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Full-Text Articles in Law
Veiling And Inverted Masking, Saleema Saleema Snow
Veiling And Inverted Masking, Saleema Saleema Snow
Journal Articles
“Good morning, Your Honor, AA, here on behalf of the United States government.”1 AA recounted her proudest moment: appearing in federal district court as an attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a religious accommodation case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.2 There she stood, an Ivy League graduate and the granddaughter of sharecroppers. She appeared before the court as an African-American Muslim woman in hijab representing the government to uphold the constitutional rights of another Muslim woman.3 The complainant, Safoorah Khan, was employed as a teacher in a small Illinois school district and had …
Combating Silence In The Profession, Veronica Root Martinez
Combating Silence In The Profession, Veronica Root Martinez
Journal Articles
Members of the legal profession have recently taken a public stance against a wave of oppressive policies and practices. From helping immigrants stranded in airports to protesting in the face of white nationalists, lawyers are advocating for equality within and throughout American society each and every day. Yet as these lawyers go out into the world on behalf of others, they do so while their very profession continues to struggle with its own discriminatory past. For decades, the legal profession purposefully excluded women, religious minorities, and people of color from its ranks, while instilling a select group of individuals with …
A Strategic Legal Challenge To The Unforeseen Anticompetitive And Racially Discriminatory Effects Of Baseball’S North American Draft, Stephen F. Ross, Michael James Jr.
A Strategic Legal Challenge To The Unforeseen Anticompetitive And Racially Discriminatory Effects Of Baseball’S North American Draft, Stephen F. Ross, Michael James Jr.
Journal Articles
Major League Baseball (MLB) has honored a single player by retiring his number for every club. Absent special commemorations, no player will wear the number “42” in honor of the man who broke the color barrier to become the first African American to play major league baseball in the modern era: Jackie Robinson. MLB has also honored a single player—chosen from nominees from each individual club—by presenting an annual award for humanitarian service in his name; that honoree is Roberto Clemente. However, the sad reality is that if a fifteen-year-old Jackie Robinson were growing up today in South Pasadena, California, …
Breaking Cartels To Stymie The Reproduction Of Racism And Breaking Them In Time, Angela Mae Kupenda
Breaking Cartels To Stymie The Reproduction Of Racism And Breaking Them In Time, Angela Mae Kupenda
Journal Articles
Daria Roithmayr’s book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage, situates the reproduction of racism outside of intentionally inflicted racist acts. She argues that even if racism by individual design ceases, everyday decisions by Whites lock in the many decades’, and even centuries’, of entrenched structures of White advantage. Tracing the history of race in America especially from Jim Crow, Roithmayr illustrates how White advantage was locked in through wealth accumulation protections given Whites and denied Blacks, through the real estate market practices favoring Whites, in educational policies perpetuated through a de jure then a de facto system, …
Retaining Color, Veronica Root
Retaining Color, Veronica Root
Journal Articles
It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have more difficulty retaining attorneys of color — in particular black and Hispanic attorneys …
Our Illegal Founders, Victor C. Romero
Our Illegal Founders, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
This Essay briefly mines America’s history to argue that the law setting forth where our national borders are and how strictly we patrol them has always been subject to the vagaries of politics, economics, and perception. Illegal (im)migration has long been part of our migration history, engaged in not just by Latin American border crossers, but also by prominent colonists, giving the lie to the claim that upholding border laws should always be sacrosanct. In many school districts today, the usual summary of American history from our childhood civics classes no longer bypasses the uncomfortable truths of conquest and westward …
Immigrant Education And The Promise Of Integrative Egalitarianism, Victor C. Romero
Immigrant Education And The Promise Of Integrative Egalitarianism, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
Although not an equal protection case, Martinez v. Regents of the University of California challenges us to grapple with the Supreme Court’s post-Brown commitment to equal opportunity within the context of immigrant higher education. Sadly, Brown’s progeny from Bakke to Parents Involved reveals the cost of embracing a color-blind constitutionalism unmoored from a fundamental commitment to vigilantly combat subordination and dismantle unearned privilege. More optimistically, the Supreme Court’s gay rights jurisprudence developed in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas provides insights into how a conservative court can accurately distinguish irrational discrimination from democratic deliberation, a lesson that might help …
