Legal History Commons^™

Inimicus Libertatis: Chief Justice Rehnquist’S Majority Or Plurality Opinions In The Field Of Criminal Procedure, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Scholarly Works

Since the early 1970’s an increasingly conservative Supreme Court of the United States has been leading this country through a “Criminal Procedure Counterrevolution” (also called “The Rehnquisition”), during which the federal rights and remedies of criminal defendants have been inexorably and significantly eroded. There are numerous books and law review articles discussing this counterrevolution. Chief Justice Rehnquist, the most articulate and ideological of the Courts conservative justices, may properly be regarded as the intellectual founder and leader of this trend in favor of restricting criminal procedure rights.

This article analyzes and provides a bibliography of Supreme Court criminal procedure opinions …

Contemplating Masterpiece Cakeshop, Terri R. Day

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Modern Class Action Rule: Its Civil Rights Roots And Relevance Today, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

The modern class action rule recently turned fifty years old — a golden anniversary. However, this milestone is marred by an increase in hate crimes, violence and discrimination. Ironically, the rule is marking its anniversary within a similarly tumultuous environment as its birth — the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. This irony calls into question whether this critical aggregation device is functioning as the drafters intended. This article makes three contributions.

First, the article unearths the rule’s rich history, revealing how the rule was designed in 1966 to enable structural reform and broad injunctive relief in civil rights cases. …

Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …