Law Commons^™

Matter Of A-B-, Lgbtq Asylum Claims, And The Rule Of Law In The U.S. Asylum System, Nora Snyder

Northwestern University Law Review

On June 11, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions released his decision in a case called Matter of A‑B‑, purporting to eliminate domestic violence and gang violence as grounds for asylum. The decision also cast doubt on the continued viability of asylum claims predicated on non-state actor violence, which alarmed LGBTQ advocates, whose asylum claims often involve non-state actor persecutors. In making this change, Sessions used a previously rarely used feature of the asylum system, the Attorney General’s self-certification power. This Note analyzes the potential impact of Matter of A‑B‑ on LGBTQ asylum seekers. Based on the text of the …

Framing Trans Rights, Marie-Amélie George

Northwestern University Law Review

In the wake of marriage equality, opponents of LGBT rights refocused their attention, making transgender rights their main target. To persuade voters to maintain gender identity antidiscrimination protections, LGBT rights campaigns presented trans identity in a specific, but limited, way. These campaigns emphasized gender-conforming transgender individuals—those who adhere to male and female stereotypes—and thereby implicitly reinforced the gender binary. Although LGBT advocates have largely succeeded in their efforts to preserve LGBT rights, their messaging may undermine the movement’s broader litigation strategy and subject nonbinary members of the transgender community to greater discrimination and persecution.

The trans rights framing choices thus …

The Transgender Military Ban: Preservation Of Discrimination Through Transformation, Michele Goodwin, Erwin Chemerinsky

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay contends that the Trump Administration’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military is based on prejudice and bias, lacking any legitimate justification. As such, the transgender military ban cannot be justified on legal grounds. Nor can it be justified based on health and safety. Engaging a robust empirical record, the authors show that the ban cannot be justified based on matters of efficiency, preparedness, or combat readiness—arguments used by the Trump Administration to justify the ban. Despite transgender individuals serving openly in the military in recent years, the Trump Administration has not been able to offer in …

Eddie Murphy And The Dangers Of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination, Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Northwestern University Law Review

The model of discrimination animating some of the most common approaches to detecting discrimination in both law and social science—the counterfactual causal model—is wrong. In that model, racial discrimination is detected by measuring the “treatment effect of race,” where the treatment is conceptualized as manipulating the raced status of otherwise identical units (e.g., a person, a neighborhood, a school). Most objections to talking about race as a cause in the counterfactual model have been raised in terms of manipulability. If we cannot manipulate a person’s race at the moment of a police stop, traffic encounter, or prosecutorial charging decision, then …