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Full-Text Articles in Law
Equal Opportunity, Individual Liberty And Meritocracy In Education: Reinforcing Structures Of Privilege And Inequality, Christian Sundquist
Equal Opportunity, Individual Liberty And Meritocracy In Education: Reinforcing Structures Of Privilege And Inequality, Christian Sundquist
Articles
The paradigm of equal opportunity inevitably seeks to reproduce and maintain structures of class and racial privilege. The deficit story of equal opportunity is as follows: equal opportunity is a truly objective, neutral, and fair method to allocate educational, employment, and political resources to members of society, without regard to race, class, gender or ethnicity. The ideal of equality assumes the possibility of an objective measure of merit under which individuals' free choices and preferences may be evaluated. Accordingly, through the creation of a baseline that presupposes the inherent sameness of all people and disregards systemic discrimination as a fallacy, …
Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman
Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman
Articles
No matter how judges are selected, sooner or later some unfortunate candidate will be labeled a "judicial activist." One has to wonder: Does the term have any identifiable core meaning? Or is it just an all-purpose term of opprobrium, reflecting whatever brand of judicial behavior the speaker regards as particularly pernicious? Implicit in this question are several important issues about the role of courts in our democratic society.
I take my definition from Judge Richard Posner, who describes activist decisions as those that expand judicial power over other branches of the national government or over state governments. Unlike other uses …