Law Commons^™

Brackeen V. Zinke, Bradley E. Tinker

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In 1978, Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act to counter practices of removing Indian children from their homes, and to ensure the continued existence of Indian tribes through their children. The law created a framework establishing how Indian children are adopted as a way to protect those children and their relationship with their tribe. ICWA also established federal standards for Indian children being placed into non-Indian adoptive homes. Brackeen v. Zinke made an important distinction for the placement preferences of the Indian children adopted by non-Indian plaintiffs; rather than viewing the placement preferences in ICWA as based upon Indians’ …

Lost In Translation: Persons With Limited English Proficiency And Police Interaction In The United States, Anastasia Coppersmith

Northern Illinois Law Review Supplement

This article explores United States jurisprudence of the constitutionality of language rights as it correlates to communications between law enforcement officials and non-English speaking persons in emergency situations. The judicial and legislative bodies provide protections to limited English speaking minorities in the realms of education, healthcare, and when navigating through the United States court system. However, these protections are not extended to include interactions between language-minority citizens and initial police interactions during emergency situations.

Equality In Germany And The United States, Edward J. Eberle

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article will proceed as follows. Part I will describe the methodology and approach of American and German equality law. The constitutional Courts of both countries value equality highly, resulting in strong and well developed jurisprudence. Each of the Courts employ a sliding scale of judicial scrutiny with the degree of scrutiny varying with the trait or personal interest affected by the governmental measure. Strict or extremely intensive scrutiny applies to measures targeting personal traits that especially affect a person's identity, like race, national heritage, or alienage under United States law, and race, sex, gender, language, national origin, disability, faith, …

Racing On Two Different Tracks: Using Substantive Due Process To Challenge Tracking In Schools, Katarina Wong

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

Tracking is a widespread educational practice where secondary schools divide students into different classes or “tracks” based on their previous achievements and perceived abilities. Tracking produces different levels of classes, from low ability to high ability, based on the theory that students learn better when grouped with others at their own level. However, tracking often segregates students of color and low socioeconomic status into low-tracked classes and these students do not receive the same educational opportunities as white and/or wealthier students. Students and parents have historically challenged tracking structures in their schools using an Equal Protection Clause framework. However, this …

Fighting Fines & Fees: Borrowing From Consumer Law To Combat Criminal Justice Debt Abuses, Neil L. Sobol

Neil L Sobol

Although media and academic sources often describe mass incarceration as the primary challenge facing the American criminal justice system, the imposition of criminal justice debt may be a more pervasive problem. On March 14, 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that state chief justices forward a letter to all judges in their jurisdictions describing the constitutional violations associated with the illegal assessment and enforcement of fines and fees. The DOJ’s concerns include the incarceration of indigent individuals without determining whether the failure to pay is willful and the use of bail practices that result in impoverished defendants remaining in …

Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol

Neil L Sobol

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race.” Unfortunately, abusive collection of criminal justice debt is not limited to Ferguson. This Article, prepared for a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in July 2015, identifies the key findings in the Department of Justice’s report …

Charging The Poor: Criminal Justice Debt & Modern-Day Debtors' Prisons, Neil L. Sobol

Neil L Sobol

Debtors’ prisons should no longer exist. While imprisonment for debt was common in colonial times in the United States, subsequent constitutional provisions, legislation, and court rulings all called for the abolition of incarcerating individuals to collect debt. Despite these prohibitions, individuals who are unable to pay debts are now regularly incarcerated, and the vast majority of them are indigent. In 2015, at least ten lawsuits were filed against municipalities for incarcerating individuals in modern-day debtors’ prisons. Criminal justice debt is the primary source for this imprisonment.

Criminal justice debt includes fines, restitution charges, court costs, and fees. Monetary charges exist …

Equal Protection And The Social Sciences Thirty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Destiny Peery, Osagie K. Obasogie

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Blind Justice: Why The Court Refused To Accept Statistical Evidence Of Discriminatory Purpose In Mccleskey V. Kemp—And Some Pathways For Change, Reva B. Siegel

Northwestern University Law Review

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court refused to accept statistical evidence of race discrimination in an equal protection challenge to the death penalty. This lecture, on the decision’s thirtieth anniversary, locates McCleskey in cases of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts that restrict proof of discriminatory purpose in terms that make it exceedingly difficult for minority plaintiffs successfully to assert equal protection claims.

