Law Commons^™

Policing Queer Sexuality, Ari Ezra Waldman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall. By Anna Lvovsky.

Lawyers For White People?, Jessie Allen

Articles

This article investigates an anomalous legal ethics rule, and in the process exposes how current equal protection doctrine distorts civil rights regulation. When in 2016 the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct finally adopted its first ever rule forbidding discrimination in the practice of law, the rule carried a strange exemption: it does not apply to lawyers’ acceptance or rejection of clients. The exemption for client selection seems wrong. It contradicts the common understanding that in the U.S. today businesses may not refuse service on discriminatory grounds. It sends a message that lawyers enjoy a professional prerogative to discriminate against …

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Baby Suffragettes: Girls In The Woman's Suffrage Movement Across The Atlantic, Mckenzi Christensen

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

Feminism And Democracy, Louis Edgar Esparza

Human Rights & Human Welfare

After work on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks walked onto a bus that was to take her home that night. She ended up on a trip to jail instead, for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. The event triggered resistance to bus segregation, the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the election of the then-unknown Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader. The success of the campaign is an integral battle in our historical retellings of the US African American Civil Rights Movement. Fewer recount the sexual harassment against black women by white …

Ua5/3 University Attorney - Committee File, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Unprocessed committee files created by the University Attorney. Committees include the Council on Higher Education Special Committee on Minority Affairs, Administrative Council and Teacher Admissions, Certification, and Student Teaching Committee. This record group is unprocessed and must be reviewed for potential restricted materials before access is granted. Please contact the University Archivist prior to your visit.

Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Since its inception in 1948, the state of Israel has based development plans on an agenda of nation-building that has systematically excluded Palestinian Arab citizens such as the indigenous Bedouin. Policies of relocation, resettlement, and restructuring have been imposed on the Bedouin, forcing them from their ancestral lands and lifestyle in the Naqab (or Negev, as it is called in Hebrew) desert of southern Israel. The rapid and involuntary transition from self-sufficient, semi-nomadic, pastoral life to sedentarization and modernization has resulted in dependency on a state that treats the Bedouin as minority outsiders through unjust social, political, and economic structures. …

Political Repression And Islam In Iran, Amy Kirk

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Signs with the slogan, ‘I am Neda’, flooded the streets of Tehran in the violent aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections and assassination of Neda Agha-Soltan. The internationally publicized video of Neda’s death became an iconic rallying point for the reformist opposition in Iran. Stringent clampdowns since the 1979 revolution have signified a sociopolitical change that has endured for three decades. President Khatami’s reform efforts of the late 1990s were stifled by Ahmadinejad’s election of 2005. Since Ahmadinejad’s appointment there has been little official tolerance for political and fundamental Islamic dissent, leading to serious human rights violations against the reformist …

Moving Beyond Divisive Discourse: Latin American Women In Politics, Ursula Miniszewski

Human Rights & Human Welfare

On June 25, 1993 the United Nations General Assembly held the World Conference on Human Rights, which adopted the Declaration and Programme of Action that states, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.” On September 18, 2008 The New York Times quoted Senator Cecilia López Montaño …

The Heart Of The Game: Putting Race And Educational Equity At The Center Of Title Ix, Deborah L. Brake, Verna L. Williams

Articles

This article examines how race and educational equity issues shape women's sports experiences, building upon the narrative of Darnellia Russell, a high school basketball player profiled in the documentary The Heart of the Game. Darnellia is a star player who, because of an unintended pregnancy, has to fight to play the game she loves.

This girl's story provides a unique and underutilized lens through which to examine gender and athletics, as well as evaluate the legal framework for gender equality in sport. In focusing on this narrative, we seek to give voice to black female athletes and to express their …

Perceiving Subtle Sexism: Mapping The Social-Psychological Forces And Legal Narratives That Obscure Gender Bias, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This essay seeks to explain the Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education case as an interpretation of discrimination that notably and correctly focuses on how institutions cause sex-based harm, rather than on whether officials within chosen institutions act with a discriminatory intent. In the process, I discuss what appears to be the implicit theory of discrimination underlying the Davis decision: that schools cause the discrimination by exacerbating the harm that results from sexual harassment by students. I then explore the significance of the deliberate indifference requirement in this context, concluding that the standard, for all its flaws, is distinct …

Title Ix As Pragmatic Feminism, Deborah Brake

Articles

This paper uses Title IX as a vehicle for exploring the potential benefits of pragmatism for feminist legal theory. Title IX is unusual in antidiscrimination law for its eclectic approach to theory, drawing from liberal feminism, substantive equality, antisubordination and different voice models of equality at various points in the law's approach to gender equality in sports. This paper argues that Title IX, as a pragmatic approach to theory, provides a promising example of how feminist legal theory can draw from pragmatism to navigate the double-bind and the backlash.

Following an introduction in Part I, Part II of this Article …

The Strange Career Of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation And The Transformation Of Anti-Discrimination Discourse, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the causes and consequences of a transformation in anti-discrimination discourse between 1970 and 1977 that shapes our constitutional landscape to this day. Fears of cross-racial intimacy leading to interracial marriage galvanized many white Southerners to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, some commentators, politicians, and ordinary citizens proposed a solution: segregate the newly integrated schools by sex. When court-ordered desegregation became a reality in the late 1960s, a smattering of southern school districts implemented sex separation plans. As late as 1969, no one saw sex-segregated schools …

Tumbling Towers As Turning Points: Will 9/11 Usher In A New Civil Rights Era For Gay Men And Lesbians In The United States?, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article examines the events of 9/11, and the potential resultant shifts in attitude, policies, and laws in the United States, through the lens of civil rights extended to gay and lesbian citizens. It seeks, but does not purport to definitively discover, the true meaning of the phrase "life will never be the same." It asks, but does not purport to fully answer, whether historians a century or two hence will look back on 9/11 as the turning point when the United States began to fulfill its promise of liberty to all people, or whether this date will be earmarked …

School Liability For Peer Sexual Harassment After Davis: Shifting From Intent To Causation In Discrimination Law, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This essay seeks to explain the Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education case as an interpretation of discrimination that notably and correctly focuses on how institutions cause sex-based harm, rather than on whether officials within chose institutions act with a discriminatory intent. In the process, I discuss what appears to be the implicit theory of discrimination underlying the Davis decision: that schools cause the discrimination by exacerbating the harm that results from sexual harassment by students. I then explore the significance of the deliberate indifference requirement in this context, concluding that the standard, for all its flaws, is distinct …