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Full-Text Articles in Law

Equally Insured? Lasting Insurance Industry Reform Came Only With A Rethinking Of Race, Mary L. Heen Jul 2010

Equally Insured? Lasting Insurance Industry Reform Came Only With A Rethinking Of Race, Mary L. Heen

Law Faculty Publications

Earlier this decade, some of America’s best-known life insurance companies quietly settled multimillion-dollar civil rights lawsuits challenging race-based life insurance rates and benefits. As a result, those companies closed a chapter of American economic history that began after the Civil War with the door-to-door marketing of small individual life insurance policies to poor workers, including former slaves, and their families. The closing of this chapter in history also marked the end of a form of Jim Crow race discrimination largely invisible to the American public.


Women And Subprime Lending: An Essay Advocating Self-Regulation Of The Mortgage Lending Industry,Symposium On Law As Transformative Agent: Thinking And Doing Law In New Categories, Carol N. Brown Jan 2010

Women And Subprime Lending: An Essay Advocating Self-Regulation Of The Mortgage Lending Industry,Symposium On Law As Transformative Agent: Thinking And Doing Law In New Categories, Carol N. Brown

Law Faculty Publications

The subsequent national mortgage foreclosure crisis that seemed almost 5 uncontrollable by 2007 ignited a mortgage-related financial crisis that affected the global market place. News media, business reports, government investigations, 6 regulatory inquiries, and citizen suits focused national attention on the housing crisis and the problems attending what soon came to be known as the “mortgage meltdown.” A dual mortgage market had emerged in which subprime lending 7 disproportionately affected minorities (particularly blacks and Hispanics), women, and the elderly.8 Evidence of the disparate impact felt by certain minority borrowers is abundant and the evidence of gender disparities in subprime lending …


Congress Needs To Repair The Court's Damage To § 1983, Ivan E. Bodensteiner Jan 2010

Congress Needs To Repair The Court's Damage To § 1983, Ivan E. Bodensteiner

Law Faculty Publications

Today it is not unusual for a § 1983 plaintiff to establish a violation of the U.S. Constitution and resulting injuries, yet be denied damages because of the Supreme Court's misinterpretation of the 1871 statute. This anomaly is the result of several defenses created by the Court, including absolute and qualified immunity, the rejection of respondeat superior liability for municipalities, and the expansion of sovereign immunity, based, in part, on a misinterpretation of the Eleventh Amendment. Several other rulings of the Court narrow the circumstances under which private parties are subject to § 1983 liability, refuse to exempt § 1983 …


In Loco Parentis In The Public Schools: Abused, Confused, And In Need Of Change, Susan P. Stuart Jan 2010

In Loco Parentis In The Public Schools: Abused, Confused, And In Need Of Change, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

In loco parentis is a common law doctrine that has been used to characterize the on-campus relationship between a school and its students, but its abuse has led to such absurd cases as Safford Unified School District No.1 v. Redding. Although waning in higher education, the doctrine is experiencing a resurgence in elementary and secondary schools. As originally conceived, the doctrine was used primarily to justify and defend student disciplinary actions: the school stood in the shoes of the parent and had authority to discipline, almost at will. The doctrine, however, never seemed to have a corollary in the …


Clear As Mud: How The Uncertain Precedential Status Of Unpublished Opinions Muddles Qualified Immunity Determinations, David R. Cleveland Jan 2010

Clear As Mud: How The Uncertain Precedential Status Of Unpublished Opinions Muddles Qualified Immunity Determinations, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Resurrecting The Promise Of Brown: Understanding And Remedying How The Supreme Court Reconstitutionalized Segregated Schools, Kimberly J. Robinson Jan 2010

Resurrecting The Promise Of Brown: Understanding And Remedying How The Supreme Court Reconstitutionalized Segregated Schools, Kimberly J. Robinson

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education held that separate educational facilities were "inherently unequal." After tolerating substantial delay and evasion of the requirements of Brown, the Court eventually required school districts to dismantle the dual systems by eliminating all traces of separate schools and creating integrated schools. In contrast to numerous scholars that have contended that many of the Court's later school desegregation decisions withdrew from or grew weary of school desegregation, this Article argues that the effect of many of the Court's leading school desegregation decisions was to reconstitutionalize segregated schools. Furthermore, the Court's …


Intent And Empirics: Race To The Subprime, Carol N. Brown Jan 2010

Intent And Empirics: Race To The Subprime, Carol N. Brown

Law Faculty Publications

The United States’ history of racially discriminatory banking, housing, and property policies created a community of black Americans accustomed to exploitative financial services and vulnerable to victimization by subprime lenders. My thesis is that black borrowers are experiencing a new iteration of intentional housing discrimination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; lenders identified a vulnerable 'emerging market' of black homeowners and borrowers and knowingly targeted them to receive subprime or predatory loan products when equally situated white borrowers were given superior, prime mortgage products. This Article explores how disparate lending practices coupled with banking deregulation undermined the Congressional push for …


Time To Bury The Shocks The Conscience Test, Rosalie Berger Levinson Jan 2010

Time To Bury The Shocks The Conscience Test, Rosalie Berger Levinson

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court has acknowledged that "the Due Process Clause, like its forebear in the Magna Carta, was 'intended to secure the individual from the arbitrary exercise of the powers of government'...to prevent governmental power from being 'used for purposes of oppression.'"1 Historically, Magna Carta was aimed a·t limiting the power of the king. Today, substantive due process is invoked to challenge arbitrary deprivations of life, liberty, and property by officials, such as police officers, jail guards, public-school educators, public employers, and members of zoning boards. However, the Supreme Court has emasculated its efficacy as a limitation on executive …