Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Updating Anderson-Burdick To Evaluate Partisan Election Manipulation, Andrew Vazquez

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

This Article analyzes jurisprudence concerning the judicial review of election laws. It suggests that the United States Supreme Court’s approach should acknowledge the realities of political partisanship when reviewing challenged laws and regulations. Specifically, this Article proposes a judicial test to evaluate election laws for partisan biases using factors modeled on those employed by the Court in Gingles v. Thornburg. Simply put, the manipulation of election laws to pursue partisan advantages poses the greatest threat to our democracy. Accordingly, this Article concludes that protecting our democracy from election practices that benefit one party over another in the guise of …

Increasing Voter Investment In American Democracy: Proposals For Reform, Adam Drake

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Millions of Americans choose to stay home every election cycle. Polling suggests that these nonvoters are either apathetic with respect to the democratic process or feel alienated from the United States government. Reforms to the democratic system should focus on alleviating these sentiments, ultimately encouraging more voters to show up to the polls. As turnout increases, so too does the legitimacy and stability of the U.S. government.

With that goal in mind, this Article advocates for a five- prong approach to reforming the electoral system. The first proposed step is to eliminate unnecessary barriers to voting by establishing federal automatic …

Old Dilemmas, New Guises: Developing An Anti-Subordination Reading Of Students For Fair Admissions V. Harvard, Eric Szkarlat

Fordham Law Review Online

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court will again hear arguments on the constitutionality of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. This outcome was far from foretold: the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had suggested the Court might never take up affirmative action in admissions again. Yet after dragging its feet on granting certiorari, the Court agreed to hear Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard. This time, however, the case has a substantially different and quite controversial posture. That posture centers on alleged discrimination against Asian and Pacific American (APA) students applying to college. Some APA students are divided …

Small Gestures And Unexpectedconsequences: Textualist Interpretationsof State Antidiscrimination Lawafter Bostock V. Clayton County, Anastasia E. Lacina

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County expanded Title VII’s coverage of victims of sex discrimination in employment by interpreting the statute to also protect LGBTQ+ employees who were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Although Bostock only applies precedentially to Title VII, the long and interwoven history of state antidiscrimination statutes shows that the ruling may reach beyond federal law. This Note examines state court cases that have considered whether to apply Bostock’s reasoning to the interpretation of state antidiscrimination statutes. Furthermore, this Note argues in favor of a path …

Choose Your Words Carefully: Reimagining Retaliatory Arrest After Nieves V. Bartlett, Ryan Hor

Fordham Law Review

In the summer of 2020, the United States experienced potentially its largest ever social movement in the protests against racial inequality. Predictably, protestors clashed with law enforcement officers, often leading to arrests. Arrested individuals could bring § 1983 retaliatory arrest claims alleging that the officers deprived them of their First Amendment right to free speech. Such claims underline the tension between two vital interests: free speech and law enforcement effectiveness. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Nieves v. Bartlett, which crafted a new framework for retaliatory arrest claims that consequently diminished a plaintiff’s chance to prevail and recover …

Lgbtqia+ Public Accomodation Cases: The Battle Between Religious Freedom And Civil Rights, Jamie Reinah

Fordham Law Review

Protections for LGBTQIA+ Americans have greatly expanded since the U.S. Supreme Court recognized marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, but the debate about whether business owners can refuse to serve LGBTQIA+ couples on religious grounds has grown more bitterly divided. The free exercise of religion is a fundamental constitutional right, and it is strongly protected at both the federal and state levels. At the same time, LGBTQIA+ couples are protected from receiving unequal treatment in public places under state antidiscrimination laws. The clash between religion and LGBTQIA+ rights has culminated in a line of cases that present difficult questions …

Collaterally Attacking The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Application To Meritorious Prisoner Civil Litigation, Melissa Benerofe

Fordham Law Review

Earlier this year, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reached its twenty-fifth birthday, reinvigorating discussion on its effects on people in prison and the U.S. criminal justice system more broadly. This Note examines how the PLRA deters and obstructs prisoners’ ability to file meritorious civil rights lawsuits regarding the conditions of their confinement. The PLRA does so primarily through four of its provisions, which this Note refers to as the “access provisions.” The access provisions include: (1) the exhaustion of administrative remedies; (2) the filing fee provision; (3) the three-strikes rule; and (4) limitations on attorney’s fees. This Note argues …

Analysis And Investigation Of Solitary Confinement Reforms, Alison E. Gordon

SJD Dissertations

No abstract provided.

