Law Commons^™

Law And Local Activism: Uncovering The Civil Rights History Of Chambers V. Mississippi, Emily Prifogle

Articles

Countless academics have examined and discussed the importance of Chambers v. Mississippi in a multitude of areas including compulsory due process, admission of hearsay, third party guilt evidence, false confessions, racial evaluations of hearsay and witnesses, and morally reasonable verdicts. In contrast, this article attempts to excavate the account of a rural Mississippi community’s struggle for rights that underlies the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chambers. On its face, the case has no link or reference to the civil rights movement. However, this paper reveals that local civil rights activists took armed, direct economic action for equal rights Woodville, Mississippi, …

Understanding Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

Law & Economics Working Papers

Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on their differences in risk profiles, first, so that they can charge different premiums to the different groups based on their risk and, second, to incentivize risk reduction by insureds. This is why we let insurers discriminate. There are, however, limits to the types of discrimination we will allow insurers to engage in. But what exactly are those limits and how are they justified? To answer these questions, this Article articulates the leading fairness and efficiency arguments for and against limiting insurers’ …

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission And Structural Reform Of The American Workplace, Margo Schlanger, Pauline T. Kim

Law & Economics Working Papers

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court struck down a class action suit alleging that Wal-Mart stores discriminated against female employees in pay and promotion decisions, making it more difficult to obtain certification of private employment discrimination class actions. As a result, the role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in seeking structural reform of the workplace, always of substantial influence, has gained in comparative importance. Yet there is remarkably little written about the EEOC’s large-scale injunctive cases. This Article addresses this major gap in scholarship.

Using both qualitative case studies and a new quantitative data-set, we test existing theories …

Evidence-Based Sentencing And The Scientific Rationalization Of Discrimination, Sonja B. Starr

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper critiques, on legal and empirical grounds, the growing trend of basing criminal sentences on actuarial recidivism risk prediction instruments that include demographic and socioeconomic variables. I argue that this practice violates the Equal Protection Clause and is bad policy: an explicit embrace of otherwise-condemned discrimination, sanitized by scientific language. To demonstrate that this practice should be subject to heightened constitutional scrutiny, I comprehensively review the relevant case law, much of which has been ignored by existing literature. To demonstrate that it cannot survive that scrutiny and is undesirable policy, I review the empirical evidence underlying the instruments. I …

Offices Of Goodness: Influence Without Authority In Federal Agencies, Margo Schlanger

Law & Economics Working Papers

Inducing governmental organizations to do the right thing is the central problem of public administration. If Congress or another principal wants a federal executive agency to pay attention to a value that constrains or conflicts with the agency’s overall mission — that additional value is here labeled, generically, "Goodness" — the principal often creates a subsidiary agency office — an "Office of Goodness." Both policymakers and scholars should care about how and when Offices of Goodness work. Yet while Offices of Goodness are frequently established in federal agencies, they are nearly invisible in scholarship. And the resulting knowledge gap is …

Dignité/Dignidade: Organizing Against Threats To Dignity In Societies After Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

This chapter is not an attempt to join the fractious debate over philosophical first principles or juridical first usages of the term 'dignity'. Instead, it explores the tight connection between the institution of slavery and the giving of specific meanings to the concept of dignity, in particular times and particular places. To explore the dynamics of the intertwined process of creating and drawing upon meaning for the terms 'dignity' and 'slavery', I examine two historical movements that emerged after formal abolition.

On Estimating Disparity And Inferring Causation: Sur-Reply To The U.S. Sentencing Commission Staff, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi

Articles

In this Essay, Professors Starr and Rehavi respond to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s empirical staff’s criticisms of their recent article, which found, contrary to the Commission’s prior work, no evidence that racial disparity in sentences increased in response to United States v. Booker. As Starr and Rehavi suggest, their differences with the Commission perhaps relate to differing objectives. The Commission staff’s reply expresses a lack of interest in identifying Booker’s causal effects; in contrast, that is Starr and Rehavi’s central objective. In addition, Starr and Rehavi’s approach also accounts for disparities arising throughout the post-arrest justice process, extending beyond the …

Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Precedent from the Roberts Court shows the Justices taking three distinct approaches to precedent they dislike. Each provides a template for the Court to criticize race-based affirmative action in higher education, as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is widely expected to do. Most narrowly, the Court might use Fisher to issue a warning, much like it did in 2009 when it sidestepped a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act; under this approach, the opinion would spell out why the Justices think the diversity celebrated in Grutter v. Bollinger no longer provides sufficient justification for the use of …

What Was Wrong With The Record?, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Shelby County v. Holder offers three reasons for why the record Congress amassed to support the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was legally insufficient to justify the statute's continued regional application: (1) the problems Congress documented in 2006 were not as severe as those that prompted it to craft the regime in 1965; (2) these problems did not lead Congress to alter the statute's pre-existing coverage formula; and (3) these problems did not exclusively involve voter registration and the casting of ballots.

Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …

South Carolina's 'Evolutionary Process', Ellen D. Katz

Articles

When Congress first enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, public officials in South Carolina led the charge to scrap the new statute. Their brief to the Supreme Court of the United States described the VRA as an “unjustified” and “arbitrary” affront to the “Equality of Statehood” principle, and a “usurp[ation]” of the State’s legislative and executive functions. Not surprisingly, the Warren Court was unpersuaded and opted instead to endorse broad congressional power to craft “inventive” remedies to address systematic racial discrimination and to “shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of evil to its victims.” …

Shelby County V. Holder: Why Section 2 Matters, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Editor’s Note: Professor Ellen D. Katz writes and teaches about election law, civil rights and remedies, and equal protection. She and the Voting Rights Initiative at Michigan Law filed a brief as amicus curiae in Shelby County v. Holder, on which the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments February 27. Here, she examines why Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bears consideration in the case, which involves a challenge to Section 5 of the act.

Mandatory Sentencing And Racial Disparity, Assessing The Role Of Prosecutors And The Effects Of Booker, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi

Articles

This Article presents new empirical evidence concerning the effects of United States v. Booker, which loosened the formerly mandatory U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, on racial disparities in federal criminal cases. Two serious limitations pervade existing empirical literature on sentencing disparities. First, studies focus on sentencing in isolation, controlling for the “presumptive sentence” or similar measures that themselves result from discretionary charging, plea-bargaining, and fact-finding processes. Any disparities in these earlier processes are excluded from the resulting sentence-disparity estimates. Our research has shown that this exclusion matters: pre-sentencing decision-making can have substantial sentence-disparity consequences. Second, existing studies have used loose causal inference …

A Cure Worse Than The Disease?, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The pending challenge to section 5 of the Voting Rights Act insists the statute is no longer necessary. Should the Supreme Court agree, its ruling is likely to reflect the belief that section 5 is not only obsolete but that its requirements do more harm today than the condition it was crafted to address. In this Essay, Professor Ellen D. Katz examines why the Court might liken section 5 to a destructive treatment and why reliance on that analogy in the pending case threatens to leave the underlying condition unaddressed and Congress without the power to address it.

Three Puzzling Things About New York Times V. Sullivan: Beginning The Anniversary Conversation, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

This is the 50th anniversary of a watershed year in the history of the civil rights movement. During that year, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference mounted its anti-segregation campaign in Alabama; Commissioner "Bull" Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators; activists were attacked; riots flared; George Wallace blocked the doors of a public university to keep black students out; President Kennedy dispatched troops to Alabama and called for the passage of a civil rights bill; Medgar Evers was murdered; the then-largest human rights demonstration in U.S. history converged on Washington; Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic speech at …

The Difference A Justice May Make: Remarks At The Symposium For Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Suzanne Baer

Articles

First, I will briefly summarize the state of the art of equality law in Germany today. A distinct dimension of this story from a European Union member state is that we are not just theorizing postnational constitutionalism these days, but that we live it already, since law is not anymore isolated as national but needs to be seen in the context of transnational migration and multinational regimes. Second, I turn to a key feature and key challenge in and to equality law today. It is what I have called the triangle of fundamental rights, referring to the three most prominent …

Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger

Articles

For this Introduction, I undertake to look a bit more broadly at recent data. The best sources of demographic information about prisoners are the various surveys and censuses conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). While no BJS publication directly addresses the issue, and no BJS dataset allows its full analysis, it is possible to glean something from the most recent BJS prison census, the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities.