Law Commons^™

Do Public Accommodations Laws Compel “What Shall Be Orthodox”?: The Role Of Barnette In 303 Creative Llc V. Eleni, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s embrace, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, of a First Amendment objection to state public accommodations laws that the Court avoided in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission: such laws compel governmental orthodoxy. These objections invoke West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette’s celebrated language: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” They also …

Roberts's Revisions: A Narratological Reading Of The Affirmative Action Cases, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

In a seminal article published nearly twenty years ago in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Professor Peter Brooks posed a critical yet underexplored question: "Does the [flaw [n]eed a [n]arratology?"⁵ In essence, he asked whether law as a field should have a framework for deconstructing and understanding how and why a legal opinion, including the events that the opinion is centered on, has been crafted and presented in a particular way.⁶ After highlighting that "how a story is told can make a difference in legal outcomes," Brooks encouraged legal actors to "talk narrative talk" …

The Problem Is The Court, Not The Constitution, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

“But first, we must believe.” So concludes The Antiracist Constitution, where Brandon Hasbrouck confronts an uneasy question: In the quest for racial justice, is the Constitution friend or foe? Even the casual observer knows that constitutional law is no friend to racial justice. In the nineteenth century, Plessy v. Ferguson blessed Jim Crow. In the twentieth century, Washington v. Davis insulated practices that reproduce Jim Crow. Now in the twenty-first century, pending affirmative action litigation invites the Supreme Court to outlaw efforts to remedy Jim Crow.

“Do Not Ever Refer To My Lord Jesus Christ With Pronouns”: Considering Controversies Over Religiously Motivated Discrimination On The Basis Of Gender Identity, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

In the by-now familiar framing “religious freedom versus LGBT+ rights,” perhaps the most visible conflicts today in the United States, and elsewhere, concern the “T”—transgender or gender identity rights. This issue of the Journal of Law and Religion includes a conversation in print between Patrick Parkinson, Laura Portuondo and Claudia Haupt, and Shannon Gilreath on this timely topic, and their contrasting perspectives mirror dimensions of the larger public controversies. Although tweets like those quoted above (by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Lavern Spicer) asserting that neither the Bible nor Jesus had pronouns sparked both factual corrections and comical retorts, ³ the …

Two Approaches To Equality, With Implications For Grutter, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The question “what is equality?”, applied to the distribution of resources across races, suggests the following answer: when there appears to be no need for a policy that focuses on improving the welfare of one race relative to another. There is another way to approach the same question: equality is when traditionally-recognized paths to advancement do not give preference to or disadvantage an individual because of his race. Notice the difference here is between end-state and process-based notions of equality, a distinction Nozick emphasized in his examination of justice in distribution. Nozick rejected end-state theories of justice in distribution. I …

Un-Erasing Race In A Medical-Legal Partnership: Antiracist Health Justice Advocacy By Design, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, Peggy Maisel, Kelley Saia

Faculty Scholarship

This Article covers a potential response to a Massachusetts state law which has been interpreted to require health care providers and birthing hospitals to report to state authorities any infant born to a person taking medication of opioid use disorder. While the statute mandates reports where a professional has "reasonable cause to believe that a child is suffering physical or emotional injury" as a result of substance dependence at birth, the Article highlights that many institutions report all infants born to persons with substance abuse disorders, regardless of risk of harm, for fear of penalty for failure to report. As …

Ambivalent Advocates: Why Elite Universities Compromised The Case For Affirmative Action, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

“The end of affirmative action.” The headline is near. When it arrives, scholars will explain that a controversial set of policies could not withstand unfriendly doctrine and less friendly Justices. This story is not wrong. But it is incomplete. Critically, this account masks an underappreciated source of affirmative action’s enduring instability: elite universities, affirmative action’s formal champions, have always been ambivalent advocates.

Elite universities are uniquely positioned to shape legal and lay opinions about affirmative action. They are formal defendants in affirmative action litigation and objects of public obsession. And yet, schools like Harvard and the University of North Carolina—embroiled …

Colorblind Capture, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

We are facing two converging waves of racial retrenchment. The first, which arose following the Civil Rights Movement, is nearing a legal milestone. This term or the next, the Supreme Court will prohibit affirmative action in higher education. When it does, the Court will cement decades of conservative jurisprudence that has systematically eroded the right to remedy racial inequality.

The second wave is more recent but no less significant. Following 2020’s global uprising for racial justice, rightwing forces launched a coordinated assault on antiracism itself. The campaign has enjoyed early success. As one measure, GOP officials have passed, proposed or …

The Crt Of Black Lives Matter, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Critical Race Theory ("CR T"), or at least its principles, stands at the core of most prominent social movements of today-from the resurgence of the #MeToo Movement, which was founded by a Black woman, Tarana Burke, to the Black Lives Matter Movement, which was founded by three Black women: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors. In fact, Critical Race Theorists have long defined CRT itself as a movement, one that has not only provided theoretical interventions regarding the relationship between race, racism, power, and the law, but that has also encouraged and, in fact, inspired and guided social movements. …

Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District …

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

Pov: Why The Crown Act Is Needed, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

Imagine, for one minute, that we live in an alternate universe where employer and school grooming policies that ban “unprofessional” or “faddish” hairstyles are routinely employed as a reason for firing, or refusing to hire, individuals with naturally straight hair. The normative standard for hair in this alternate universe is tightly coiled, curly hair—the kind of hair texture that actors like Denzel Washington or Issa Rae are born with, hair texture that is best suited for natural and protective hairstyles like locs, twists, braids, and Bantu knots.

Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado

Faculty Scholarship

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States—a unanimous opinion in which the Court effectively constitutionalized racial profiling. Despite its enduring consequences, Whren remains good law today. This Article rewrites the opinion. We do so, in part, to demonstrate how one might incorporate racial justice concerns into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, a body of law that has long elided and marginalized the racialized dimensions of policing. A separate aim is to reveal the “false necessity” of the Whren outcome. The fact that Whren was unanimous, and that even progressive Justices signed on, might lead one to conclude that …

Reclaiming Equality: How Regressive Laws Can Advance Progressive Ends, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Since the fall of 2020, right-wing forces have targeted Critical Race Theory ("CR T') through a sustained disinformation campaign. This offensive has deployed anti-CRT rhetoric to justify a host of "Backlash Bills" designed to chill conversations about race and racism in the classroom. Concerned stakeholders have assailed these laws as morally bankrupt and legally suspect. These responses are natural and appropriate. But challenging a bill's moral or legal mooring is insufficient to counter a primary purpose of this legislative onslaught: to further erode, within our public discourse and collective consciousness, the ability to distinguish between racism and antiracism. To meet …

An Institute Of One's Own: Polly Bunting's "Messy Experiment" Of Helping Women Navigate Work-Family Conflict, Linda C. Mcclain

Shorter Faculty Works

Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2021).

In 1960, Mary (“Polly”) Ingraham Bunting, newly-appointed President of Radcliffe College, wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine to encourage applications to the new Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. In the essay, Bunting connected the Institute’s goal of ending the “waste of highly talented, educated womanpower” to helping women as well as to better realizing America’s “heritage” and “aspirations.” The Institute would help “intellectually displaced women”—mothers whose homemaking and childcare responsibilities had interrupted their careers—get back on track through a financial stipend …

Civil Rights Catch 22s, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

The tax law's race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.' This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.² Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.

The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax …

Obergefell, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Fulton, And Public-Private Partnerships: Unleashing V. Harnessing 'Armies Of Compassion' 2.0?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Fulton v. City of Philadelphia presented a by-now familiar constitutional claim: recognizing civil marriage equality—the right of persons to marry regardless of gender—inevitably and sharply conflicts with the religious liberty of persons and religious institutions who sincerely believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. While the Supreme Court’s 9-0 unanimous judgment in favor of Catholic Social Services (CSS) surprised Court-watchers, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion did not signal consensus on the Court over how best to resolve the evident conflicts raised by the contract between CSS and the City of Philadelphia. This article argues that it …

Classrooms Into Courtrooms, Naomi M. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

The federal Department of Education’s (DOE) 2020 Title IX Rule fundamentally transformed the relationship between postsecondary schools (schools) and students. While courts have long warned against turning classrooms into courtrooms, the 2020 Rule nonetheless imposed a mandatory quasi-criminal courtroom procedure for Title IX sexual harassment investigatory proceedings in schools. This transformation is a reflection of the larger trend of importing criminal law norms and due process protections into Title IX school proceedings. It is especially regressive at a time where calls for long-overdue criminal justice reform are reaching a boiling point across the nation. Its effects are especially troubling because …

Title 42, Asylum, And Politicising Public Health, Michael Ulrich, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

President Biden has continued the controversial immigration policy of the Trump era known as Title 42, which has caused harm and suffering to scores of asylum seekers under the guise of public health.1 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the policy in March 2020 with the stated purpose of limiting the spread of the coronavirus into the U.S.; though, CDC and public health officials have admitted this policy has no scientific basis and there is no evidence it has protected the public.2,3 Instead, the impetus behind the policy appears to be a desire to keep out or …

"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment …

The Expressive Fourth Amendment, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

