Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

The Misguided Use Of The Harvard/Unc Ruling To Thwart Law Firm And Other Private Employer Dei Efforts, Ronald A. Norwood

SLU Law Journal Online

This article explores the Harvard/UNC ruling and what, in the author’s view, is the misguided efforts by certain political and well-financed private actors to use that ruling to justify the eradication of private employers and law firm DEI efforts. It is the author’s firm belief that because the Supreme Court’s holding is limited to an analysis of the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause (limited to state actors) and Title VI (covering private actions receiving federal funding), that ruling should not be used by courts to quash DEI programs designed to level the employment playing field for minorities, women and other protected …

“She’S Earned This”: Angela Onwuachi-Willig Rejoices In Historic Confirmation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s School of Law—the first Black woman to be dean of a top-20 law school—is rejoicing. The first Black woman has been confirmed to the US Supreme Court.

Onwuachi-Willig has had Ketanji Brown Jackson’s back from the moment President Biden announced he would nominate the federal judge to the nation’s highest court.

Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

In a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.”

The Chief Justice And The Page: Earl Warren, Charles Bush, And The Promise Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In October Term 1954, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the implementation of the Brown decision. The resulting opinion is commonly referred to as “Brown II.” In his unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered local school districts to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Supporters of immediate integration were dismayed by the vague language, which ultimately allowed southern states to use a variety of tactics to deliberately evade and resist the Court’s mandate that public schools be desegregated.

What has been forgotten in the discussion of Brown II and the “all deliberate speed” standard is that …

Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay examines the Supreme Court's stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie …

Brett Kavanaugh Vs. The Exonerated Central Park Five: Exposing The President's "Presumption Of Innocence" Double Standard, Sofia Yakren

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In the service of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, the President of the United States (and Republican Senators) both misappropriated and further eroded the already compromised concepts of due process and presumption of innocence. This Essay uses the prominent “Central Park Five” case in which five teenagers of color were wrongly convicted of a white woman’s widely-publicized beating and rape to expose the President’s disparate use of the presumption along race and status lines. This narrative is consistent with larger systemic inequities that leave poor black and brown criminal defendants less likely to benefit …

Hearing Women: From Professor Hill To Dr. Ford, Stephanie M. Wildman

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

One of the recent traumas, another skirmish in today’s civilian conflict over what kind of society America will be, arose from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about sexual assault she had endured. Her composed, measured statement during the nowJustice Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing exemplified bravery in the face of adversity. The Senate and the nation’s response to her testimony underscored the high stakes in the ongoing ideological conflict, beyond the obvious prize of a Supreme Court seat. Constituents in the current ideological battle had differing reactions to Ford’s testimony and to this hearing, reflecting a range of views about …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

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 …

The Fight For Equal Protection: Reconstruction-Redemption Redux, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Patricia Stottlemyer

All Faculty Scholarship

With Justice Scalia gone, and Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy in their late seventies, there is the possibility of significant movement on the Supreme Court in the next several years. A two-justice shift could upend almost any area of constitutional law, but the possible movement in race-based equal protection jurisprudence provides a particularly revealing window into the larger trends at work. In the battle over equal protection, two strongly opposed visions of the Constitution contend against each other, and a change in the Court’s composition may determine the outcome of that struggle. In this essay, we set out the current state …

The Ironies Of Affirmative Action, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s most recent confrontation with race-based affirmative action, Fisher v. University of Texas, did not live up to people’s expectations—or their fears. The Court did not explicitly change the current approach in any substantial way. It did, however, signal that it wants race-based affirmative action to be subject to real strict scrutiny, not the watered-down version featured in Grutter v. Bollinger. That is a significant signal, because under real strict scrutiny, almost all race-based affirmative action programs are likely unconstitutional. This is especially true given the conceptual framework the Court has created for such programs—the way …

The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Fifty Years Later, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Seldom, if ever, have the power and the purposes of legislation been rendered so impotent.... All that is left today are afew scattered remnants of a once grandiose scheme to nationalize the fundamental rights of the individual.

These words were written fifty years ago by Eugene Gressman, now William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina School of Law, as a description of what the courts, primarily the Supreme Court of the United States, had done with the civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the Civil War. Professor Gressman's article, The Unhappy History of …