notable shift in the scope of negligence liability of public authorities in the Post War period. Notably there was a trend toward restriction of liability in the 1980s. This essay tries to explain why this happened not by focusing on changing legal formulas but by examining the political context of the law in this area. I begin the essay by demonstrating how changes in the attitudes toward the role of the state have led to the changes in the law in this area. I then go on to examine the impact of Thatcher’s ascent to power. …

Gerald Ford, The Nixon Pardon, And The Rise Of The Right , Laura Kalman

Cleveland State Law Review

Perhaps more than the 1960s, the early 1970s marked the high water mark of the liberal consensus. Roe v. Wade, which grounded the right to abortion in the right to privacy, represented the apex of rights-based liberalism and perpetuated the division between public and private, a crucial facet to liberalism. As President, Nixon often governed liberally even though he talked conservatively, and thus many conservatives regarded him as a traitor. The rise of the modern Republican Party and the right was highly contingent: When Nixon resigned, both the Republican Party and conservatives seemed even more divided, endangered, and mired in …

Trying A New Way: Barack Obama’S Tolerance Of Intolerance, Stephanie L. Phillips

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.