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Full-Text Articles in Law
Big Data Affirmative Action, Peter N. Salib
Big Data Affirmative Action, Peter N. Salib
Northwestern University Law Review
As a vast and ever-growing body of social-scientific research shows, discrimination remains pervasive in the United States. In education, work, consumer markets, healthcare, criminal justice, and more, Black people fare worse than whites, women worse than men, and so on. Moreover, the evidence now convincingly demonstrates that this inequality is driven by discrimination. Yet solutions are scarce. The best empirical studies find that popular interventions—like diversity seminars and antibias trainings—have little or no effect. And more muscular solutions—like hiring quotas or school busing—are now regularly struck down as illegal. Indeed, in the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has invalidated …
Debt Governance, Wealth Management, And The Uneven Burdens Of Child Support, Allison Tait
Debt Governance, Wealth Management, And The Uneven Burdens Of Child Support, Allison Tait
Northwestern University Law Review
Child support is a ubiquitous kind of debt, common to all income and wealth levels, with data showing that approximately 30% of the U.S. adult population has either been subject to paying child support or has received it. Across this field of child support debt, however, unpaid obligations look different for everyone, and in particular the experiences around child support debt diverge radically for low-income populations and high-wealth ones. On the low-income end of the spectrum, child support debt is a sophisticated and adaptive governance technology that disciplines and penalizes those living in or near poverty. Being in child support …
Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records because it …
Salary History And The Equal Pay Act: An Argument For The Adoption Of “Reckless Discrimination” As A Theory Of Liability, Kate Vandenberg
Salary History And The Equal Pay Act: An Argument For The Adoption Of “Reckless Discrimination” As A Theory Of Liability, Kate Vandenberg
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
The Equal Pay Act (EPA) purports to prohibit employers from paying female employees less than male employees with similar qualifications; however, the affirmative defenses provided in the EPA are loopholes that perpetuate the gender pay gap. In particular, the fourth affirmative defense allows for wage differentials based on a “factor other than sex.” Many federal circuits have read this defense broadly to include wage differentials based on salary history. That is, an employer can pay a female employee less than her male counterparts because she was paid less by her previous employer. While salary history was once viewed as an …
Eddie Murphy And The Dangers Of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination, Issa Kohler-Hausmann
Eddie Murphy And The Dangers Of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination, Issa Kohler-Hausmann
Northwestern University Law Review
The model of discrimination animating some of the most common approaches to detecting discrimination in both law and social science—the counterfactual causal model—is wrong. In that model, racial discrimination is detected by measuring the “treatment effect of race,” where the treatment is conceptualized as manipulating the raced status of otherwise identical units (e.g., a person, a neighborhood, a school). Most objections to talking about race as a cause in the counterfactual model have been raised in terms of manipulability. If we cannot manipulate a person’s race at the moment of a police stop, traffic encounter, or prosecutorial charging decision, then …
Housing, Healthism, And The Hud Smoke-Free Policy, Dave Fagundes, Jessica L. Roberts
Housing, Healthism, And The Hud Smoke-Free Policy, Dave Fagundes, Jessica L. Roberts
NULR Online
No abstract provided.
42 U.S.C. § 1981’S Equal Benefit Clause: Debating The Application To Private Actor Discrimination, Lauren Pope
42 U.S.C. § 1981’S Equal Benefit Clause: Debating The Application To Private Actor Discrimination, Lauren Pope
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
No abstract provided.
"Our Taxes Are Too Damn High": Institutional Racism, Property Tax Assessment, And The Fair Housing Act, Bernadette Atuahene
"Our Taxes Are Too Damn High": Institutional Racism, Property Tax Assessment, And The Fair Housing Act, Bernadette Atuahene
Northwestern University Law Review
To prevent inflated property tax bills, the Michigan Constitution prohibits property tax assessments from exceeding 50% of a property’s market value. Between 2009 and 2015, the City of Detroit assessed 55%–85% of its residential properties in violation of the Michigan Constitution, and these unconstitutional assessments have had dire consequences. Between 2011 and 2015, one in four Detroit properties have been foreclosed upon for nonpayment of illegally inflated property taxes. In addition to Detroit, the other two cities in Michigan’s Wayne County where African-Americans comprise 70% or more of the population—Highland Park and Inkster—have similarly experienced systemic unconstitutional assessments and unprecedented …
What Can Brown Do For You?: Addressing Mccleskey V. Kemp As A Flawed Standard For Measuring The Constitutionally Significant Risk Of Race Bias, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky
What Can Brown Do For You?: Addressing Mccleskey V. Kemp As A Flawed Standard For Measuring The Constitutionally Significant Risk Of Race Bias, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky
Northwestern University Law Review
This Essay asserts that in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court created a problematic standard for the evidence of race bias necessary to uphold an equal protection claim under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. First, the Court’s opinion reinforced the cramped understanding that constitutional claims require evidence of not only disparate impact but also discriminatory purpose, producing significant negative consequences for the operation of the U.S. criminal justice system. Second, the Court rejected the Baldus study’s findings of statistically significant correlations between the races of the perpetrators and victims and the imposition of the death …
Combating Discrimination Against The Formerly Incarcerated In The Labor Market, Ifeoma Ajunwa, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Combating Discrimination Against The Formerly Incarcerated In The Labor Market, Ifeoma Ajunwa, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Northwestern University Law Review
Both discrimination by private employers and governmental restrictions in the form of statutes that prohibit professional licensing serve to exclude the formerly incarcerated from much of the labor market. This Essay explores and analyzes potential legislative and contractual means for removing these barriers to labor market participation by the formerly incarcerated. First, as a means of addressing discrimination by the state, Part I of this Essay explores the ways in which the adoption of racial impact statements—which mandate that legislators consider statistical analyses of the potential impact their proposed legislation may have on racial and ethnic groups prior to enacting …
Rental Home Sweet Home: The Disparate Impact Solution For Renters Evicted From Residential Foreclosures, David Lurie
Rental Home Sweet Home: The Disparate Impact Solution For Renters Evicted From Residential Foreclosures, David Lurie
Northwestern University Law Review
At the end of the last decade, a drastic spike in residential foreclosures brought unprecedented attention to the damage that mass foreclosure often brings to primarily low-income, minority–majority communities. Much of this attention—in both the media and in the legal arena—has been devoted to homeowners disadvantaged by predatory loans and other unsavory practices. However, a recent body of scholarship has shown that the brunt of mass foreclosure often falls on renters, who often have little or no procedural protection from speedy and unexpected eviction from their homes, regardless of lease status or tenure. This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s …
A Free Speech Response To The Gay Rights/Religious Liberty Conflict, Andrew Koppelman
A Free Speech Response To The Gay Rights/Religious Liberty Conflict, Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University Law Review
The most sensible reconciliation of the tension between religious liberty and public accommodations law, in the recent cases involving merchants with religious objections to same-sex marriage, would permit business owners to present their views to the world, but forbid them either to threaten to discriminate or to treat any individual customer worse than others. Even if such businesses have no statutory right to refuse to facilitate ceremonies they regard as immoral, they are unlikely to be asked to participate in those ceremonies. This solution may, however, be forbidden by the law of hostile environment harassment. That raises a severe free …
Protecting Title Vii's Antiretaliation Provision In The Wake Of University Of Texas Southwestern Medical Center V. Nassar, Kimberly A. Pathman
Protecting Title Vii's Antiretaliation Provision In The Wake Of University Of Texas Southwestern Medical Center V. Nassar, Kimberly A. Pathman
Northwestern University Law Review
No abstract provided.
Soul Of A Woman: The Sex Stereotyping Prohibition At Work, Kimberly A. Yuracko
Soul Of A Woman: The Sex Stereotyping Prohibition At Work, Kimberly A. Yuracko
Faculty Working Papers
In 1989 the Supreme Court in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins declared that sex stereotyping was a prohibited from of sex discrimination at work. This seemingly simple declaration has been the most important development in sex discrimination jurisprudence since the passage of Title VII. It has been used to extend the Act's coverage and protect groups that were previously excluded. Astonishingly, however, the contours, dimensions and requirements of the prohibition have never been clearly articulated by courts or scholars. In this paper I evaluate four interpretations of what the sex stereotyping prohibition might mean in order to determine what it actually …
Doma, Romer, And Rationality, Andrew Koppelman
Doma, Romer, And Rationality, Andrew Koppelman
Faculty Working Papers
It has been objected by many that the Defense of Marriage Act lacks a rational basis because it reflects a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group. The increasing success of the argument, which has persuaded three federal judges, reveals the hidden normative premises of rational basis analysis, at least whenever that analysis is used to invalidate a statute. Since 1996, when DOMA was passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress, the country's attitudes toward gay people have evolved rapidly, to the point where this kind of mindless lashing out at gays looks a lot less attractive. …