People’S Electric: Engaged Legal Education At Rutgers-Newark Law School In The 1960s And 1970s, George W. Conk

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Achieving Access To Justice Through Adr: Fact Or Fiction?, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Fordham Law Review

This Symposium will offer a critical analysis of ADR’s access to justice claims and consider the extent to which they should be more modest. An outstanding group of scholars have addressed this question in a variety of contexts, including procedural and substantive justice; restorative justice; arbitration; mediation; online dispute resolution (ODR); and international, comparative, and cross-cultural perspectives.

To “Otherwise Make Unavailable”: Tenant Screening Companies’ Liability Under The Fair Housing Act’S Disparate Impact Theory, Shivangi Bhatia

Fordham Law Review

Tenant screening companies present information to housing providers on prospective tenants’ criminal and eviction histories in the form of background screening reports. These screening reports disproportionately impact racial and gender minorities. Two opposing views exist on whether courts should interpret the Fair Housing Act to cover the discriminatory practices and policies of tenant screening companies. Some believe that background screening reports are a vital part of the housing industry, while others criticize them for their inaccurate, misleading, and discriminatory nature. This Note proposes that, moving forward, courts should interpret § 3604(a) and § 3604(b) of the Fair Housing Act to …

Online Resources And Family Cases: Access To Justice In Implementation Of A Plan, Kristen M. Blankley

Fordham Law Review

This Article discusses access to justice in the implementation of orders in family cases. Parenting, financial, and other types of family court orders may last up to eighteen or twenty-one years in the case of minor children or longer in the case of protected adults. In the case of financial obligations, these orders set forth ongoing requirements to make monthly payments (such as child support, alimony, and medical expense reimbursements) and to maintain other financial obligations (such as maintaining health insurance, daycare expenses, and payment of costs for extracurricular activities). Most importantly, these court orders allocate parenting time, which may …

American Diversity In International Arbitration: A New Arbitration Story Or Evidence Of Things Not Seen, Benjamin G. Davis

Fordham Law Review

This Essay suggests that the unseen presence of blacks and other underrepresented groups (such as women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and persons with disabilities) in the shadows of the development of international arbitration law in the United States helps us to see that diversity, while unrecognized, has been inherent in American international arbitration for hundreds of years.

The Dark Side Of Consensus And Creativity: What Mediators Of Mass Disputes Need To Know About Agency Risks, Howard M. Erichson

Fordham Law Review

This Essay looks at how mediators describe their role, and it asks whether—in negotiations to resolve mass disputes—the mindset and skill set of mediators may sometimes exacerbate rather than mitigate risks of self- serving conduct by lawyers. The Essay applies general concerns about class settlements and nonclass settlements to the particular problem of mass dispute mediation.

Remedy Without Diagnosis: How To Optimize Results By Leveraging The Appropriate Dispute Resolution And Shared Decision-Making Process, Mariana Hernandez-Crespo Gonstead

Fordham Law Review

This Article aims to realize the untapped potential of the dispute resolution field beyond traditional understandings of access to justice for everyone’s benefit. It argues that, by developing skills, citizens can significantly contribute to altering the course of history in our global economy, especially in Latin America and Venezuela. It introduces and familiarizes citizens with the knowledge developed in the dispute resolution field for the past fifty years. As a new field, dispute resolution is rapidly growing and evolving. Even though the knowledge produced is vital to help us interact more effectively, the materials are complex, dispersed, and, in some …

