Law Commons^™

Discrimination In Customer Segmentation Marketing Practices, Jude A. Thomas

Jude A Thomas

Customer segmentation is a powerful analytical marketing practice that is employed by a wide range of businesses to segregate customers with similar characteristics into subgroups in order to inform operational business processes. Such practices allow firms to better allocate their resources in order to form more profitable customer relationships, but they also have the capacity to lead to unfair discriminatory impact upon customer groups. Current legislation is largely unprotective of customers so positioned, but recent trends in the insurance and lending industries suggest that a broader application of anti-discrimination laws could foretell a future of greater restrictions on the implementation …

Reclaiming Equality To Reframe Indigent Defense Reform, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Equal access to resources is fundamental to meaningful legal representation, yet for decades, equality arguments have been ignored in litigating indigent defense reform. At a time when underfunded indigent defense systems across the country are failing to provide indigent defendants with adequate representation, the question of resources is even more critical. Traditionally, advocates seeking indigent defense reform have relied on Sixth Amendment arguments to protect the rights of indigents in this context; however, the Sixth Amendment approach suffers from a number of shortcomings that have made it a poor tool for systemic reform, including its exclusive focus on attorney performance …

The Constitutionality Of Government Fees As Applied To The Poor, Henry Rose

Henry Rose

The Constitutionality of Government Fees as Applied to the Poor

Abstract

The United States Supreme Court has considered on many occasions the constitutionality of government fees that indigent persons were unable to pay. As a result of their inability to pay, these indigent persons were initially denied access to legal process, (in both the civil and criminal context), access to electoral processes and access to general government services. The most recent decision of the Supreme Court involving this issue, M.L.B. v. S.L.J., 519 U.S. 102 (1996), has resulted in a lack of clarity as to the constitutional principles that the …

The Poor As A Suspect Class Under The Equal Protection Clause: An Open Constitutional Question, Henry Rose

Henry Rose

(Abstract) The Poor as a Suspect Class Under the Equal Protection Clause: An Open Constitutional Question Both judges and legal scholars assert that the United States Supreme Court has held that the poor are neither a quasi-suspect nor a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. They further assert that this issue was decided by the Supreme Court in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973). It is the thesis of this article that the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether the poor are a quasi-suspect …