Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Civil Rights and Discrimination

Brooklyn Law School

Brooklyn Law Review

Keyword
Publication Year

Articles 1 - 28 of 28

Full-Text Articles in Law

When Life Takes Your Lemons: Resolving The Legislative Prayer Debate In School Board Settings In Light Of Kennedy V. Bremerton School District, Jordan Halper May 2024

When Life Takes Your Lemons: Resolving The Legislative Prayer Debate In School Board Settings In Light Of Kennedy V. Bremerton School District, Jordan Halper

Brooklyn Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic fanned the flames of a fire that had been slowly but steadily burning since 2016, arming the loudest warriors of America’s endless culture war with a slew of new divisive issues. Virtually overnight, parental rights groups began capitalizing on the frustration in their communities in order to spur political change, training their ire toward public schools. What began as a crusade against mask mandates and vaccines manifested into a well-funded effort by ultraconservative groups to undermine the public education system as a whole. Against this backdrop, the legislative prayer exception—which was meant to sanction the practice of …


Dogma, Discrimination, And Doctrinal Disarray: A New Test To Define Harm Under Title Vii, Zach Islam Mar 2024

Dogma, Discrimination, And Doctrinal Disarray: A New Test To Define Harm Under Title Vii, Zach Islam

Brooklyn Law Review

Historically, federal courts have used the “adverse employment action” test in Title VII disparate treatment, disparate impact, and retaliation cases to determine whether a plaintiff has suffered adequate harm. This note argues that this approach is fundamentally flawed. At the outset, the test is a judicial power grab with no support in the statutory language. What is more, it fails to uphold the plain policy purposes for Title VII by largely ignoring evidence of discriminatory acts in the workplace that Congress sought to prevent in passing the statute. Consequently, Title VII plaintiffs get the short end of the stick with …


A New Private Law Of Policing, Cristina Carmody Tilley Mar 2024

A New Private Law Of Policing, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Brooklyn Law Review

American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but functionally hostile to Black, female, poor, and other marginalized Americans? From the liberal midcentury onward, social justice advocates have treated these spaces as fundamentally public and fully remediable via public law equity commands. This article takes a broader view. It urges a tort law revival in …


Affirmatively Furthering Health Equity, Mary Crossley Mar 2024

Affirmatively Furthering Health Equity, Mary Crossley

Brooklyn Law Review

Pervasive health disparities in the United States undermine both public health and social cohesion. Because of the enormity of the healthcare sector, government action, standing alone, is limited in its power to remedy health disparities. This article proposes a novel approach to distributing responsibility for promoting health equity broadly among public and private actors in the healthcare sector. Specifically, it recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services issue guidance articulating an obligation on the part of all recipients of federal healthcare funding to act affirmatively to advance health equity. The Fair Housing Act’s requirement that recipients of federal …


My Body, Whose Choice? A Case For A Fundamental Right To Bodily Autonomy, Miri Trauner Mar 2024

My Body, Whose Choice? A Case For A Fundamental Right To Bodily Autonomy, Miri Trauner

Brooklyn Law Review

In 2022, the US Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the fundamental right to abortion it had established nearly fifty years prior. The Court’s decision threw into uncertainty the future of not only reproductive rights in this country, but also many other individual rights. At the same time as the decision, the world was still reeling from a global pandemic, and the development of COVID-19 vaccines had spurred widespread controversy over the constitutionality of vaccine mandates. Both advocates for abortion access and opponents to vaccine mandates shared a common cry: “my …


Order Of Protection Or Deportation? How Civil Orders Of Protection Entangle Noncitizens And Their Families In The Immigration And Criminal Legal Systems, Creating The Harm That They Were Intended To Prevent., Sarah E. Corsico Dec 2023

Order Of Protection Or Deportation? How Civil Orders Of Protection Entangle Noncitizens And Their Families In The Immigration And Criminal Legal Systems, Creating The Harm That They Were Intended To Prevent., Sarah E. Corsico

Brooklyn Law Review

A civil protection order can act as an important form of relief for an individual experiencing violence; however, it can also bring extreme complications and consequences for noncitizens. Unlike its intended purpose as a remedy separate from punitive state systems, civil protection orders can replicate the harm of the criminal legal system for noncitizens—barring someone from gaining immigration status, delaying applications, impacting international travel, and at its worst, resulting in deportation. Despite the high stakes nature of these proceeding, for the most part, there is no right to assigned counsel in civil protection order cases. As a result, many individuals …


The White Supremacist Structure Ofamerican Zoning Law, Sarah J. Adams-Schoen May 2023

The White Supremacist Structure Ofamerican Zoning Law, Sarah J. Adams-Schoen

Brooklyn Law Review

This article disrupts the false narrative of white supremacism that has, for more than a century, cast American land use law as race neutral. In doing so, this article builds on an important but underdeveloped body of legal scholarship elucidating zoning law’s role in creating and perpetuating a separate and unequal dual housing system. It provides primary historical evidence and a clear narrative demonstrating that the defining feature of American zoning law—a strict residential use taxonomy that privileges neighborhoods of restrictively regulated single-family homes and burdens less restrictively regulated residential areas—emerged directly from the facially race-based and facially neutral, but …


Who’S The Fairest Of Them All: Circuit Split Over Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Discrimination Under The Fair Housing Act, Kelli Conway Dec 2022

Who’S The Fairest Of Them All: Circuit Split Over Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Discrimination Under The Fair Housing Act, Kelli Conway

Brooklyn Law Review

This note explores a circuit split between the Second and Seventh Circuits regarding whether landlords and property owners can be held liable for postacquisition, tenant-on-tenant discrimination. This issue is one of first impression in recent years, resulting in divergent holdings. To address conflicting judicial approaches to an increasingly prevalent civil claim, this note argues for the necessity of a Congressional amendment to the Fair Housing Act (FHA), the law which generally governs housing discrimination. Specifically, the proposed amendment would recognize postacquisition discrimination as an actionable claim and append a test to the FHA for postacquisition liability as employed by the …


Last Rights: A Theory Of Individual Impact, Kenneth R. Davis Dec 2022

Last Rights: A Theory Of Individual Impact, Kenneth R. Davis

Brooklyn Law Review

Title VII recognizes both individual and group disparate treatment claims, which allege intentional discrimination. But Title VII recognizes only group claims for disparate impact. Conspicuously absent are claims for individual impact. The reason for the absence of an individual-disparate-impact claim is a problem of proof. To establish a Title VII claim, a plaintiff must prove that he or she lost a job opportunity was “because of” membership in a protected class. Showing that a single individual lost a job opportunity because of a test score, resume evaluation, or interview does not prove that any of these selection criteria unlawfully discriminated …


White Supremacy’S Police Siege On The United States Capitol, Vida B. Johnson Feb 2022

White Supremacy’S Police Siege On The United States Capitol, Vida B. Johnson

Brooklyn Law Review

On January 6, 2021, law enforcement failed the people and the institutions it was supposed to protect. This article explores how white supremacy and far-right extremism in policing contributed to the insurrection at the Capitol. Police officers enabled the siege of the Capitol, participated in the attack, and failed to take seriously the threat posed by white supremacists and other far-right groups. The debacle is emblematic of the myriad problems in law enforcement that people of color, scholars, and those in the defund and abolitionist movements have been warning about for years. Police complicity in the attack on the Capitol …


Black Deaths Matter: The Race-Of-Victim Effect And Capital Punishment, Daniel S. Medwed Dec 2021

Black Deaths Matter: The Race-Of-Victim Effect And Capital Punishment, Daniel S. Medwed

Brooklyn Law Review

The racial dimensions of the death penalty are well-documented. Many observers assume this state of affairs derives from bias—often implicit and occasionally explicit—against black defendants in particular. Research points to an even more alarming factor. The race of the victim, not the defendant, steers cases in the direction of death. Regardless of the perpetrator’s race, those who kill whites are more likely to face capital charges, receive a death sentence, and die by execution than those who murder blacks. This short Essay adds a contemporary gloss to the race-of-victim effect literature, placing it in the context of the Black Lives …


Redefining The Safe Third Country Exception Of The Immigration And Nationality Act In The Wake Of Trump, Daniel E. Rabbani Dec 2021

Redefining The Safe Third Country Exception Of The Immigration And Nationality Act In The Wake Of Trump, Daniel E. Rabbani

Brooklyn Law Review

The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act lays out when an asylum seeker has the right to apply for asylum in the United States. This right is not available, however, when an asylum seeker passes through a designated Safe Third Country. A Safe Third Country is an internationally used concept that, pursuant to an international agreement, requires refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country that they step foot in. As the Safe Third Country exception on the Immigration and Nationality Act stands now, there are no guidelines on how to evaluate whether a country is in fact safe. This …


Without A Voice, Without A Forum: Finding Iirira Section 1252(G) Unconstitutional, Amanda Simms Dec 2021

Without A Voice, Without A Forum: Finding Iirira Section 1252(G) Unconstitutional, Amanda Simms

Brooklyn Law Review

The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) abrogates sovereign immunity in certain circumstances to allow private individuals, regardless of citizenship, to sue the United States for specific torts committed by government officials. Yet when two lawful permanent residents—located in different parts of the country—separately tried to sue the government for wrongful removal, one court dismissed the suit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction while the other court did not. These decisions, though reaching opposite conclusions, both relied on federal immigration statute 8 U.S.C. § 1252(g) in order to determine whether judicial review of immigrants’ removal orders is precluded. This note argues …


The Rise Of Ada Title Iii: How Congress And The Department Of Justice Can Solve Predatory Litigation, Sarah E. Zehentner Sep 2021

The Rise Of Ada Title Iii: How Congress And The Department Of Justice Can Solve Predatory Litigation, Sarah E. Zehentner

Brooklyn Law Review

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 to afford equal opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Title III of the ADA, specifically, was enacted to afford disabled individuals equal access to places of public accommodation. When the ADA was enacted, the internet was still in its infancy and Congress did not contemplate the need for governing accessibility to websites of public accommodations. Today, the internet has become embedded in virtually every aspect of our lives, yet there are still millions of disabled individuals who are unable to equally access the websites of American businesses. With the ADA being …


Prosecuting Misconduct: New York’S Creation Of A Watchdog Commission, Danielle Robinson Jun 2020

Prosecuting Misconduct: New York’S Creation Of A Watchdog Commission, Danielle Robinson

Brooklyn Law Review

Prosecutors play an integral role in America’s inherently adversarial criminal justice system and thus have a significant impact on the individual liberties of accused citizens. Therefore, they have long since been subject to continuous scrutiny by the public, which in turn leads to criticism of state legislatures for not addressing the issue. The state of New York attempted to meet this challenge of prosecutorial misconduct head-on as part of a multi-pronged criminal justice reform agenda with the creation of a first-in-the-nation commission on prosecutorial conduct (CPC). At this point in time, the CPC has been held unconstitutional. This note will …


The People’S Business: The Case For Amending New York Civil Rights Law Section 50-A, Jeffrey T. Hazelton Jun 2020

The People’S Business: The Case For Amending New York Civil Rights Law Section 50-A, Jeffrey T. Hazelton

Brooklyn Law Review

For more than forty years, New York Civil Rights Law section 50-a has harmed New Yorkers by shielding the release of police officers’ “personnel records,” including in the aftermath of substantiated complaints of misconduct. With the aid of numerous New York Court Appeals decisions, this statute progressively transformed from a relatively nuanced protection for testifying officers during trial, to its ultimate status as an outright bar to virtually all public disclosures. In fact, the New York Court Appeals has even held that section 50-a supersedes New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), thereby prohibiting even redacted FOIL disclosures. By prioritizing …


Essay: Injustice In Black And White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes In Interracial Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Hatoum Oct 2018

Essay: Injustice In Black And White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes In Interracial Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Hatoum

