Digital Commons Network^™

Stimulus And Civil Rights, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Federal spending has the capacity to perpetuate racial inequality, not simply through explicit exclusion, but through choices made in the legislative and institutional design of spending programs. Drawing on the lessons of New Deal and postwar social programs, this Essay offers an account of the specificfeatures offederal spending that give it salience in structuring racial arrangements. Federal spending programs, this Essay argues, are relevant in structuring racial inequality due to their massive scale, their creation of new programmatic and spending infrastructures, and the choices made in these programs as to whether to impose explicit inclusionary norms on states and localities. …

Disparity Rules, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992, Congress required states receiving federal juvenile justice funds to reduce racial disparities in the confinement rates of minority juveniles. This provision, now known as the disproportionate minority contact standard (DMC), is potentially more far-reaching than traditional disparate impact standards: It requires the reduction of racial disparities regardless of whether those disparities were motivated by intentional discrimination orjustified by "legitimate" agency interests. Instead, the statute encourages states to address how their practices exacerbate racial disadvantage.

This Article casts the DMC standard as a partial response to the failure of constitutional and statutory standards to discourage actions that produce racial …

Desegregating Politics: "All-Out" School Desegregation Explained, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

School desegregation is not dead. It lives quietly in what used to be the Confederate South. Notwithstanding the Reagan and Bush Administrations' ten-year campaign to limit the legal, remedial, and temporal scope of court-ordered integration plans throughout the nation, desegregation persists in southern rural areas where substantial numbers of black Americans continue to reside and in southern urban areas where school districts were organized in 1970 to encompass not only the inner city but also the suburbs. By many accounts, moreover, desegregation is an effective and accepted – one may even say respected – member of the family of social …