After the eight-minute and forty-six second video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, cities across the United States erupted in mass protests with people outraged by the death of yet another Black person at the hands of police. The streets were flooded for months with activists and community members of all races marching, screaming, and demonstrating against police brutality and for racial justice. Police—like warriors against enemy forces—confronted overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with militarized violence and force. Ultimately, racial justice protesters and members of the media brought lawsuits under section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act in the district courts of …

Bigotry, Prophecy, Religion, And The Race Analogy In Marriage And Civil Rights Battles: Responding To Commentaries On Who's The Bigot?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most rewarding parts of writing a book is that it opens the door for constructive conversation with thoughtful and perceptive readers like the scholars who generously contributed to this book symposium. Their various essays touch on and offer powerful insights about the core concerns that I had when I wrote Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. They offer thoughtful empirical and normative observations and surface useful questions about important future investigations. Were I able to write a next chapter—or a sequel—all these commentaries would shape its content. As it is, I …

A Prelude To A Critical Race Perspective On Civil Procedure, Portia Pedro

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I examine the lack of scholarly attention given to the role of civil procedure in racial subordination. I posit that a dearth of critical thought interrogating the connections between procedure and the subjugation of marginalized peoples might be due to the limited experiences of procedural scholars; a misconception that procedural rules are a technical, objective, neutral area; and avoidance of discussion of race or other aspects of identity unless there is a case, material, or scholarly topic that meets an unreasonably high standard. I emphasize the importance of a critical race analysis of civil procedure.

(Re)Framing Race In Civil Rights Lawyering, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

A review of Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Press, 2019). The Review proceeds in four parts. Part I parses Gates’s analysis of the rise of white supremacist ideology and the accompanying concept of the “Old Negro” during the Redemption era and the countervailing emergence of the concept of a “New Negro” culminating in the Harlem Renaissance. Part II examines the lawyering process as a rhetorical site for constructing racialized narratives and racially subordinating visions of client, group, and community identity through acts of representing, prosecuting, and defending people of …

The Trauma Of Awakening To Racism: Did The Tragic Killing Of George Floyd Result In Cultural Trauma For Whites?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

The act of witnessing the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old, African-American father, brother, partner, and son, at the hands of the police caused many white individuals to experience an epiphany about racism, specifically structural racism, in the United States. Following the horrific killing of George Floyd, many white people began to shift their thinking about the existence and prevalence of racialized police brutality, reconsidering the manner in which they had always viewed the world around them. Indeed, many white individuals began to recognize and acknowledge the varied ways in which whiteness worked to privilege them in our society, even …

The Color Line: A Review And Reflection For Antiracist Scholars, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

In The Color Line: A Short Introduction, David Lyons provides a valuable service to students and academics in law, social sciences, and humanities by providing a concise history of the development and maintenance of race and racial order through law, policy, and discrimination in the United States. Lyons effectively outlines how race and racism were developed through these mechanisms in an effort to facilitate and maintain white supremacy.

Bigotry, Civility, And Reinvigorating Civic Education: Government's Formative Task Amidst Polarization, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

In the U.S. and around the globe, concerns over a decline in civility and tolerance and a surge in lethal extremist violence motivated by hatred of religious and racial groups make condemning—and preventing—hatred and bigotry seem urgent. What meaning can the ideal of e pluribus unum (“out of many one”) have in this fraught and polarized environment? Within the U.S., a long line of jurists, politicians, and educators have invoked civic education in public schools as vital to preserving constitutional democracy and a healthy pluralism. How can schools carry out such a civic role in times of democratic discord and …

Experimental Meets Intersectional: Visionary Black Feminist Pragmatism And Practicing Constitutional Democracy, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

That pragmatism can do-and already is doing-real work to repair and improve constitutional democracy in the United States is a conviction voiced in the academy, in social movements, and in social media. But what does pragmatism mean, as used in these contexts? Sometimes, pragmatism seems to connote simply being practical (rather than idealistic) and focusing on results. But sometimes, commentators are saying more: pragmatism as a distinctive political philosophy has the power to fuel meaningful democratic change. This Article focuses on the creative and productive melding of classical American pragmatism (as exemplified by John Dewey and others) with feminism. In …

A Proper Burial, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is an invited response to Professor Mark Killenbeck's article, "Sober Second Thoughts? Korematsu Reconsidered." In his contrarian piece, Killenbeck argues that Korematsu was defensible, albeit on narrow grounds: it advanced the development of strict scrutiny. He goes on to argue that comparisons between the internment case and the Supreme Court's Muslim travel ban case are overwrought and that the latter case, too, is defensible. I'm not convinced. First, to say that a ruling is defensible is not saying much; far better for critiques to be tethered to sterner standards. Second, after all these years, Korematsu remains a poorly reasoned …