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Full-Text Articles in Law

Commentary On Marriage Grants: Article Iii & Same-Sex Marriage, Neal Devins, Tara Leigh Grove Dec 2012

Commentary On Marriage Grants: Article Iii & Same-Sex Marriage, Neal Devins, Tara Leigh Grove

Popular Media

No abstract provided.


Shaping California's Prisons: How The Alternative Custody Program, Designed To Remedy The State's Eighth Amendment Violations In The Prison System, Encroaches On Equal Protection, Emilie A. Whitehurst Nov 2012

Shaping California's Prisons: How The Alternative Custody Program, Designed To Remedy The State's Eighth Amendment Violations In The Prison System, Encroaches On Equal Protection, Emilie A. Whitehurst

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.


The Equal Protection Implications Of Government's Hateful Speech, Helen Norton Nov 2012

The Equal Protection Implications Of Government's Hateful Speech, Helen Norton

William & Mary Law Review

Under what circumstances should we understand government’s racist or otherwise hateful speech to violate the Equal Protection Clause? Government speech that communicates hostility or animus on the basis of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or other class status can facilitate private parties’ discriminatory behavior, deter its targets from certain important opportunities or activities, and communicate a message of exclusion and second-class status. Contemporary equal protection doctrine, however, does not yet fully address the harms that such government expression potentially poses. The recent emergence of the Court’s government speech doctrine—which to date has emphasized the value of government expression without …


Split-Recovery: A Constitutional Answer To The Punitive Damage Dilemma, Clay R. Stevens Nov 2012

Split-Recovery: A Constitutional Answer To The Punitive Damage Dilemma, Clay R. Stevens

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.


Unconstitutional Animus, Susannah W. Pollvogt Nov 2012

Unconstitutional Animus, Susannah W. Pollvogt

Susannah W Pollvogt

It is well established that animus can never constitute a legitimate state interest for purposes of equal protection analysis. But neither precedent nor scholarship has stated conclusively what exactly animus is, or what counts as evidence of animus in any given case. The United States Supreme Court has explicitly addressed the question of animus only a handful of times, and these cases do not appear to be particularly congruent with one another, at least on the surface. Further, while scholars have discussed animus in terms of moral philosophy, no one has attempted to articulate a unified theory of animus as …


Unconstitutional Animus, Susannah W. Pollvogt Nov 2012

Unconstitutional Animus, Susannah W. Pollvogt

Fordham Law Review

It is well established that animus can never constitute a legitimate state interest for purposes of equal protection analysis. But neither precedent nor scholarship has stated conclusively how animus is properly defined, what counts as evidence of animus in any given case, or the precise doctrinal significance of a finding of animus. The U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly addressed the question of animus only a handful of times, and these cases do not appear to be particularly congruent with one another, at least on the surface. Further, while a number of scholars have discussed animus in terms of moral philosophy, …


Political Question Or Judicial Query: An Examination Of The Modern Doctrine And Its Inapplicability To Human Rights Mass Tort Litigation, Nancy S. Williams Oct 2012

Political Question Or Judicial Query: An Examination Of The Modern Doctrine And Its Inapplicability To Human Rights Mass Tort Litigation, Nancy S. Williams

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.


Originalism And The Other Desegregation Decision, Ryan C. Williams Oct 2012

Originalism And The Other Desegregation Decision, Ryan C. Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

Critics of originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation often focus on the “intolerable” results that originalism would purportedly require. Although originalists have disputed many such claims, one contention that they have been famously unable to answer satisfactorily is the claim that their theory is incapable of justifying the Supreme Court’s famous 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe. Decided the same day as Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling is the case that is most closely associated with the Supreme Court’s so-called “reverse incorporation” doctrine, which interprets the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment as if it effectively "incorporates" the Fourteenth …


Race, Law And Justice: The Rehnquist Court And The American Dilemma , Paul Butler, Richard D. Kahlenberg, Roger Pilon, Robert S. Chang, David Kairys, Jamin B. Raskin, Charles J. Cooper, Phil Tajitsu Nash, Jeffret\Y Rosen, Adrienne D. Davis, Alexandra Natapoff, Katheryn K. Russell, Angela Jordan Newton, Burton Wechsler, Mark Hager, Clarence Page, Brenda Wright, Stuart Ishimaru, Frank R. Parker, Frank H. Wu Aug 2012

Race, Law And Justice: The Rehnquist Court And The American Dilemma , Paul Butler, Richard D. Kahlenberg, Roger Pilon, Robert S. Chang, David Kairys, Jamin B. Raskin, Charles J. Cooper, Phil Tajitsu Nash, Jeffret\Y Rosen, Adrienne D. Davis, Alexandra Natapoff, Katheryn K. Russell, Angela Jordan Newton, Burton Wechsler, Mark Hager, Clarence Page, Brenda Wright, Stuart Ishimaru, Frank R. Parker, Frank H. Wu

Jamin Raskin

No abstract provided.


