Law Commons^™

Civil Rights Without Representation, Joanna C. Schwartz

William & Mary Law Review

Although much recent attention has been paid to qualified immunity, the biggest threat to civil rights enforcement is actually the lack of lawyers able and willing to represent people whose constitutional rights have been violated. There are small, tight-knit communities of civil rights lawyers with expertise and passion in the cities of the Great Migration, but few civil rights attorneys practice outside those urban areas. Limits on attorneys’ ability to recover fees mean that even attorneys willing to take civil rights cases will have financial incentives to decline meritorious cases if they would be expensive to litigate or if the …

No Child Left Behind Bars: Applying The Principles Of Strict Scrutiny When Sentencing Juveniles Tried As Adults, Max Chu

William & Mary Law Review

The Commonwealth of Virginia was the first in the nation to pass legislation that provides judges with the discretion to veer away from the mandatory minimum sentence and to impose trauma-informed and age-appropriate sentences for juvenile offenders convicted of felonies and tried as adults. Although Virginia’s new law, House Bill 744 (HB 744), is a pioneering step in the right direction, this Note argues that the law may now provide judges with too much discretion. In other words, HB 744 alone, without more guidance, does not go far enough to protect the rights of juvenile offenders.

Therefore, this Note proposes …

Fourth Amendment Infringement Is Afoot: Revitalizing Particularized Reasonable Suspicion For Terry Stops Based On Vague Or Discrepant Suspect Descriptions, Caroline E. Lewis

William & Mary Law Review

In Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court granted law enforcement broad power to perform a limited stop and search of someone when an officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is engaged in criminal activity. The resulting “Terry stop” created a way for police officers to investigate a suspicious person without requiring full probable cause for an arrest. The officer need only have “reasonable suspicion supported by articulable facts” based on the circumstances and the officer’s policing “experience that criminal activity may be afoot.” Reasonable suspicion is—by design—a broad standard, deferential to police officers’ judgment. Law enforcement officers …

Abortion, Sterilization, And The Universe Of Reproductive Rights, Melissa Murray

William & Mary Law Review

In recent years, a new narrative associating reproductive rights with the eugenics movement of the 1920s has taken root. As this narrative maintains, in the 1920s, Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of the modern birth control movement, joined forces with the eugenics movement to market family planning measures to marginalized minority communities.

Although the history undergirding this narrative is incomplete and misleading, the narrative itself has flourished as the debate over the continued vitality of reproductive rights has unfolded in the United States. Indeed, in just the last three years, a member of the United States Supreme Court and a number …

Redliking: When Redlining Goes Online, Allyson E. Gold

William & Mary Law Review

Airbnb’s structure, design, and algorithm create a website architecture that allows user discrimination to prevent minority hosts from realizing the same economic benefits from short-term rental platforms as White hosts, a phenomenon this Article refers to as “redliking.” For hosts with an unused home, a spare room, or an extra couch, Airbnb provides an opportunity to create new income streams and increase wealth. Airbnb encourages prospective guests to view host photographs, names, and personal information when considering potential accommodations, thereby inviting bias, both implicit and overt, to permeate transactions. This bias has financial consequences. Empirical research on host earning rates …

Paternalism, Tolerance, And Acceptance: Modeling The Evolution Of Equal Protection In The Constitutional Canon, John Tehranian

William & Mary Law Review

This Article proposes a legal taxonomy through which we can model changes in interpretations and applications of antidiscrimination principles to best understand the evolution of equal protection doctrine. The goal for doing so is two-fold. First, through a careful exegesis of a wide range of equal protection cases from the past hundred and fifty years, the analysis provides a positive theory to chart how respect for minority rights can progress within a given doctrinal space. Second, the analysis provides an unabashedly normative assessment of how closely a given legal regime comes to accepting and celebrating the inherent dignitary interests of …

Marriage Equality's Lessons For Social Movements And Constitutional Change, William N. Eskridge Jr.

