Law Commons^™

Mine The Gap: Using Racial Disparities To Expose And Eradicate Racism, James S. Liebman, Kayla C. Butler, Ian Buksunski

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, lawyers and legal scholars have disagreed over how much resource redistribution to expect from federal courts and Congress in satisfaction of the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection. Of particular importance to this debate and to the nation given its kaleidoscopic history of inequality, is the question of racial redistribution of resources. A key dimension of that question is whether to accept the Supreme Court's limitation of equal protection to public actors' disparate treatment of members of different races or instead demand constitutional remedies for the racially disparate impact of public action.

For a substantial segment of the …

Fiscal Pressures And Discriminatory Policing: Evidence From Traffic Stops In Missouri, Allison P. Harris, Elliott Ash, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides evidence of racial variation in traffic enforcement responses to local government budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri from 2001 through 2012. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates; we also find an increase in traffic-stop arrest rates. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among White (rather than Black or Latino) drivers. The results are robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates and a variety of model specifications, including a regression discontinuity examining bare budget shortfalls. Considering potential mechanisms, we …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate.

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …