Law Commons^™

Gay And Lesbian Applicants To The Bar: Even Lord Devlin Could Not Defend Exclusion, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In 1957, the publication of a report to Parliament, the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the repeal of laws criminalizing private homosexual conduct between consenting adults, sparked an intensely debated controversy in political philosophy and jurisprudence. The issue: is society justified in criminalizing behavior which, although causing no secular harm, transgresses widely held moral values? The principal proponent of morals legislation was Lord Patrick Devlin, who responded to the Wolfenden recommendation with a paper disputing the report's premises--that criminal law had no proper business punishing private immorality.Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence H.L.A. Hart, a philosophical successor to the libertarianism of John Stuart …

Federalism, Preclearance, And The Rehnquist Court, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Lopez v. Monterey County is an odd decision. Justice O'Connor's majority opinion easily upholds the constitutionality of a broad construction of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in language reminiscent of the Warren Court. Acknowledging the "substantial 'federalism costs" resulting from the VRA's "federal intrusion into sensitive areas of state and local policymaking," Lopez recognizes that the Reconstruction Amendments "contemplate" this encroachment into realms "traditionally reserved to the States." Justice O'Connor affirms as constitutionally permissible the infringement that the section 5 preclearance process "by its nature" effects on state sovereignty, and applies section 5 broadly, holding the statute …

Re/Forming And Influencing Public Policy, Law And Religion: Missing From The Table, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

Taking a leap to be at a table from which Mexican American women have always been absent, and are still not invited, takes tremendous courage, knowing that much personal sacrifice will be required. This Essay addresses why Mexican American women have been absent from the tables of influence in the worlds of public policy, religion, and law, and how they can establish their presence as part of an anti-subordination agenda.

An Ounce Of Prevention Is A Poor Substitute For A Pound Of Cure: Confronting The Developing Jurisprudence Of Education And Prevention In Employment Discrimination Law, Susan Bisom-Rapp

Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges a widely shared conviction that has had a tremendous impact on employer practices and, most recently, on employment discrimination jurisprudence. More specifically, the piece interrogates the belief that employee education can prevent, or at least greatly curb, invidious employment discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and other civil rights statutes. This premise, broadly held and rarely questioned, has spawned a multi-billion dollar sexual harassment and diversity training industry staffed by consultants, attorneys, and human resource professionals, who offer programs aimed at litigation prevention. Yet, there is absolutely no empirical support for the premise …

Sexists, Misogynists And The Male-Dominated Workplace: Whether Prevailing Workplace Norms Should Discredit A Hostile Work Environment In Williams V. General Motors Corp., Maresa Torregrossa

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Asian American Voting Rights And Representation: A Perspective From The Northeast, Glenn D. Magpantay

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article presents a strategy for advancing Asian American voting rights and for ensuring that Asian Americans have a full and fair opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, as guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act, through an exploration of legal issues in the census, redistricting, and alternative voting systems. First, it discusses the importance of an accurate count of Asian Americans in the decennial census. Second, it explores legal strategies to achieve meaningful representation of Asian Americans through the redrawing of federal, state, and local voting district boundaries. Third, it reviews the merits and limitations of alternative voting …

'Appropriate' Means-Ends Constraints On Section 5 Powers, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

With the narrowing of Congress' Article I power to regulate interstate commerce and to authorize private suits against states, Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment provides Congress with an increasingly important alternative source of power to regulate and police state conduct. However, in City of Boerne v. Flores and subsequent cases, the Supreme Court has tightened the doctrinal test for prophylactic legislation based on Section Five. The Court has clarified Section Five's legitimate ends by holding that Congress may enforce Fourteenth Amendment rights only as they are defined by the federal judiciary, and the Court has constrained Section Five's permissible …

The Sex Discrimination Argument In Gay Rights Cases, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The argument that laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in fact discriminate on the basis of sex is not new. Advocates have been pressing this claim for almost thirty years. Simply put, the argument is that a statute that bars a sexual relationship between two women or two men discriminates on the basis of sex because either partner could have had the same relationship with a person of the opposite sex.

Title Vii And Religious Liberty, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids religious discrimination in employment, raises in microcosm some extremely thorny questions about religious liberty; questions more familiar to most of us in constitutional settings. In focusing on these questions in their Title VII context, I am more interested in fundamental conceptual issues than in the precise details of what that law should be taken to provide.