Arbitrarily Selecting Black Arbitrators, Michael Z. Green

Fordham Law Review

Calls for increased diversity among arbitrators have surged with the growth of the employer movement, so-called mandatory arbitration, which requires employees to agree to arbitrate employment discrimination matters as a condition of employment. Despite good-faith efforts by neutral service providers, civil rights organizations, bar associations, and employer and employee groups to identify and address the need for more diverse arbitrators in mandatory arbitration, many commentators still lament that this diversity problem reflects negatively on access to justice. With the #MeToo movement’s focus in recent years on the lack of a public and transparent resolution for sexual harassment matters, as well …

Adr, Dynamic (In)Justice, And Achieving Access: A Foreclosure Crisis Case Study, Lydia Nussbaum

Fordham Law Review

This Article proceeds in two parts. Part I argues for a dynamic, rather than fixed, conception of access to justice. It then explores how ADR processes, when placed in this dynamic framework, can create new forms of injustice and intensify preexisting ones. Part II presents a case study from the foreclosure crisis to illustrate how the features of ADR processes are especially well suited to respond to dynamic injustices. It further demonstrates how ADR design must evolve to respond to the dynamic system of (in)justice in which ADR processes operate.

Does Adr Feel Like Justice?, Jennifer W. Reynolds

Fordham Law Review

This Article contends that modern conflict spectacles, fueled by snap disputing dynamics and foisted upon the polity through media and social media, are so far afield from traditional ADR principles and practices that they may keep ADR from “feeling” like justice to many people. How people feel about alternative practices and processes will have an impact on whether they avail themselves of those methods in their own disputes. In other words, even if we had widely available, high-quality, and free ADR services available to everyone, we might still have an access to justice problem because those services would not be …

Measuring “Access To Justice” In The Rush To Digitize, Amy J. Schmitz

Fordham Law Review

Access to Justice (A2J) is the hot topic of the day, energizing Twitter and judges alike. Meanwhile, professors and policymakers join in song, singing the praises of online dispute resolution (ODR) as means for expanding A2J. This is because ODR uses technology to allow for online claim diagnosis, negotiation, and mediation without the time, money, and stress of traditional court processes. Indeed, courts are now moving traffic ticket, condominium, landlord/tenant, personal injury, debt collection, and even divorce claims online. The hope is that online triage and dispute resolution systems will provide means for obtaining remedies for self-represented litigants (SRLs) and …

Access To Justice And Dispute Resolution Across Cultures, Sukhsimranjit Singh

Fordham Law Review

There is a saying in the United States: the justice one receives is the justice one can afford. All too often, this saying proves true for both lower- and middle-class individuals. For the greatly impoverished, the access to justice crisis is twofold: part of the problem is knowing when to seek legal help and another is ensuring adequate delivery of legal assistance on request. Middle- class individuals face a different challenge, as they surpass the income threshold for free civil public legal aid but cannot afford the rising costs of conventional litigation. The problem persists across different cultures. This Article …

How Mediation Contributes To The “Justice Gap” And Possible Technological Fixes, Ellen Waldman

Fordham Law Review

This Essay’s basic premise is that mediation, as it currently is presented to pro se parties in the lower courts, risks significant depredations of justice. This risk flows directly from the ethics rules that either discourage or outright forbid mediators from providing disputants with exactly the information they need to make informed judgments as they bargain over housing, time with children, and scarce financial resources.

Bringing Transparency And Accountability (With A Dash Of Competition) To Court-Connected Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh

Fordham Law Review

Among the various dispute resolution processes, mediation is the most widely institutionalized in American courts. As a result, this Article focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on the data collected and disseminated regarding court-connected mediation. The Article begins with a brief description of the institutionalization of mediation and other dispute resolution processes in the federal judicial system and in select U.S. state court systems. This narrative reveals substantial reference to the availability of mediation but a dizzying patchwork in terms of institutionalization and a significant lack of system-wide information in some states. The Article then focuses on the data that these …

Arbitration Archetypes For Enhancing Access To Justice, Jill I. Gross

Fordham Law Review

In the second half of the twentieth century, the use of arbitration proliferated in the United States as part of a greater alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement, with the promise that using ADR processes would, among other things, enhance disputants’ access to justice. Arbitration offers disputing parties a process to resolve their dispute, which, at least in theory, is known for decreased cost, increased speed, party control, privacy, and finality. These characteristics generally enhance parties’ access to justice because, as compared to litigation, barriers to entry are lower, outcomes are delivered more quickly, substantive outcomes are more equitable, and parties …

