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Employees Beware: How Sb 43 Takes Missouri Anti-Discrimination Law Too Far, Emily Crane Jun 2018

Employees Beware: How Sb 43 Takes Missouri Anti-Discrimination Law Too Far, Emily Crane

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

SB 43 passed through the Missouri Legislature and was signed into law by Governor Eric Greitens on June 30, 2017. Ostensibly intended to bring Missouri’s anti-discrimination law in line with analogous federal law, SB 43 amended the Missouri Human Rights Act and thereby improperly increased the legal burden on employment discrimination plaintiffs. This article examines the causation standards under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act and contrasts those with the newly-amended Missouri Human Rights Act to demonstrate just how far Missouri law has gone. In so doing, this article ultimately concludes …


Side By Side: Revitalizing Urban Cores And Ensuring Residential Diversity, Andrea Boyack Jan 2017

Side By Side: Revitalizing Urban Cores And Ensuring Residential Diversity, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

Fifty years ago, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed a hope that someday people of all races would “live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.” Residential patterns in America today, however, remain highly segregated by race and income. The Fair Housing Act outlawed overt housing discrimination and unjustified discriminatory impacts, but zoning laws and housing finance structures have continued to impede housing integration, leaving communities nearly as racially homogenous as they were in the mid 20th century. These separate neighborhoods are far from equal. The majority of people who reside in financially distressed city-center neighborhoods are …


Race, Rhetoric, And Judicial Opinions: Missouri As A Case Study, Brad Desnoyer, Anne Alexander Jan 2017

Race, Rhetoric, And Judicial Opinions: Missouri As A Case Study, Brad Desnoyer, Anne Alexander

Faculty Publications

This Essay studies the relationship between race, rhetoric, and history in three twentieth century segregation cases: State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Kraemer v. Shelley, and Liddell v. Board of Education. Part I gives a brief overview of the scholarship of Critical Race Theory, majoritarian narratives and minority counter-narratives, and the judiciary’s rhetoric in race-based cases. Part II analyzes the narratives and language of Gaines, Kraemer, and Liddell, provides the social context of these cases, and traces their historical outcomes.

The Essay contends that majoritarian narratives with problematic themes continue to perpetuate even though court opinions have evolved to use …


The Twelve-Year-Old Girl's Lawsuit That Changed America: The Continuing Impact Of Now V. Little League Baseball, Inc. At 40, Douglas E. Abrams Jan 2012

The Twelve-Year-Old Girl's Lawsuit That Changed America: The Continuing Impact Of Now V. Little League Baseball, Inc. At 40, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In 1972, Little League's national office forced 12-year-old Maria Pepe off her Hoboken (N.J.) team because "[g]irls are not eligible." The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights sustained her gender discrimination claim in 1973, and the courts upheld the administrative decision a year later.

National reaction to Maria Pepe's courageous insistence on gender equity helped sustain the evolution in gender roles that had accelerated since the Women's Movement of the 1960s. Her landmark legal action also likely influenced the Supreme Court's gradual movement toward intermediate scrutiny of gender discrimination claims; the 1975 federal regulations that assured Title IX of the …


Pretext In Peril, Natasha T. Martin Apr 2010

Pretext In Peril, Natasha T. Martin

Missouri Law Review

This Article addresses the connections among substance, procedure, and equality in the American workplace. Exploring the deepening struggle for plaintifs under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Article seeks to add clarity to an enduring quandary - why does Title VII fail to combat the prejudicial disparate treatment it was designed to eradicate? This Article offers a critique of the hardships shouldered by plaintiffs in proving contemporary workplace discrimination. Challenging the seemingly unfettered discretion of the courts in evaluating claims of workplace bias, this Article pursues the interplay of procedural and substantive law to expose how …


Discrimination Redefined, Ann. C. Mcginley Apr 2010

Discrimination Redefined, Ann. C. Mcginley

Missouri Law Review

I agree with Professor Martin's premise that it has become increasingly difficult to prove disparate treatment, especially in light of courts' aggressive use of summary judgment. I argue in this essay that the courts' retrenchment in Title VII cases results from a narrow definition of discrimination that focuses on conscious, intentional discrimination. Increasingly social science research demonstrates that much disparate treatment occurs as a result of unconscious biases, but the courts' reluctance to consider this social science has led, in many cases, to a literal, narrow definition of"pretext." Moreover, I posit that the recent Supreme Court case of Ricci v. …