The lecture’s aims are both critical and constructive. The historical reading I offer shows that portions of the opinion justify restrictions on evidence to protect prosecutorial discretion, while others limit proof of discrimination in ways that …

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 …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Equal Protection And White Supremacy, Paul Butler

Northwestern University Law Review

The project of using social science to help win equal protection claims is doomed to fail if its premise is that the Supreme Court post-McCleskey just needs more or better evidence of racial discrimination. Everyone—including the Justices of the Court—already knows that racial discrimination is endemic in the criminal justice system. Social science does help us to understand the role of white supremacy in U.S. police and punishment practices. Social science also can help us understand how to move people to resist, and can inform our imagination of the transformation needed for equal justice under the law.

The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman

Northwestern University Law Review

Graham v. Connor established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims. The Supreme Court not only refined an objective reasonableness test to describe the constitutional standard, but also held that the Fourth Amendment is the sole avenue for courts to adjudicate claims that police violated a person’s constitutional rights in using force. In this Essay, we ask: What impact did this decision have on the nature of police excessive force claims in federal courts? To address this, we engaged in a qualitative examination of 500 federal cases (250 in the twenty-six years before Graham and 250 in the …

Is There Any Silver Lining To Trinity Lutheran Church, Inc. V. Comer?, Caroline Mala Corbin

Michigan Law Review Online

Trinity Lutheran Church, Inc. v. Comer is a significant setback for a strong separation of church and state. Missouri denied a playground grant to Trinity Lutheran because of a state constitutional provision that bans financial aid to churches. The church sued. The Supreme Court held not only that the Establishment Clause allowed the government to give taxpayer money to Trinity Lutheran, but that the Free Exercise Clause required it. The decision's many flaws are not the focus of this short Essay. Instead, this Essay dissects the Supreme Court's reasoning in order to apply it to current controversies in related areas …

Remedies Symposium: Upstairs Downstairs: Morales-Santana And The Right To A Remedy In Comparative Law, Jerfi Uzman

ConLawNOW

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Sessions v. Morales-Santana has refueled a classic debate about constitutional remedies in equal protection cases. The ways in which courts should respond to underinclusive legislation is a question that is fundamental to the idea of constitutional rights. Not just in the United States but throughout the Western world, courts struggle with the dilemma raised in Morales-Santana. In this article, I seek to broaden the debate by putting Morales-Santana in a comparative perspective. Drawing from the case law of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Supreme Court of …

Epistemic Peerhood In The Law, R. George Wright

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

We thus have, at this point, a preliminary sense of the importance of some possible choices in deciding whose voices and participation should be taken seriously, as that of our epistemic peers, in deciding legal questions. This Article addresses these preliminary understandings in several legal contexts. We can do so most profitably on the basis of a better, fuller, and more specific understanding of the crucial idea of epistemic peerhood. It is thus the idea of epistemic peerhood itself that this Article addresses immediately below.

Prophylactic Redistricting? Congress's Section 5 Power And The New Equal Protection Right To Vote, Michael T. Morley

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Windsor Beyond Marriage: Due Process, Equality & Undocumented Immigration, Anthony O'Rourke

Anthony O'Rourke

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Windsor, invalidating part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, presents a significant interpretive challenge. Early commentators have criticized the majority opinion’s lack of analytical rigor, and expressed doubt that Windsor can serve as a meaningful precedent with respect to constitutional questions outside the area of same-sex marriage. This short Article offers a more rehabilitative reading of Windsor, and shows how the decision can be used to analyze a significant constitutional question concerning the use of state criminal procedure to regulate immigration.

