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Full-Text Articles in Law

No Sense Of Decency, Kathryn E. Miller Mar 2023

No Sense Of Decency, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

For nearly seventy years, the Court has assessed Eighth Amendment claims by evaluating “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” In this Article, I examine the evolving standards of decency test, which has long been a punching bag for critics on both the right and the left. Criticism of the doctrine has been fierce, but largely academic until recent years. Some fault the test for being too majoritarian, while others argue that it provides few constraints on the Justices’ discretion, permitting their personal predilections to rule the day. For many, the test is seen …


Disparate Impact And The Role Of Classification And Motivation In Equal Protection Law After Inclusive Communities, Samuel Bagenstos Jan 2016

Disparate Impact And The Role Of Classification And Motivation In Equal Protection Law After Inclusive Communities, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

At least since the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, disparate-impact liability has faced a direct constitutional threat. This Article argues that the Court’s decision last Term in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., which held that disparate-impact liability is available under the Fair Housing Act, has resolved that threat, at least for the time being. In particular, this Article argues, Inclusive Communities is best read to adopt the understanding of equal protection that Justice Kennedy previously articulated in his pivotal concurrence in the 2007 Parents Involved case—which argued that …


Is Integration A Discriminatory Purpose?, Michelle Adams Jan 2011

Is Integration A Discriminatory Purpose?, Michelle Adams

Articles

Is integration a form of discrimination? Remarkably, recent Supreme Court doctrine suggests that the answer to this question may well be yes. In Ricci v. DeStefano, the Court characterizes - for the very first time - government action taken to avoid disparate-impact liability and to integrate the workplace as "race-based," and then invalidates that action under a heightened level of judicial review. Consequently, Ricci suggests that the Court is open to the "equivalence doctrine," which posits that laws intended to racially integrate are morally and constitutionally equivalent to laws intended to racially separate. Under the equivalence doctrine, integration is simply …


Stifling The Potential Of Grutter V. Bollinger: Parents Involved In Community Schools V. Seattle School District No. 1, Michelle Adams Jan 2008

Stifling The Potential Of Grutter V. Bollinger: Parents Involved In Community Schools V. Seattle School District No. 1, Michelle Adams

Articles

No abstract provided.


Equal Protection And Disparate Impact: Round Three, Richard A. Primus Jan 2003

Equal Protection And Disparate Impact: Round Three, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Prior inquiries into the relationship between equal protection and disparate impact have focused on whether equal protection entails a disparate impact standard and whether laws prohibiting disparate impacts can qualify as legislation enforcing equal rotection. In this Article, Professor Primus focuses on a third question: whether equal protection affirmatively forbids the use of statutory disparate impact standards. Like affirmative action, a statute restricting racially disparate impacts is a race-conscious mechanism designed to reallocate opportunities from some racial groups to others. Accordingly, the same individualist view of equal protection that has constrained the operation of affirmative action might also raise questions …


Intergroup Rivalry, Anti-Competitive Conduct And Affirmative Action, Michelle Adams Jan 2002

Intergroup Rivalry, Anti-Competitive Conduct And Affirmative Action, Michelle Adams

Articles

Significant research in social science describes racial inequality as grounded in notions of group identity and group conflict. Sociologists and social psychologists who study discrimination and prejudice have moved away from theories that explain prejudice solely as a problem of individual perception, and toward theories that view individual cognitive processes as related to group membership. While present social science yields no consensus view, there is a striking emphasis in the current literature on group identity theories as "powerful determinants of behavior." These theories, which stress the importance of prejudice as a group-based phenomenon and focus on "social-structural theories of group …


Sex As A Suspect Class: An Argument For Applying Strict Scrutiny To Gender Discrimination, Deborah Brake Jan 1996

Sex As A Suspect Class: An Argument For Applying Strict Scrutiny To Gender Discrimination, Deborah Brake

Articles

In United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia' ("VMI"), the Supreme Court has a landmark opportunity to revisit the legal standard courts should use to review classifications which treat men and women differently. The VMI case involves an equal protection challenge to the state's exclusion of women from VMI and its establishment of an alternative, sex-stereotyped women's leadership program as a remedy to that exclusion. The United States, which brought the case against VMI, has asked the Supreme Court to rule that sex-based classifications, like classifications based on race, must be subjected to the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, or "strict …