William & Mary Law Review

The marriage equality movement won its first state victory in 2003, and within a dozen years fifty states were handing out marriage licenses. The swiftness of the constitutional triumph was only possible because public opinion underwent a sea change in that period. Sexual and gender minorities achieved this remarkable turnaround once a critical mass, widely dispersed in the country, came out of their closets as committed couples (often raising children), and mainstream America found their stories more consistent with their own lives than they did a generation earlier. Other lessons of marriage equality’s success, however, are how hard it is …

Force-Feeding Pretrial Detainees: A Constitutional Violation, Bryn L. Clegg

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

William & Mary Law Review

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

Challenging Congress's Single-Member District Mandate For U.S. House Elections On Political Association Grounds, Austin Plier

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Workplace Wellness Programs: Empirical Doubt, Legal Ambiguity, And Conceptual Confusion, Camila Strassle, Benjamin E. Berkman

William & Mary Law Review

Federal laws that protect workers from insurance discrimination and infringement of health privacy include exceptions for wellness programs that are “voluntary” and “reasonably designed” to improve health. Initially, these exceptions were intended to give employers the flexibility to create innovative wellness programs that would appeal to workers, increase productivity, and protect the workforce from preventable health conditions.

Yet a detailed look at the scientific literature reveals that wellness program efficacy is quite disputed, and even highly touted examples of program success have been shown to be unreliable. Meanwhile, the latest administrative regulations on wellness programs were vacated by a district …

Looking Beyond Batson: A Different Method Of Combating Bias Against Queer Jurors, Anna L. Tayman

William & Mary Law Review

On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California’s history, was murdered. He was shot five times, twice in the head. His murderer, Dan White, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served only five years in prison.

The Dan White trial is the most famous example of queer juror exclusion in American history. While White’s defense attorney, Douglas Schmidt, could not directly ask the jurors about their sexual orientation, he had another strategy: find the gays and allies and keep them out, and find the Catholics and keep them in. Schmidt struck a woman who …

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act At Age 10: Gina’S Controversial Assertion That Data Transparency Protects Privacy And Civil Rights, Barbara J. Evans

William & Mary Law Review

The genomic testing industry is an edifice built on data transparency: transparent and often unconsented sharing of our genetic information with researchers to fuel scientific discovery, transparent sharing of our test results to help regulators infer whether the tests are safe and effective, and transparent sharing of our health information to help treat other patients on the premise that we gain reciprocity of advantage when each person’s health care is informed by the best available data about all of us. Transparency undeniably confers many social benefits but creates risks to the civil rights of the people whose genetic information is …

Embracing The Chinese Exclusion Case: An International Law Approach To Racial Exclusions, Lauri Kai

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Boundaries Of Obergefell, Andrew J. Pecoraro

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Data-Driven Discrimination At Work, Pauline T. Kim

William & Mary Law Review

A data revolution is transforming the workplace. Employers are increasingly relying on algorithms to decide who gets interviewed, hired, or promoted. Although data algorithms can help to avoid biased human decision-making, they also risk introducing new sources of bias. Algorithms built on inaccurate, biased, or unrepresentative data can produce outcomes biased along lines of race, sex, or other protected characteristics. Data mining techniques may cause employment decisions to be based on correlations rather than causal relationships; they may obscure the basis on which employment decisions are made; and they may further exacerbate inequality because error detection is limited and feedback …

Protecting Privacy To Prevent Discrimination, Jessica L. Roberts

William & Mary Law Review

A person cannot consider information that she does not have. Unlawful discrimination, therefore, frequently requires discriminators to have knowledge about protected status. This Article exploits that simple reality, arguing that protecting privacy can prevent discrimination by restricting access to the very information discriminators use to discriminate. Although information related to many antidiscrimination categories, like race and sex, may be immediately apparent upon meeting a person, privacy law can still do significant work to prevent discrimination on the basis of less visible traits such as genetic information, age, national origin, ethnicity, and religion, as well as in cases of racial or …

Mitigating The Impact Of Title Vii's New Retaliation Standard: The Americans With Disabilities Act After University Of Texas Southwestern Medical Center V. Nassar, August T. Johannsen

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Guilt Dispositive? Federal Habeas After Martinez, Justin F. Marceau

William & Mary Law Review

Federal habeas review of criminal convictions is not supposed to be a second opportunity to adjudge guilt. Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others, has said that the sole question on federal habeas is whether the prisoner’s constitutional rights were violated. By the early 1970s, however, scholars criticized this rights-based view of habeas and sounded the alarm that postconviction review had become too far removed from questions of innocence. Most famously, in 1970 Judge Friendly criticized the breadth of habeas corpus by posing a single question: Is innocence irrelevant? In his view habeas review that focused exclusively on questions of rights in …

Windsor Beyond Marriage: Due Process, Equality & Undocumented Immigration, Anthony O'Rourke

William & Mary Law Review

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Windsor, invalidating part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, presents a significant interpretive challenge. Early commentators have criticized the majority opinion’s lack of analytical rigor, and expressed doubt that Windsor can serve as a meaningful precedent with respect to constitutional questions outside the area of same-sex marriage. This Article offers a more rehabilitative reading of Windsor and shows how the decision can be used to analyze a significant constitutional question concerning the use of state criminal procedure to regulate immigration.

From Windsor’s holding, the Article distills two concrete doctrinal propositions …

The Unwelcome Requirement In Sexual Harassment: Choosing A Perspective And Incorporating The Effect Of Supervisor-Subordinate Relations, Larsa K. Ramsini

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Presidential Constitutionalism And Civil Rights, Joseph Landau

William & Mary Law Review

As the judicial and legislative branches have taken a more passive approach to civil rights enforcement, the President’s exercise of independent, extrajudicial constitutional judgment has become increasingly important. Modern U.S. presidents have advanced constitutional interpretations on matters of race, gender, HIV-status, self-incrimination, reproductive liberty, and gun rights, and President Obama has been especially active in promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons—most famously by refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Commentators have criticized the President’s refusal to defend DOMA from numerous perspectives but have not considered how the President’s DOMA policy fits within …

Flunking The Class-Of-One/Failing Equal Protection, William D. Araiza

William & Mary Law Review

This Article considers the equal protection “class-of-one” doctrine in light of recent developments, both at the Supreme Court and in the lower courts. After Part I explains the background and current state of the doctrine, Part II considers how that doctrine provides insights into such basic equal protection concepts as discriminatory intent and animus. It also critiques the Court’s analysis of the class-of-one, arguing that the Court has mishandled these concepts and in so doing caused doctrinal anomalies and lower court confusion. Part II offers an alternative approach to the class-of-one that corrects those problems while still addressing the concerns …

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 …

Resolving Election Error: The Dynamic Assessment Of Materiality, Justin Levitt

William & Mary Law Review

The ghosts of the 2000 presidential election will return in 2012. Photo-finish and error-laden elections recur in each cycle. When the margin of error exceeds the margin of victory, officials and courts must decide which, if any, errors to discount or excuse, knowing that the answer will likely determine the election’s winner. Yet despite widespread agreement on the likelihood of another national meltdown, neither courts nor scholars have developed consistent principles for resolving the errors that cause the chaos.

This Article advances such a principle, reflecting the underlying values of the electoral process. It argues that the resolution of an …

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures: Reclassifying Drug Possession Offense In Response To The Indigent Defense Crisis, Kaitlin C. Gratton

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique In The Age Of Obama, Robin L. West

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Importance Of Immutability In Employment Discrimination Law, Sharona Hoffman

William & Mary Law Review

This Article argues that recent developments in employment discrimination law require a renewed focus on the concept of immutable characteristics. In 2009, two new laws took effect: the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA). This Article’s original contribution is an evaluation of the employment discrimination statutes as a corpus of law in light of these two additions.

The Article thoroughly explores the meaning of the term “immutable characteristic” in constitutional and employment discrimination jurisprudence. It postulates that immutability constitutes a unifying principle for all of the traits now covered by the employment …

Plausibility Pleading Employment Discrimination, Charles A. Sullivan

William & Mary Law Review

The Supreme Court’s unanimous 2002 decision in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., which took a very permissive approach to pleading discrimination claims, may or may not remain good law after Ashcroft v. Iqbal. As is well known, Iqbal took a restrictive approach to pleading generally under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and its application to employment discrimination cases could pose serious problems for plaintiffs attempting to get into federal court. In addition, there is certainly a tension between Swierkiewicz and Iqbal. This is in part because the former is a strong reaffirmation of notice pleading as it has traditionally been …

The Supreme Court's Post-Racial Turn Towards A Zero-Sum Understanding Of Equality, Helen Norton

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.