Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law: A (Nearly) Empty Vessel?, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Empty Vessel explores both the positive and normative questions of what the contractually implied obligation of good faith does and should require of contracting parties. The Article attempts to assess and evaluate the ways in which courts are currently employing the good faith doctrine in contract disputes, as part of a larger project whose goal is to re-conceive and reinvigorate the private law doctrine of good faith as one that might assist in effecting the public law norm of equality. Empty Vessel identifies two dominant theoretical approaches to how to define good faith, which I refer to as the fairness …

Introduction To Law, Ethics, And Affirmative Action In America, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article discusses the language of the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. The rhetoric and language that we use to address race is difficult, if not tortured. The article explains why Grutter should have been an easy case and a simple opinion, and the ways in which the final opinion was anything but simple.

Reform Or Retrenchment: Single Sex Education And The Construction Of Race And Gender, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As parents, policymakers, and educators search for solutions to the crisis in the nation's public schools, single sex education emerges time and again as a promising strategy, particularly for African American students. This article argues that, in order to comprehend fully the implications of single sex schooling in inner city schools, examining the history of sex-based and race-based segregation in education is essential.

History demonstrates that sex and racial segregation in education has supported gender and hierarchies and the attendant subordination of African Americans and white women. For example, when public education became available for Blacks, its primary purpose was …

Living "Off-Stage": The Semiotic Potential Of Narrative In Paula Johnson's Inner Lives: Voices Of African-American Women In Prison, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The hopelessness and hopefulness in the voices of the women profiled in Inner Lives exemplify a semiotic response to the racism that permeates the criminal justice and prison systems in the United States. This article asks how, in the telling of their stories and living of their lives, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women profiled in the book engage in a working semiotics. The extraordinary thing about the narratives collected by Johnson is that they describe how women who have been placed at the very bottom of the American social consciousness are successfully constructing their own image-repertoires rather than accepting …

Critical Interventions: Toward An Expansive Equality Approach To The Doctrine Of Good Faith In Contract Law, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article argues that courts should use the doctrine of good faith in contract law to prohibit improper considerations of race in contract formation and performance, and should recognize good faith as a device for eliminating racial subordination that can function beyond the scope of conventional civil rights discourse. Although civil rights laws provide important remedies to victims of discrimination, the elimination of racial subordination cannot remain the exclusive domain of civil rights law. Rather, other substantive areas of law can and should incorporate expansive equality principles to achieve that end. For example, this article demonstrates how the implied obligation …

Using § 1983 To Enforce Title Vi's Section 602 Regulations, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article examines the circumstances under which § 1983 suits may be used to enforce agency regulations in general, and Title VI's disparate impact regulations in particular.

Reforming State Brownfield Programs To Comply With Title Vi, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Many states have adopted voluntary action programs to encourage developers to clean up and redevelop brownfields, former industrial or commercial facilities that have some environmental contamination. While brownfields redevelopment often has important benefits, states often allow cleanups that are less stringent than would otherwise be required and that raises the possibility that redevelopment could pose health risks to neighboring residents. Because many brownfield sites are located in areas with significant minority populastions, there is the potential for disproportionate impacts against these groups. If disparate impacts occur, states are arguably liable under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The …

The Look Within: Property, Capacity, And Suffrage In Nineteenth-Century America, Jacob Katz Cogan

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Note looks at the trajectory of suffrage reform from the late eighteenth century to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and argues that reformers were obsessed with the inner qualities of persons. Whereas the eighteenth century had located a person's capacity for political participation externally (in material things, such as property), the nineteenth century found these qualities internally (in innate and heritable traits, such as intelligence). To chart the transformation, this Note examines the debates over suffrage in the state constitutional conventions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as contemporaneous commentaries.

Part I will describe the …

Environmental Justice And Discriminatory Siting: Risk-Based Representation And Equitable Compensation, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article proposes a new risk-based approach to representing and compensating not only minorities but any person affected by a siting decision. This proposal would create a formal mechanism for achieving the desire of many environmental justice advocates to empower those local residents most affected by a siting decision. The EPA or state siting agencies, however, would provide a technocratic framework for assessing the scope of risks, despite the limitations of risk and cost-benefit analysis; would set limits on the maximum amount of risk in any community; and would specify the minimum compensation required from a developer. Immediate neighbors, political …

The Four Failures Of The Political Economy, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A contemporary policy analyst accustomed to the ways of the micro economic model might admit that the effects of certain types of environmental regulation, (the placement of hazardous waste facilities, for example) might disproportionately impact the poor because it is economically prudent to locate facilities where land is the cheapest. The harsh reality of this strategy is that poor people are more likely to live in poorer sections of the country; thus, the likelihood of being closer to such a facility is higher than that of the general populace. Thus, under this hypothesis, environmental equity is classbased and dictated by …

Do The United States Sentencing Guidelines Deprive Defendants Of Due Process?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

It is difficult to determine whether due process requires individualized sentencing because sentencing goals and practices have varied greatly during the course of this nation's history. A court applying Judge Bork's original intent doctrine of constitutional interpretation would probably reach a result different from that reached by a court employing a more liberal view of due process protections.1o It is likely that liberals and conservatives on the current Supreme Court would disagree on whether the Guidelines violate due process.

This article argues that the Guidelines can be saved and can satisfy due process requirements if the Supreme Court interprets the …