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Supreme Court of the United States

2010

History

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

"The Prejudice Of Caste": The Misreading Of Justice Harlan And The Ascendency Of Anticlassificaiton, Scott Grinsell Jan 2010

"The Prejudice Of Caste": The Misreading Of Justice Harlan And The Ascendency Of Anticlassificaiton, Scott Grinsell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article reconsiders the familiar reading of Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson as standing for the principle of constitutional colorblindness by examining the significance of Harlan's use of the metaphor "caste" in the opinion. By overlooking Harlan's invocation of "caste," it argues that conservative proponents of anticlassification have reclaimed the opinion for "colorblindness," and buried a powerful statement of the antisubordination principle that is at the heart of our equality law. The Article begins by examining the emergence of a reading of the opinion as articulating a view of equality law based in anticlassification. The Article then returns …


Past As Prologue: Old And New Feminisms, Martha Chamallas Jan 2010

Past As Prologue: Old And New Feminisms, Martha Chamallas

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Each "stage" of feminist legal theory-and each brand or strand of feminism- stays alive and is never completely replaced by newer approaches. When I first attempted to synthesize the field of Feminist Legal Theory for a treatise I was writing at the end of the twentieth century, I thought it would be useful to think chronologically and to analyze the major developments of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I crudely divided feminist legal theory into three stages roughly corresponding to the preceding decades: the equality stage of the 1970s, the difference stage of the 1980s, and the diversity stage of …


The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus Jan 2010

The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Supreme Court Justices frequently divide on questions of original meaning, and the divisions have a way of mapping what we might suspect are the Justices’ leanings about the merits of cases irrespective of originalist considerations. The same is true for law professors and other participants in constitutional discourse: people’s views of original constitutional meaning tend to align well with their (nonoriginalist) preferences for how present constitutional controversies should be resolved. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some people are better than others at suspending presentist considerations when examining historical materials, and some people are better than others at recognizing when …