I Could Have Been A Contender: Summary Jury Trial As A Means To Overcome Iqbal's Negative Effects Upon Pre-Litigation Communication, Negotiation And Early, Consensual Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh
Journal Articles
With its recent decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court may be intentionally or unintentionally “throwing the fight,” at least in the legal contests between many civil rights claimants and institutional defendants. The most obvious feared effect is reduction of civil rights claimants’ access to the expressive and coercive power of the courts. Less obviously, the Supreme Court may be effectively undermining institutions’ motivation to negotiate, mediate - or even communicate with and listen to - such claimants before they initiate legal action. Thus, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have the potential to deprive …
Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero
Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held liable for discriminatory conduct when they purposefully rely on a forbidden characteristic, such as race or gender, in promulgating policy; to simply know that minorities and women will be adversely affected by the law does not deny these groups equal protection under the law. This Essay interrogates this doctrine by taking a closer look at Iqbal and Feeney, the thirty-year-old precedent the majority cited as the source of its antidiscrimination standard. Because Feeney was cited in neither of the …
Restoring The Ada And Beyond: Disability In The 21st Century, Robert L. Burgdorf
Restoring The Ada And Beyond: Disability In The 21st Century, Robert L. Burgdorf
Journal Articles
Perhaps it was imprudent for me to agree, in response to the request of the symposium organizers, to address the future of disability law. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Neils Bohr supposedly once said that "[p]rediction is very difficult, especially about the future."' Columnist and author Jim Bishop wrote, "The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face." 2 Prognosticating is a very tricky and uncertain undertaking. I cannot pretend to have any particular gift for crystal ball gazing in disability matters. When I joined the …
Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero
Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
Despite the wisdom of separating the service and enforcement functions of our immigration bureau, the new tripartite system under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security risks fueling the "immigrant Arab as terrorist" stereotype, rather than helping to re-establish the reality that noncitizen terrorists, like U.S. citizen ones, are a rare species.
Postsecondary School Education Benefits For Undocumented Immigrants: Promises And Pitfalls, Victor C. Romero
Postsecondary School Education Benefits For Undocumented Immigrants: Promises And Pitfalls, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
Should longtime undocumented immigrants have the same opportunity as lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens to attend state colleges and universities? There are two typical justifications for denying them such opportunities. First, treating undocumented immigrants as in-state residents discriminates against U.S. citizen nonresidents of the state. Second, and more broadly, undocumented immigration should be discouraged as a policy matter, and therefore allowing undocumented immigrant children equal opportunities as legal residents condones and perhaps encourages "illegal" immigration. This essay responds to these two concerns by surveying state and federal solutions to this issue.
The Americans With Disabilities Act: Analysis And Implications Of A Second-Generation Civil Rights Statute, Robert L. Burgdorf Jr.
The Americans With Disabilities Act: Analysis And Implications Of A Second-Generation Civil Rights Statute, Robert L. Burgdorf Jr.
Journal Articles
Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote that our nation's civil rights laws were a "sparse and insufficient collection of statutes ... barely a naked framework."' On their faces, many federal civil rights statutes constitute little more than broad directives that "Thou shalt not discriminate." Broadly worded statements outlawing discrimination were the optimal approach to statutory draftsmanship in light of the controversial nature of the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s. The drafters of these statutes needed to craft language that would be palatable to a majority of the members of Congress while still having a meaningful impact …
Bias In Housing: Toward A New Approach, Charles E. Rice
Bias In Housing: Toward A New Approach, Charles E. Rice
Journal Articles
The problem of racial discrimination in housing is the product of several factors. Among these is racial prejudice on the part of private land owners, real estate brokers, builders and mortgage finance institutions.