The Cost Of Free Speech: Resolving The Wedding Vendor Divide, Victoria Cappucci

Fordham Law Review

As marriage equality becomes fully realized in the United States, business proprietors increasingly refuse to service same-sex weddings on religious grounds. However, at the same time, state laws protect same-sex couples from discrimination in places open to the public. Such competing values have resulted in a line of “wedding vendor” cases. As the cases continue to proliferate, this Note examines when, and to what extent, the otherwise equally important values of free expression and equality should trump one another. This Note analyzes First Amendment compelled speech claims within the line of wedding vendor cases: specifically, whether wedding goods and services …

Restorative Justice From Prosecutors’ Perspective, Bruce A. Green, Lara Bazelon

Fordham Law Review

Restorative justice processes have been promoted as an alternative to criminal adjudication for many years outside the United States and, in recent years, in the United States as well. In the United States, restorative justice processes are used in some jurisdictions in cases involving juvenile offenders or low-level, nonviolent offenses by adults, but they have rarely been used in cases of adult felony offenders charged with serious violent crimes. Whether restorative justice processes will be used more broadly depends largely on whether prosecutors become receptive to their use. A handful of newly elected “progressive prosecutors” have expressed interest in applying …

Access To Algorithms, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Fordham Law Review

Federal, state, and local governments increasingly depend on automated systems—often procured from the private sector—to make key decisions about civil rights and liberties. When individuals affected by these decisions seek access to information about the algorithmic methodologies that produced them, governments frequently assert that this information is proprietary and cannot be disclosed. Recognizing that opaque algorithmic governance poses a threat to civil rights and liberties, scholars have called for a renewed focus on transparency and accountability for automated decision-making. But scholars have neglected a critical avenue for promoting public accountability and transparency for automated decision-making: the law of access to …

How To Explain To Your Twins Why Only One Can Be American: The Right To Citizenship Of Children Born To Same-Sex Couples Through Assisted Reproductive Technology, Lena K. Bruce

Fordham Law Review

Sections 301 and 309 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) govern birthright citizenship by descent. Per the U.S. Department of State’s (DOS) interpretation of these sections, to transmit citizenship to a child, the U.S. citizen-parent must have a biological connection with the child. For couples who use assisted reproductive technology (ART) to have children, however, this means that one parent will always be barred from transmitting citizenship to their own child. This is because in ART families, at least one parent will always lack the biological connection that the DOS requires to transmit citizenship pursuant to the INA. This …

Mestizaje/Mesticagem: Racism & Citizenship In Latin America, Tanya Hernandez, Yuko Miki, Nitza Escalera

Posters

Maloney Library lecture series, Behind the Book

Dignity And Social Meaning: Obergefell, Windsor, And Lawrence As Constitutional Dialogue, Steve Sanders

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s three most important gay and lesbian rights decisions—Obergefell v. Hodges, United States v. Windsor, and Lawrence v. Texas—are united by the principle that gays and lesbians are entitled to dignity. Beyond their tangible consequences, the common constitutional evil of state bans on same-sex marriage, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and sodomy laws was that they imposed dignitary harm. This Article explores how the gay and lesbian dignity cases exemplify the process by which constitutional law emerges from a social and cultural dialogue in which the Supreme Court actively participates. In doing …

More Color More Pride: Addressing Structural Barriers To Interracial Lgbtq Loving, Praatika Prasad

Fordham Law Review Online

Through an examination of State-supported racial structures, this Essay illustrates that even after the legalization of interracial and same-sex marriages, the State’s control over housing, education, and employment prospects impedes the formation of interracial LGBTQ relationships. This Essay suggests that reducing residential segregation can be a first step in dismantling structural barriers to interracial LGBTQ loving, as truly integrated housing would increase cross-racial contact, lead to better educational and employment outcomes, and give LGBTQ people of color a chance to improve their social capital. This, together with altering how issues of race are framed within the LGBTQ community, will help …