Pretext Without Context, D. Wendy Greene Apr 2010

Pretext Without Context, D. Wendy Greene

Missouri Law Review

First, this response addresses the lower courts' opinions in Ash v. Tyson Foods, Inc., as well as the Supreme Court's per curiam opinion in this case, which espouses a more contextualized analysis of pretext in race-based disparate treatment cases. Next, this response examines Holiness v. MooreHandley, Inc. and the acontextual, colorblind analysis the court applied. Each case illustrates the negative effects of courts analyzing pretext without context at different stages of race discrimination litigation: during post-trial phases in Ash v. Tyson Foods, Inc. and at the summary judgment stage in Holiness v. Moore-Handley, Inc. Ash v. Tyson Foods, Inc. and …


Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, And Housing Discrimination, Rigel C. Oliveri Jan 2009

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, And Housing Discrimination, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

In the face of federal inability to effectively police our national borders and to remove unauthorized immigrants, many local governments have recently sought to take measures into their own hands by passing anti-illegal immigrant ("AII") ordinances. These ordinances usually contain a combination of provisions restricting housing, employment, and public benefits for unauthorized immigrants, among other things.This Article focuses on AII provisions that are targeted at private rental housing, which typically take the form of sanctions against landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants.


Elevator Company Goes Down: Mandatory Arbitration Provisions As Applied To Pending Civil Rights Claims In The Employment Context, Miranda Fleschert Jul 2008

Elevator Company Goes Down: Mandatory Arbitration Provisions As Applied To Pending Civil Rights Claims In The Employment Context, Miranda Fleschert

Journal of Dispute Resolution

In Goldsmith v. Bagby Elevator Company, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals carved a distinction in the employment context between mandatory predispute arbitration agreements and compulsory arbitration agreements as applied to pending claims of discrimination. In doing so, the court warns employers that any effort to terminate an employee's rights with respect to a pending Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC") claim by instituting a mandatory arbitration provision will be seen as impermissibly retaliatory. Amid the backdrop of a case in which supervisors routinely called black employees "monkeys," "slaves," and "niggers," the court makes a well-meaning attempt at preserving employees' statutorily …


Is Acquisition Everything? Protecting The Rights Of Occupants Under The Fair Housing Act, Rigel C. Oliveri Jan 2008

Is Acquisition Everything? Protecting The Rights Of Occupants Under The Fair Housing Act, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

This article addresses a recent trend among the federal courts to deny housing discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act in cases where the plaintiff was an occupant of the housing at the time the discrimination occurred. Put another way, the courts have begun to read the FHA as protecting only the right to obtain housing, not the right to occupy that housing free of discrimination.The trend began with a 2004 Seventh Circuit opinion authored by Judge Richard Posner in the case of Halprin v. The Prairie Single Family Homes. Halprin dismissed most of the claims of a Jewish couple …


Other Disciplines, Methodologies, And Countries: Studying Courts And Crisis, Tracey E. George Nov 2004

Other Disciplines, Methodologies, And Countries: Studying Courts And Crisis, Tracey E. George

Missouri Law Review

The United States is at war: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and against terrorism. This symposium asks the timely question: How do governments and their citizens respond to fear and risk in times of crisis? In the essay, I begin by framing the issue very briefly. I then argue that understanding this issue requires scholars to follow Epstein and Wells by looking to other disciplines, methodologies, and countries.


Encouraging Courage: Law's Response To Fear And Risk, William B. Fisch Nov 2004

Encouraging Courage: Law's Response To Fear And Risk, William B. Fisch

Missouri Law Review

No abstract provided.


Hate Speech In The Constitutional Law Of The United States, William B. Fisch Oct 2002

Hate Speech In The Constitutional Law Of The United States, William B. Fisch

Faculty Publications

Our general reporter, Professor Pizzorusso, has given us “incitement to hatred” - primarily against a group of persons defined in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the like--as the working definition of “hate speech”, and asks to what extent such speech is constitutionally protected in the reporting countries. The United States of America are known at least in recent times for providing exceptionally broad protection for otherwise objectionable speech and expression, and hate speech is understood to be one of the areas in which they have positioned themselves further out on the speech-protective end of …


Consumer Discrimination: The Limitations Of Federal Civil Rights Protection, Deseriee A. Kennedy Apr 2001

Consumer Discrimination: The Limitations Of Federal Civil Rights Protection, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Missouri Law Review