From Windsor’s holding, the Article distills …

Holocaust Art Disputes: The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act Of 2016, Herbert I. Lazerow

Faculty Scholarship

The Holocaust Expropriated Recovery Act of 2016 (HEAR) purports to extend the statute of limitations for actions to recover art and certain other items stolen during the Holocaust. The new statute of limitations would be either the old statute or a six-years-from-actual-discovery statute, whichever is longer. This article analyzes the likely results of that law. It sets forth the problems leading to HEAR’s enactment, including the typical parties to these controversies, the informational difficulties confronting both claimants and purchasers of art, and the elements of recovery suits, and discusses the functions of statutes of limitations and adverse possession and prescription. …

The New York State Commission On Prosecutorial Conduct, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

On August 20th, 2018, Governor Cuomo signed into law a bill that created the nation’s first state commission on prosecutorial conduct (the “Commission”). Since its inception, the law has elicited strong opposition from prosecutors and prosecutorial groups and equally fervent advocacy among members of the New York defense bar and other supporters. Supporters claim that the law is an invaluable tool in the fight against unethical prosecutorial conduct, while opponents such as the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York (“DAASNY”) claim that the law violates both the New York State and U.S. Constitution. On October 17, 2018, …

Equal Protection For Equal Play: A Constitutional Solution To Gender Discrimination In International Sports, Jenna N. Rowan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Note considers the extent of gender discrimination in international sports, providing an overview of gender discrimination in sports and detailing the inadequacies of current statutory remedies. Additionally, this Note describes why constitutional remedies are unavailable for these athletes, highlighting a 1987 Supreme Court case holding that sports governing bodies are not state actors. This Note proposes overruling that case to hold instead that international sports governing bodies are state actors and are, therefore, subject to the provisions in the US Constitution. Under this solution, international athletes could bring gender discrimination claims against these bodies under an equal protection rationale.

Racial Character Evidence In Police Killing Cases, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is facing a twofold crisis: police killings of people of color and unaccountability for these killings in the criminal justice system. In many instances, the officers’ use of deadly force is captured on video and often appears clearly unjustified, but grand and petit juries still fail to indict and convict, leaving many baffled. This Article provides an explanation for these failures: juror reliance on “racial character evidence.” Too often, jurors consider race as evidence in criminal trials, particularly in police killing cases where the victim was a person of color. Instead of focusing on admissible evidence, jurors …

Obama's Conversion On Same-Sex Marriage: The Social Foundations Of Individual Rights, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores how presidents who wish to seize a leadership role over the development of rights must tend to the social foundations of those rights. Broad cultural changes alone do not guarantee success, nor do they dictate the substance of constitutional ideas. Rather, presidential aides must actively re-characterize the social conditions in which rights are made, disseminated, and enforced. An administration must articulate a strategically plausible theory of a particular right, ensure there is cultural and institutional support for that right, and work to minimize blowback. Executive branch officials must seek to transform and popularize legal concepts while working …

Unequal Protection: Examining The Judiciary’S Treatment Of Unwed Fathers, Brett Potash

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Our Principled Constitution, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

Suppose that one of us contends, and the other denies, that transgender persons have constitutional rights to be treated in accord with their gender identity. It appears that we are disagreeing about “what the law is.” And, most probably, we disagree about what the law is on this matter because we disagree about what generally makes it the case that our constitutional law is this rather than that.

Constitutional theory should provide guidance. It should endeavor to explain what gives our constitutional rules the contents that they have, or what makes true constitutional propositions true. Call any such account a …

Religious Arguments, Religious Purposes, And The Gay And Lesbian Rights Cases, Steve Sanders

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Remedies And The Government's Constitutionally Harmful Speech, Helen Norton

Publications

Although governments have engaged in expression from their inception, only recently have we begun to consider the ways in which the government’s speech sometimes threatens our constitutional rights. In my contribution to this symposium, I seek to show that although the search for constitutional remedies for the government’s harmful expression is challenging, it is far from futile. This search is also increasingly important at a time when the government’s expressive powers continue to grow—along with its willingness to use these powers for disturbing purposes and with troubling consequences.

More specifically, in certain circumstances, injunctive relief, declaratory relief, or damages can …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Publications

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Privacy's Double Standards, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Where the right to privacy exists, it should be available to all people. If not universally available, then privacy rights should be particularly accessible to marginalized individuals who are subject to greater surveillance and are less able to absorb the social costs of privacy violations. But in practice, there is evidence that people of privilege tend to fare better when they bring privacy tort claims than do non-privileged individuals. This disparity occurs despite doctrine suggesting that those who occupy prominent and public social positions are entitled to diminished privacy tort protections.

This Article unearths disparate outcomes in public disclosure tort …

From Loving To Obergefell: Elevating The Significance Of Discriminatory Effects, Holning Lau

Holning Lau