Execution By Accident: Evidentiary And Constitutional Problems With The "Childhood Onset" Requirement In Atkins Claims, Steven Mulroy Aug 2012

Execution By Accident: Evidentiary And Constitutional Problems With The "Childhood Onset" Requirement In Atkins Claims, Steven Mulroy

Steven Mulroy

The article discusses claims by capital defendants asserting that they are mentally retarded (MR) and thus cannot be executed under the 2002 Supreme Court holding in Atkins v. Virginia. Courts hearing such claims require proof that any intellectual deficits first occurred during childhood. This “childhood onset” prong is problematic for practical and theoretical reasons. As a practical matter, courts often improperly: (a) expect (rarely available) IQ test results dating from childhood; (b) dismiss MR proof if the defendant has minimal day-to-day competence, despite the medical consensus that MR persons can drive, cook, etc.; and (c) reject Atkins claims because the …


Nguyen V. Ins And The Application Of Intermediate Scrutiny To Gender Classifications: Theory, Practice, And Reality, Norman T. Deutsch Apr 2012

Nguyen V. Ins And The Application Of Intermediate Scrutiny To Gender Classifications: Theory, Practice, And Reality, Norman T. Deutsch

Pepperdine Law Review

The Supreme Court has articulated three theoretically different standards of review for determining whether government action has denied any person equal protection of the laws: rational basis, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny. One area of this tri-level jurisprudence that continues to be troublesome in practice is the application of intermediate scrutiny to gender classifications. Nguyen v. INS is significant because it is the first case in which all nine Justices unequivocally applied that standard in such a case. Nonetheless, the application of the standard remains problematic since the Court split five to four on its application to the facts. This …


Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler Jan 2012

Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler

Aaron J Shuler

Rogers Smith in his "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," warns of novel legal systems reconstituting ascriptive American inequality. The post-Warren Courts' approach to Equal Protection, specifically their unwillingness to consider disparate impact and the difference between invidious and benign practices, betrays an "ironic innocence" as described by James Baldwin to a history of racial discrimination and domination, and a disavowal of a hiearchy that the Court perpetuates.


Inextricably Political: Race, Membership And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff Jan 2012

Inextricably Political: Race, Membership And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff

Sarah Krakoff

Courts address equal protection questions about the distinct legal treatment of American Indian tribes in the following dichotomous way: are classifications concerning American Indians “racial or political?” If the classification is political (i.e. based on federally recognized tribal status or membership in a federally recognized tribe) then courts will not subject it to heightened scrutiny. If the classification is racial rather than political, then courts may apply heightened scrutiny. This article challenges the dichotomy itself. The legal categories “tribe” and “tribal member” are themselves political, and reflect the ways in which tribes and tribal members have been racialized by U.S. …


The Anticlassification Turn In Employment Discrimination Law, Brad Areheart Jan 2012

The Anticlassification Turn In Employment Discrimination Law, Brad Areheart

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

The distinction between antisubordination and anticlassification has existed since the 1970s and has been frequently invoked by scholars to advocate for certain readings of antidiscrimination law. The anticlassification principle prohibits practices that classify people on the basis of a forbidden category. In contrast, the antisubordination principle allows classification (or consideration of, for example, race or sex) to the extent the classification is intended to challenge group subordination.While most scholars writing about antisubordination and anticlassification have done so in the context of equal protection, this Article systematically applies antisubordination and anticlassification values to assess recent developments in employment discrimination law and …


Changing Workforce Demographics And The Future Of The Protected Class Approach, Nancy Levit Jan 2012

Changing Workforce Demographics And The Future Of The Protected Class Approach, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

The composition and identity characteristics of the American workforce are changing. The population in this country is rising, aging, and becoming much more racially and ethnically diverse. Appearance norms are shifting too. These changes have enormous implications for constitutional and employment discrimination law. In both equal protection and employment discrimination cases, recovery usually depends on membership in a constitutionally or statutorily protected category. Yet the statutory approach to anti-discrimination law has stagnated. Part of the difficulty of the protected class approach is that it is based on something of a paradox — the paradox of exceptionalism. Class-based protection requires individuals …