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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race

"The Prejudice Of Caste": The Misreading Of Justice Harlan And The Ascendency Of Anticlassificaiton, Scott Grinsell Jan 2010

"The Prejudice Of Caste": The Misreading Of Justice Harlan And The Ascendency Of Anticlassificaiton, Scott Grinsell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article reconsiders the familiar reading of Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson as standing for the principle of constitutional colorblindness by examining the significance of Harlan's use of the metaphor "caste" in the opinion. By overlooking Harlan's invocation of "caste," it argues that conservative proponents of anticlassification have reclaimed the opinion for "colorblindness," and buried a powerful statement of the antisubordination principle that is at the heart of our equality law. The Article begins by examining the emergence of a reading of the opinion as articulating a view of equality law based in anticlassification. The Article then returns …


Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks Jan 2010

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court's long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision's implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de …


Of Visible Race-Consciousness And Institutional Role: Equal Protection And Disparate Impact After Ricci And Inclusive Communities, Richard A. Primus Jan 2010

Of Visible Race-Consciousness And Institutional Role: Equal Protection And Disparate Impact After Ricci And Inclusive Communities, Richard A. Primus

Book Chapters

Six years ago, Ricci v. DeStefano foregrounded the possibility that statutory disparate-impact standards like the one in Title VIl might be on a collision course with the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. For many observers, it was a radically new possibility. Until that point, disparate-impact doctrine had usually been understood as an ally of equal protection rather than as a potentially conflicting aspect of the law. But between the 1970s and the beginning of the present century, equal protection doctrine became more individualistic and less tolerant of race-conscious actions intended to redress inherited racial hierarchies. Those developments put equal protection …


The Future Of Disparate Impact, Richard A. Primus Jan 2010

The Future Of Disparate Impact, Richard A. Primus

Articles

The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano foregrounded the question of whether Title VIl's disparate impact standard conflicts with equal protection. This Article shows that there are three ways to read Ricci, one of which is likely fatal to disparate impact doctrine but the other two of which are not.