Law Commons^™

Does Grutter Offer Courts An Opportunity To Consider Race In Jury Selection And Decisions Related To Promoting Fairness In The Deliberation Process?, Phoebe A. Haddon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers whether the two recent Supreme Court affirmative action cases, the Michigan law school and undergraduate cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, provide support for opening the process of jury selection and deliberation to more fully include people of color and other under-represented groups and their experiences. I shall argue that these recent affirmative action cases can provide some support for ensuring better representation of people of color in the jury selection process, challenging the pre-textual use of peremptories and opening opportunities to talk about race during trials. The Court's reasoning in Grutter that diversity is …

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …

Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.