Among the questions are: What is discrimination because of religion? How should religion be "defined"? How far should employers accommodate the religious exercise of workers? Under the First Amendment, how much accommodation can the …

Tax Expenditures, Social Justice And Civil Rights: Expanding The Scope Of Civil Rights Laws To Apply To Tax-Exempt Charities, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In recent years, courts have decided a number of cases in which private organizations discriminated against people based solely on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other immutable traits. For example, in 2000, the Boy Scouts of America revoked a New Jersey man's membership in the Boy Scouts because he was gay. New Jersey's supreme court held that the Boy Scouts' action violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination law. Notwithstanding the state court's holding, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the First Amendment prevented any court from forcing the Boy Scouts to keep a gay man as a member of its …

Feminism At The Millennium, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Sexism of all kinds – subtle and blatant, criminal and legal, commercial and private – is the topic of the three books under review. The books initially sort themselves out by discipline: Everyday Sexism and Subtle Sexism are anthologies whose editors and contributors are primarily sociologists; Speaking of Sex is written by a law professor and offers a more focused argument about the persistence of gender inequalities. Distinctions in authorship aside, the three books pose a pair of similar and painfully familiar questions: Why is so much still organized to the disadvantage of women, and what can (feminist) academics contribute …

Consumer Discrimination: The Limitations Of Federal Civil Rights Protection, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Section 51 Actions Against Private Racial Profiling, Peter Zablotsky, Sa'id Vakili

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In July of 1998 something rather mundane happened: Lucas Rosa walked into Park West Bank in Holyoke, Massachusetts and asked for a loan application. Since it was a warm summer day, and because she wanted to look credit-worthy, Rosa wore a blousey top over stockings. Suddenly, the mundane transformed into the exceptional: When asked for some identification, Rosa was told that no application would be forthcoming until and unless she went home, changed her clothes and returned attired in more traditionally masculine/male clothing. Rosa, a biological male who identifies herself as female was, it seems, denied a loan application on …

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Now Legal Defense And Education Fund And Equal Rights Advocates In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant And In Support Of Reversal, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund ("NOW LDEF") is a leading national non-profit civil rights organization that performs abroad range of legal and educational services in support of efforts to eliminate sex-based discrimination" and secure equal rights. NOW LDEF was founded in 1970 by leaders of the National Organization for Women as a separate organization. NOW LDEF has appeared as amicus in numerous cases involving sex stereotyping as a form of sex discrimination, including Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, and Fisher v. Vassar College.

Equal Rights Advocates ("ERA") is one of the oldest public interest law firms specializing in …

Reflections On Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday's New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, "The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning …

Identity Crisis: Intersectionality, Multidimensionality, And The Development Of An Adequate Theory Of Subordination, Darren Hutchinson

Darren L Hutchinson

No abstract provided.

Effective Advocacy Strategies For Girls: Promoting Justice In An Unjust System, Francine Sherman

Francine T. Sherman

No abstract provided.

Contributor, Francine Sherman

Francine T. Sherman

No abstract provided.

Partiality, Julie Nice

Julie A. Nice

This essay is the introduction for a Symposium on Class in LatCrit: Theory and Praxis in a World of Economic Inequality. Professor Nice describes the symposium papers (by Kendal Broad, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Athena Mutua, and Laura Padilla) as applying various critical tools to examine how scholars study poverty and especially how the construct of “the feminization of poverty” isolates gender while leaving out other experiences of race, immigration status, sexual orientation, parental status, age, ability, and class. While she argues that the feminization of poverty construct itself emerged as a critique of how gender had been ignored in the …

Co-Founder, Artistic Noise, Inc., Francine Sherman

Francine T. Sherman

No abstract provided.

Keeping Feminism In Its Place: Sex Segregation And The Domestication Of Female Academics, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The thesis of Keeping Feminism in Its Place is that women are being "domesticated" in the legal academy. This occurs in two ways, one theoretical and one very practical: denigration of feminism on the theoretical level and sex segregation of men and women on the experiential level intertwine to disadvantage women in academia in complex and subtle ways.

The article examines occupational sex segregation and role differentiation between male and female law professors, demonstrating statistically that in legal academia, women are congregated in lower-ranking, lower-paying, lower-prestige positions. It also traces how segregation by sex persists in substantive course teaching assignments. …

Comparative Institutional Analysis In Cyberspace: The Case Of Intermediary Liability For Defamation, Susan Freiwald

Susan Freiwald

Almost every day brings reports that Congress is considering new cyberspace-targeted laws and the courts are deciding novel cyberspace legal questions. These developments lend urgency to the question of whether a particular cyberspace legal change should come through operation of new statutes, judicial decisions, or the free market. If we can develop sophisticated analytical methods to evaluate institutional competence in cyberspace, we can vastly improve the development of cyberspace law and public policy.

Comparative Institutional Analysis in Cyberspace: The Case of Intermediary Liability for Defamation promotes just such an approach. By describing and extending a recently proposed model of comparative …

Behind The Glare Of The Spotlight: Grassroots Efforts To Integrate Facilities In Jacksonville, Florida 1958-1963, Debbie Owens

Debbie Owens