This Article argues that consumer discrimination is symptomatic of the myriad ways in which racism has become subtly muted and infused into everyday interaction. This “everyday racism,” while carried out and experienced by individuals, is a result of social and institutional policies and, therefore, it represents a fusion of both individual and institutional racism. Despite the ubiquity of the experience, courts have been reluctant to directly address the harms that result from being the target of racial profiling in consumer setting using pre-trial dismissals and an unduly constricted reading of the Civil Rights Act to reject plaintiffs’ claims. The courts …


Reinforcing The Myth Of The Crazed Rapist: A Feminist Critique Of Recent Rape Legislation, Christina E. Wells, Erin Elliott Jan 2001

Reinforcing The Myth Of The Crazed Rapist: A Feminist Critique Of Recent Rape Legislation, Christina E. Wells, Erin Elliott

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article reviews these new legislative provisions, discussing their requirements as well as the general impetus behind their enactment. Part II discusses both the history of rape prosecution and feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate barriers to successful rape prosecutions. This part also elaborates upon the myth of the crazed rapist and its relationship to feminist reform efforts. Part III explains how the current legislation is rooted in and reinforces that myth by encouraging unsupportable distinctions among rape defendants. Finally, Part IV discusses the feminist response to such laws and argues for a more …


The Case Against Private Disparate Impact Suits, Thom Lambert Apr 2000

The Case Against Private Disparate Impact Suits, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

This article argues that the Third Circuit, and the courts that have implicitly approved private disparate impact suits, have erred in construing Title VI to permit private plaintiffs to sue federally funded entities for discrimination based on disparate impact alone. From a policy standpoint, permitting private disparate impact suits is a bad idea, for the threat of such suits will lead to deterrence of actions and decisions that have incidental disparate effects but are, on the whole, good.


Deserving Disabilities: Why The Definition Under The Americans With Disabilities Act Should Be Revised To Eliminate The Substantial Limitation Requirement, Cheryl L. Anderson Jan 2000

Deserving Disabilities: Why The Definition Under The Americans With Disabilities Act Should Be Revised To Eliminate The Substantial Limitation Requirement, Cheryl L. Anderson

Missouri Law Review

A commentator on a public radio program recently spoke in favor of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") by asserting that "[t]he blind, deaf, and crippled really do deserve our help."' Although this commentator purported to support the ADA, his actual message was that the definition of "disability" in the Act is excessively vague and allows individuals not "deserving" of legal protection, such as persons with back impairments and mental impairments, to, in his words, "[hitch] a ride on the disability bandwagon."2 His argument that the ADA should reach only the claims of "deserving" individuals with disabilities has had powerful …


Panel Remarks Civil Rights Division Association Symposium: The Civil Rights Division At Forty, Michael A. Middleton Apr 1999

Panel Remarks Civil Rights Division Association Symposium: The Civil Rights Division At Forty, Michael A. Middleton

Faculty Publications

Welcome to all of you to the second of our Symposia. This is the fortieth year of the Civil Rights Division. Our focus this morning will be the Division's past and where it should be going in the future.


Environmental Inequity: Economic Causes, Economic Solutions, Thom Lambert, Christopher Boerner Jan 1997

Environmental Inequity: Economic Causes, Economic Solutions, Thom Lambert, Christopher Boerner

Faculty Publications

The article examines one such shortcoming: namely, that existing research fails to account for the dynamic nature of the housing market. Analyzing data from the St. Louis metropolitan area, this study finds that economic factors--not siting discrimination--are behind many claims of environmental racism. This phenomenon suggests the need to develop public policies that fit the economic nature of the problem. In particular, a policy that compensates individuals living near industrial sites is the key to securing environmental justice.


Clash Between The First Amendment And Civil Rights: Public University Nondiscrimination Clauses, The, Richard M. Paul Iii, Derek Rose Nov 1995

Clash Between The First Amendment And Civil Rights: Public University Nondiscrimination Clauses, The, Richard M. Paul Iii, Derek Rose

Missouri Law Review

Individual rights have become increasingly important in this country in the past few decades. University campuses across the country form part of the current bedrock of this movement. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that public universities,' the closest representative of the government to college students, are the subject of much of the pressure to enact rules protecting the rights, viewpoints, and actions of minority members of society. Universities originally intended that nondiscrimination clauses ensure student groups recognized by the university did not exercise improper prejudices based on gender, nationality, or religious belief. Recently, however, the gay rights movement …


A Restatement Of The Supreme Court's Law Of Religious Freedom: Coherence, Conflict Or Chaos?, Carl H. Esbeck Jan 1995

A Restatement Of The Supreme Court's Law Of Religious Freedom: Coherence, Conflict Or Chaos?, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

Religious freedom as guaranteed in the First Amendment makes religious pluralism more likely, while pluralism makes the maintenance of religious freedom as a fundamental civil right more necessary. It seems there is a limit, however, to the expansion of America's religious pluralism that, when exceeded, shatters cultural consensus thus rendering impossible the political and civil discourse necessary to sustain democratic institutions.1 This follows because pluralism promises freedom but exacts a price in civic disunity and moral confusion. The question thereby resolves itself into just how a religiously diverse people are to live together, despite their deepest differences, while sharing in …


Arbitrability In Recent Federal Civil Rights Legislation: The Need For Amendment, Douglas E. Abrams Jan 1994

Arbitrability In Recent Federal Civil Rights Legislation: The Need For Amendment, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This Article discusses the shortcomings inherent in the consideration and enactment of the arbitrability provisions of the ADA and the 1991 Civil Rights Act. As a threshold matter, Part II demonstrates that the latter Act's textual encouragement of arbitration indicates that Congress misapprehended the effect of Gilmer, which the Supreme Court had decided barely six months before the Act's passage. Specifically, this Part will argue that after Gilmer, textual encouragement of arbitration has little or no greater legal significance than textual silence would have. In the few decades before the decision, textual encouragement would have had significant impact because particular …


Untenable, Unchristian, And Unconstitutional , Carl Tobias Nov 1993

Untenable, Unchristian, And Unconstitutional , Carl Tobias

Missouri Law Review

Clara J. McKenney donated her residence to the city of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1924 for use as a free library. She gave the building as a memorial to her husband, William Robertson McKenney, a well-respected lawyer who had practiced in Petersburg for many years. Clara McKenney's deed of transfer stipulated that the library was "to be maintained for both white and colored persons: all of the building ... including the first floor and all above that [was] to be for the exclusive use of white persons; and the basement of the building [was] to be kept and maintained for the …


Internal Dispute Resolution: The Transformation Of Civil Rights In The Workplace, John M. Lande, Lauren B. Edelman, Howard S. Erlanger Jan 1993

Internal Dispute Resolution: The Transformation Of Civil Rights In The Workplace, John M. Lande, Lauren B. Edelman, Howard S. Erlanger

Faculty Publications

Many employers create internal procedures for the resolution of discrimination complaints. We examine internal complaint handlers' conceptions of civil rights law and the implications of those conceptions for their approach to dispute resolution. Drawing on interview data, we find that complaint handlers tend to subsume legal rights under managerial interests. They construct civil rights law as a diffuse standard of fairness, consistent with general norms of good management. Although they seek to resolve complaints to restore smooth employment relations, they tend to recast discrimination claims as typical managerial problems. While the assimilation of law into the management realm may extend …


Supervisory Liability Under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983: Searching For The Deep Pocket, Shari S. Weinman Nov 1991

Supervisory Liability Under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983: Searching For The Deep Pocket, Shari S. Weinman

Missouri Law Review

Suits under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 are complex. Section 1983's theory of constitutional wrongdoing without vicarious liability will seem strange to some practitioners. There are circumstances, however, in which a plaintiff may sue the supervisor of the person who immediately inflicted the injury. This Comment examines the intricacies of supervisory liability as determined by recent United States Supreme Court and circuit court decisions and provides pointers to practitioners. In addition, this Comment suggests an amendment to section 1983.


After We're Gone: A Commentary, Michael A. Middleton Jan 1990

After We're Gone: A Commentary, Michael A. Middleton

Faculty Publications

Professor Bell has placed before us a basic question that must be dealt with by all who wish to resolve the difficulties inherent in governing a free society. That question is one with which the framers of our Constitution grappled and that baffles us still. How does a society effectively govern itself and at the same time guarantee equal liberty for all? More specifically, in the racial context presented by The Chronicle of the Space Traders, when may government act for the benefit of society in a manner that is detrimental to some of its citizens because of their race?


Securing Justice: A Response To William Bradford Reynolds, Michael A. Middleton Jan 1987

Securing Justice: A Response To William Bradford Reynolds, Michael A. Middleton

Faculty Publications

I doubt that William Bradford Reynolds would disagree that the self evident truths the Framers of the Declaration of Independence spoke about are as applicable today in the 1980's as they were over 200 years ago. I also doubt that Mr. Reynolds would disagree that despite the fact that black people were not considered human beings when the Constitution was framed, the fourteenth amendment to that great document was intended to bring them within the ambit of its protections. On these two basic propositions, I suspect, Mr. Reynolds and I would agree. Beyond that however, Mr. Reynolds advances a fundamentally …