Law Commons^™

A Guide To Knowing Your Rights With The Police And Getting Out Of Jail: Booklet 2, Thomas Harvey, Michael-John Voss, John Mcannar

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ArchCity Defenders created a self-advocating guide for people to use if they have an encounter with the police, jail or the courts.

A Guide To Knowing Your Rights With The Police And Getting Out Of Jail: Booklet 1, Thomas Harvey, Michael-John Voss, John Mcannar

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ArchCity Defenders created a self-advocating guide for people to use if they have an encounter with the police, jail or the courts.

Close The Workhouse: A Plan To Close The Workhouse & Promote A New Vision For St. Louis, Close The Workhouse Campaign [In Collaboration With], Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Action St. Louis, Bail Project

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The City of St. Louis condemns hundreds of mostly poor and Black people to suffer in unspeakably hellish and inhumane conditions at the "Workhouse," officially known as the Medium Security Institution. Over 95% of people at the Workhouse are awaiting trial and remain incarcerated due to their inability to afford unusually high and unconstitutional cash bonds. They face horrific conditions in the jail, including extreme heat and cold, abysmal medical care, rats and cockroach infestations, and mold. The City of St. Louis spends over $16 million every year operating this facility with little public benefit. The arrest-and-incarcerate approach to public …

Find Out What It Means To Me: The Politics Of Respect And Dignity In Sexual Orientation Anti-Discrimination, Jeremiah A. Ho

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This accompanying article considers the state of LGBTQ equality after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Specifically, by examining this upsurge of social visibility for same-sex couples as both acceptance of sexual minorities and cultural assimilation, the article finds that the marriage cases at the Supreme Court — Obergefell and U.S. v. Windsor — shifted the framing of gay rights from the politics of respect that appeared more than a decade ago in Lawrence v. Texas toward a politics of respectability. The article traces this regression in Justice Kennedy’s own definition of dignity from Lawrence, where …

The Injustice Of Inclusion And Fair Opportunity: Exploiting Children In Medical Research For The Benefit Of An Unworthy Society, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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The history of pediatric medical research has been characterized as a history of child abuse. Usually, the debate regarding the use of children in medical research has centered on questions of Autonomy (informed consent) and Beneficence (the best interest of the child based on a benefit risk analysis). The debate has rarely focused on the question of which children should participate in medical research by discussing the legal principle of Justice (prohibits use of vulnerable populations for medical research who are already overly burdened for medical research unrelated to health issues affecting them and requires that populations who participate in …

A Horrible Fascination: Segregation, Obscenity, & The Cultural Contingency Of Rights, Anders Walker

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Building on current interest in the regulation of child pornography, this article goes back to the 1950s, recovering a lost history of how southern segregationists used the battle against obscenity to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Itself focused on the psychological development of children, Brown sparked a discursive backlash in the South focused on claims that the races possessed different cultures and that white children would be harmed joined a larger, regional campaign, a constitutional guerilla war mounted by moderates and extremists alike that swept onto cultural, First Amendment terrain even as the frontal …

Litigation, Integration, And Transformation: Using Medicaid To Address Racial Inequities In Health Care, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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Using a public health policy perspective, this article examines the persistence of racial inequities in nursing homes and prescribes a solution to address these inequities. I use empirical data to prove the persistence of racial inequities in health care, analyze the government policies that allow racial inequities to continue, and provide a solution of regulatory integration. Specifically, I propose that civil rights enforcement be integrated with the nursing home enforcement system, which has been aggressively enforced and monitored. There are many strategies that may lead to the adoption of this system. One such strategy is using the Medicaid Act to …

'Neutral Principles': Herbert Wechsler, Legal Process, And Civil Rights, 1934-1964, Anders Walker

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This paper recovers Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler's constitutional involvement in the long civil rights movement. Derided for criticizing Brown v. Board of Education in 1959, Wechsler first became involved in civil rights litigation in the 1930s, continued to be interested in civil rights issues in the 1940s, and argued one of the most important civil rights cases to come before the Supreme Court in the 1960s. His critique of Brown, this article maintains, derived not from a disinterest in the black struggle but from a larger conviction that racial reform should be process rather than rights-based. By recovering Wechsler's …

From Ballots To Bullets: District Of Columbia V. Heller And The New Civil Rights, Anders Walker

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This article posits that the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment ruling District of Columbia v. Heller is a victory for civil rights, but not in the sense that most activists from the 1960s would recognize. Rather than a product of mid-century legal liberalism, Heller marks the culmination of almost forty years of coalition-based popular constitutionalism aimed at transforming the individual right to bear arms and the common law right to "employ deadly force in self-defense" into new civil rights. The implications of this are potentially great. By declaring the right to use deadly force in self-defense an "essential" right, the …

The Violent Bear It Away: Emmett Till & The Modernization Of Law Enforcement In Mississippi, Anders Walker

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Few racially motivated crimes have left a more lasting imprint on American memory than the death of Emmett Till. Yet, even as Till's murder in Mississippi in 1955 has come to be remembered as a catalyst for the civil rights movement, it contributed to something else as well. Precisely because it came on the heels of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Till's death convinced Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman that certain aspects of the state's handling of racial matters had to change. Afraid that popular outrage over racial violence might encourage federal intervention in …

"Neutral" Principles: Rethinking The Legal History Of Civil Rights, 1934-1964, Anders Walker

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This paper recovers Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler's constitutional involvement in the long civilrights movement. Derided for criticizing Brown v. Board of Education in 1959, Wechsler first became involved in civil rights litigation in the 1930s, continued to be interested in civil rights issues in the 1940s, and argued one of the most important civil rights cases to come before the Supreme Court in the 1960s. His critique of Brown, this article maintains, derived not from a disinterest in the black struggle but from a larger conviction that racial reform should be process rather than rights-based. By recovering Wechsler's approach, …

The Truth Is Out There: Revamping Federal Antidiscrimination Enforcement For The Twenty-First Century, Marcia L. Mccormick

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Employment discrimination laws in the United States have not created full equality in the workplace, although that was their goal. Real change requires greater accountability for those who make employment decisions and greater transparency to bolster that accountability. To provide that transparency and accountability, we need greater federal involvement in enforcement and a mechanism to publicize the state of the nation's workplaces. To accomplish this, I propose taking private sector employment discrimination disputes away from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission entirely, and starting with a new agency. The current model, with the EEOC writing compliance guidelines, encouraging mediation, and acting …

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

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This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

The Politics Of Infertility: Recognizing Coverage Exclusions As Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

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Infertility affects approximately ten percent of the reproductive-age population in the United States, and strikes people of every race, ethnicity and socio-economic level. It is recognized by the medical community as a disease, one with devastating physical, psychological, and financial effects.

In 1998, the Supreme Court held in Bragdon v. Abbott that reproduction is a major life activity within the meaning of the ADA. Many lawyers, activists and scholars thought that coverage for infertility treatment would follow soon after. In fact, in 2003 in the first major case applying Bragdon to health benefits, Saks v. Franklin Covey, the Second Circuit …

Federalism Re-Constructed: The Eleventh Amendment's Illogical Impact On Congress' Power, Marcia L. Mccormick

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The Constitution is designed to protect individual liberty and equality by diffusing power among the three branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, and by providing a minimum level of protection for individual rights. Yet, the Supreme Court seems to think that federalism is about protecting states as states rather than balancing governmental power to protect individuals. In the name of federalism, the Supreme Court has been paring away at Congress' power to enact civil rights legislation. In doing so, it has transformed the Fourteenth Amendment into a vehicle for protecting states rights rather than …