Brooklyn Law Review

This essay advocates that prosecutors’ peremptory strikes should be eliminated in interracial capital cases. The application of the death penalty has a race problem, especially for interracial cases. A conviction is far more likely if the defendant is black and the victim is white. This is due to the fact that in interracial cases, prosecutors utilize peremptory strikes to prevent black jurors from serving on cases in which the defendant is black and the victim is white. This essay is the first to argue that such a system stacks the deck against defendants in interracial capital cases in an unconstitutional …


A Nation Of Informants: Reining In Post-9/11 Coercion Of Intelligence Informants, Diala Shamas Jul 2018

A Nation Of Informants: Reining In Post-9/11 Coercion Of Intelligence Informants, Diala Shamas

Brooklyn Law Review

This article challenges the adequacy of the existing legal and regulatory framework governing informant recruitment and coercion practices to protect fundamental rights, informed by the Muslim-American experience. It looks at the growing law enforcement practice of recruiting informants among Muslim-American communities for intelligence gathering purposes. Although the coercion of law-abiding individuals to provide information to federal law enforcement agencies for intelligence gathering purposes implicates significant rights, it is left unregulated. Existing, albeit limited, restraints on the government agents’ ability to coerce individuals to provide information either assume a criminal context, or are driven by historical concerns over FBI corruption. As …


Accommodating Bias In The Sharing Economy, Norrinda Brown Hayat Jan 2018

Accommodating Bias In The Sharing Economy, Norrinda Brown Hayat

Brooklyn Law Review

The “sharing economy” is not equally accessible to all. The sharing economy’s travel accommodations giant, Airbnb, illustrates this problem. At least one study has found that requests on Airbnb from guests with distinctively African-American names are approximately 16 percent less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively white names. Some Airbnb “hosts,” including hosts that list multiple units, insist that they are not subject to civil rights laws relying on First Amendment jurisprudence, property law and business justifications for support. These arguments are identical to arguments raised and ultimately dismissed in opposition to blacks’ right to travel prior …


Fleeing The Rat’S Nest: Title Vii Jurisprudence After Ortiz V. Werner Enterprises, Inc., Zachary J. Strongin Jan 2018

Fleeing The Rat’S Nest: Title Vii Jurisprudence After Ortiz V. Werner Enterprises, Inc., Zachary J. Strongin

Brooklyn Law Review

In 2016, the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion that may be a harbinger for an important shift in the federal judiciary’s long-standing employment discrimination jurisprudence. In Ortiz v. Werner Enterprises, Judge Easterbrook reiterated the frustration with the existing “rat’s nest” of tests and standards used in Title VII discrimination and retaliation claims. The note contains two overarching arguments. First, the Supreme Court’s employment discrimination and “rat’s nest” of tests and standards has led to an untenable situation in which federal district courts apply different standards at different stages of litigations. This in turn has caused confusion amongst the various federal …


The Community Politics Of Domestic Violence, Deborah M. Weissman Jan 2017

The Community Politics Of Domestic Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Brooklyn Law Review

Gender violence has long been identified as a crisis of epidemic proportions that defies facile solution. Despite decades of intellectual and practical engagement, law reform, and notwithstanding increased social services and public health interventions, the rates of gender violence have not appreciably declined. The field of domestic violence advocacy is itself in a crisis, and it has been difficult to discern the best way forward. Reliance on the criminal justice system has tended to fracture the domestic violence movement even as it marginalized itself from disenfranchised populations. This article offers a case study of an incident that occurred between the …


Fueling The Terrorist Fires With The First Amendment: Religious Freedom, The Anti-Lgbt Right, And Interest Convergence Theory, Kyle C. Velte Jan 2017

Fueling The Terrorist Fires With The First Amendment: Religious Freedom, The Anti-Lgbt Right, And Interest Convergence Theory, Kyle C. Velte

Brooklyn Law Review

This article argues that there is a connection between formal equality for LGBT Americans and the United States’ foreign policy and national security interests. It makes that connection utilizing Professor Derek Bell’s interest convergence paradigm. It argues that the new agenda of the American Religious Right is one that seeks to assert quasi-theocratic and anti-Establishment positions in litigation as well as in its promulgation of anti-LGBT laws. This agenda is cloaked in the garb of “religious freedom,” but the Religious Right’s definition of “religious freedom” is one that runs counter to our long-standing understanding of that principle as one that …


Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook Iii Jan 2016

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook Iii

Brooklyn Law Review

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …


Race, Restructurings, And Equal Protection Doctrine Through The Lens Of Schuette V. Bamn, Steve Sanders Jan 2016

Race, Restructurings, And Equal Protection Doctrine Through The Lens Of Schuette V. Bamn, Steve Sanders

Brooklyn Law Review

In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that Michigan voters had violated principles of the fair lawmaking process when they amended their state constitution to prohibit race-conscious affirmative action in public university admissions, reasoning that the amendment, known as “Proposal 2,” constituted a political restructuring that had violated the Equal Protection Clause by disadvantaging African Americans from being able to equally access political change. However, the Sixth Circuit was careful to avoid saying that Proposal 2 created a racial classification or was motivated by a purpose of discriminating on the basis of race. Instead, consistent …


Unconstitutional But Entrenched: Putting Uocava And Voting Rights For Permanent Expatriates On A Sound Constitutional Footing, Brian C. Kalt Jan 2016

Unconstitutional But Entrenched: Putting Uocava And Voting Rights For Permanent Expatriates On A Sound Constitutional Footing, Brian C. Kalt

Brooklyn Law Review

Eligible voters who have left the United States permanently have the right to vote in federal elections as though they still live at their last stateside address. They need not be residents of their former states, be eligible to vote in state and local elections, or pay any state or local taxes. Federal law—the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA)—forces states to let these former residents vote for President, the Senate, and the House this way. There are several constitutional problems with all of this. Congress heard about many of these problems in the hearings and debates that …


A Domestic Consequence Of The Government Spying On Its Citizens: The Guilty Go Free, Mystica M. Alexander, William P. Wiggins Jan 2016

A Domestic Consequence Of The Government Spying On Its Citizens: The Guilty Go Free, Mystica M. Alexander, William P. Wiggins

Brooklyn Law Review

In recent years, a seemingly endless stream of headlines have alerted people to the steady and relentless government encroachment on their civil liberties. Consider, for example, headlines such as “U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans,” “DEA Admits to Keeping Secret Database of Phone Calls,” or “No Morsel Too Miniscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.” Of concern is not only the U.S. government’s collection of data on its citizens, but also how that information is aggregated, stored, and used. The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. While the drafters of the Fourth …


Trial And Heirs: Antemortem Probate For The Changing American Family, Katherine M. Arango Jan 2016

Trial And Heirs: Antemortem Probate For The Changing American Family, Katherine M. Arango

Brooklyn Law Review

The notion of the traditional American family has changed due to complex family structures formed through remarriages, cohabitation, and same-sex couples. Freedom of disposition is a guiding principle of inheritance law, whereby society recognizes the value in protecting one’s ability to acquire and transfer personal property at death. However, intestacy statutes are antiquated and have failed to keep pace with the rise of the modern American family, thus leaving the right to freedom of disposition uncertain and vulnerable for a large population. A will is a way of opting out of intestacy, but given that a will is frequently the …


The Case For Lgbt Equality: Reviving The Political Process Doctrine And Repurposing The Dormant Commerce Clause, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby Jan 2016

The Case For Lgbt Equality: Reviving The Political Process Doctrine And Repurposing The Dormant Commerce Clause, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby

Brooklyn Law Review

As a reaction to the Supreme Court’s historic marriage equality decision earlier this summer, many Southern state legislators opposing the trend toward LGBT-protective laws have proposed legislation that would essentially prohibit municipalities from carving out new antidiscrimination protections for the LGBT community. Conservative Senator Bart Hester spearheaded the passing of one of these “anti” antidiscrimination laws in Arkansas, and states like Texas, West Virginia, Michigan, and Oklahoma are not far behind. These “Hester-type laws” are strikingly similar to the Colorado amendment struck down by the Romer v. Evans Court 20 years ago. Both the Colorado amendment and the new wave …