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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence

Sotomayer's Supreme Court Race Jurisprudebce: 'Fidelity To The Law', Tanya K. Hernandez Jan 2014

Sotomayer's Supreme Court Race Jurisprudebce: 'Fidelity To The Law', Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

During the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concerns were persistently raised about her ability to be impartial. Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh and many others railed against her nomination, proclaiming on talk radio broadcasts from coast-to-coast that she is a reverse-racist and nothing less than anti-white. A review of the Supreme Court record of race-related cases demonstrates Justice Sotomayor’s continued commitment to her stated judicial philosophy of fidelity to the law, inasmuch as she has not sought the unilateral imposition of her own personal racial policy preferences but has instead worked as a team player to scrupulously apply legal …


Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 2005

Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the …


Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury Jan 1999

Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court increasingly has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a mandate for the state to treat citizens as if they were equal-as a limitation on the state's ability to draw distinctions on the basis of characteristics such as race and, to a lesser extent, gender. In the context of race, the Court has struck down not only race-specific policies designed to harm the historically oppressed, but race conscious policies designed to foster racial equality. Although in theory the Court has left open the possibility that benign uses of race may be constitutional under some set of facts, in …


Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …