Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko

Washington and Lee Law Review

Government sponsored segregation of urban neighborhoods has detrimentally impacted the health of Black Americans. Over the last century, federal, state, and local governments have promulgated racist laws and policies that shaped the racial divide of communities in major metropolitan cities. This divide has contributed to poor health outcomes and large discrepancies in life expectancy for Black Americans when compared to their White counterparts. While health is impacted by various factors, segregation has been shown to impose various challenges that make it difficult for Black Americans to attain good health.

Segregated Black communities struggle with economic inequality, environmental racism, and face …

Taking The Knee No More: Police Accountability And The Structure Of Racism, David Dante Troutt

Washington and Lee Law Review

From before the birth of the republic to the present day, police brutality has represented a signature injustice of state authority, especially against African Americans. Defining that injustice is the lack of accountability for official misconduct. The rule of law has systematically failed to deter lawbreaking by its law enforcement departments. This Article explores the various legal and institutional means by which accountability should be imposed and demonstrates the design elements of structured immunity. Using Critical Race Theory and traditional civil rights law notions of how structural racism operates, this Article argues that transformative change can only come about through …

Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Critical Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes (“HERS”), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states’ higher education’s harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes …

The Computer Got It Wrong: Facial Recognition Technology And Establishing Probable Cause To Arrest, T.J. Benedict

Washington and Lee Law Review

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is a popular tool among police, who use it to identify suspects using photographs or still-images from videos. The technology is far from perfect. Recent studies highlight that many FRT systems are less effective at identifying people of color, women, older people, and children. These race, gender, and age biases arise because FRT is often “trained” using non-diverse faces. As a result, police have wrongfully arrested Black men based on mistaken FRT identifications. This Note explores the intersection of facial recognition technology and probable cause to arrest.

Courts rarely, if ever, examine FRT’s role in establishing …

The New State Of Surveillance: Societies Of Subjugation, Khaled Ali Beydoun

Washington and Lee Law Review

Foundational surveillance studies theory has largely been shaped in line with the experiences of white subjects in western capitalist societies. Formative scholars, most notably Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, theorized that the advancement of surveillance technology tempers the State’s reliance on mass discipline and corporal punishment. Legal scholarship examining modern surveillance perpetuates this view, and popular interventions, such as the blockbuster docudrama The Social Dilemma and Shoshana Zuboff’s bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, mainstream the myth of colorblind surveillance. However, the experiences of nonwhite subjects of surveillance—pushed to or beyond the margins of these formative discourses—reflect otherwise. …

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Washington and Lee Law Review

2020 forced scholars, policymakers, and activists alike to grapple with the impact of “twin pandemics”—the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Black and Indigenous communities, and the scourge of structural and physical state violence against those same communities—on American society. As atrocious acts of anti-Black violence and harassment by law enforcement officers and white civilians are captured on recording devices, the gap between Black people’s human and civil rights and their living conditions has become readily apparent. Less visible human rights abuses camouflaged as private commercial matters, and thus out of the reach of the state, are also increasingly exposed as …

The Golem In The Machine: Ferpa, Dirty Data, And Digital Distortion In The Education Record, Najarian R. Peters

Washington and Lee Law Review

Like its counterpart in the criminal justice system, dirty data—data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading—in K-12 education records creates and catalyzes catastrophic life events. The presence of this data in any record suggests a lack of data integrity. The systemic problem of dirty data in education records means the data stewards of those records have failed to meet the data integrity requirements embedded in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA was designed to protect students and their education records from the negative impact of erroneous information rendered from the “private scribblings” of educators. The legislative history …

Enforcement Of The Reconstruction Amendments, Alexander Tsesis

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article analyzes the delicate balance of congressional and judicial authority granted by the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments vest Congress with powers to enforce civil rights, equal treatment, and civic participation. Their reach extends significantly beyond the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts’ narrow construction of congressional authority. In recent years, the Court has struck down laws that helped secure voter rights, protect religious liberties, and punish age or disability discrimination. Those holdings encroach on the amendments’ allocated powers of enforcement.

Textual, structural, historical, and normative analyses provide profound insights into the appropriate roles of the Supreme Court …

The Sexual Harassment Loophole, Keith Cunningham-Parmeter

Washington and Lee Law Review

Employers rarely pay for sexual harassment. The #MeToo movement has not changed this legal reality. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the nation’s primary workplace antidiscrimination law—contains a harassment loophole. Harassment is the only kind of Title VII violation that allows employers to avoid liability if they offer training and reporting opportunities to workers. In contrast, employers must automatically pay for all other Title VII claims such as discriminatory firings, even when firms have trained their employees not to discriminate. This Article makes the case for closing the loophole by aligning harassment liability with other Title VII offenses …

Say The Magic Words: Establishing A Historically Informed Standard To Prevent Partisanship From Shielding Racial Gerrymanders From Federal Judicial Review, Emily K. Dalessio

Washington and Lee Law Review

In its 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court closed the doors of the federal courts to litigants claiming a violation of their constitutional rights based on partisan gerrymandering. In Rucho, the Court held that partisan gerrymandering presents a political question that falls outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts. However, the Supreme Court did not address an insidious consequence of this ruling: namely, that map-drawers may use partisan rationales to obscure what is otherwise an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. This Note uses North Carolina as an example of a state with a long history of …

"Constitutional Justice" Or "Constitutional Peace"? The Supreme Court And Affirmative Action, Robert J. Delahunty

Washington and Lee Law Review

The "problem of constitutional evil" is the topic of a recent and provocative book by historian and law professor Mark Graber. The problem arises because the formation and the maintenance of constitutions such as ours require concessions by one group of citizens to another group who, in the eyes of the former, are committed to radically unjust practices. In the case of the formation of our own Constitution, the most fundamental of such concessions was the compromise under which slavery was guaranteed constitutional protection, at least where it already existed Despite their deep misgivings over slavery, opponents of that institution …

Fighting Racism In The Twenty-First Century, Dorothy A. Brown

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Making Gay Straight Alliance Student Groups Curriculum-Related: A New Tactic For Schools Trying To Avoid The Equal Access Act, Brian Berkley

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overcoming Resistance To Diversity In The Executive Suite: Grease, Grit, And The Corporate Promotion Tournament, Donald C. Langevoort

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Games Ceos Play And Interest Convergence Theory: Why Diversity Lags In America's Boardrooms And What To Do About It, Steven A. Ramirez

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race To The Top Of The Corporate Ladder: What Minorities Do When They Get There, Devon W. Carbado, Mitu Gulati

Washington and Lee Law Review

Racing to the top of the corporate hierarchy is difficult, no matter how qualified or capable the candidate. Producing more widgets than one's competitors is not enough. Negotiating the political landscape of the institution is also required. More specifically, individual corporate officers have to be appeased, powerful interest groups have to be co-opted and made allies, and competitors have to be undermined or eliminated. The more bureaucratic the organization and the more opaque the promotion process, the more important this institutional game to climbing the corporate ladder. This Article identifies the kind of racial minorities or racial types who are …

Equal Educational Opportunity By The Numbers: The Warren Court's Empirical Legacy, Michael Heise

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law And Culture-Shift: Race And The Warren Court Legacy, John O. Calmore

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Shattered Mirror: Identity, Authority, And Law, Lawrence M. Friedman

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Challenges To The Future Of Civil And Political Rights, Dinah Shelton

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The "Constitutional" Assault On The Virginia Military Institute, Jon A. Soderberg

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

John W. Davis And His Role In The Public School Segregation Cases - A Personal Memoir , Sydnor Thompson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Changing Meaning Of Equality In Twentieth-Century Constitutional Law, William E. Nelson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Social Safety Net To Dragnet: African American Males In The Criminal Justice System, Jerome G. Miller

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law And Justice System Practices As Racist, White, And Racialized, Kathleen Daly

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On The "Inevitability" Of Racial Discrimination In Capital Sentencing And The "Impossibility" Of Its Prevention, Detection, And Correction, David C. Baldus, George Woodworth, Charles A. Pulaski, Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Police And Violent Crime, Joseph D. Mcnamara

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Vmi Essays: The Virginia Military Institute And The Equal Protection Clause: A Factual And Legal Introduction, Jon Allyn Soderberg

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Soifer's Vision And Three Questions About Images, Milner S. Ball

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Groups In Perspectives, Carol Weisbrod

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.