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Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in Law
Discretionary Pricing, Mortgage Discrimination, And The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm, Jeffrey L. Taren
Discretionary Pricing, Mortgage Discrimination, And The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm, Jeffrey L. Taren
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
For generations, mortgage lending has always been the gateway to the American dream of homeownership, and, historically, has also been characterized by widespread discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and their communities. Mortgage discrimination in the modem era has often been accomplished through a technique known as discretionary pricing, in which lenders allow their loan officers and brokers to increase borrowers' costs from an objectively determined base rate. In the past decade alone, discretionary pricing has cost minority homeowners billions of dollars in extra payments, which, in tum, has led these minorities to suffer higher foreclosure rates than whites and …
Equally Insured? Lasting Insurance Industry Reform Came Only With A Rethinking Of Race, Mary L. Heen
Equally Insured? Lasting Insurance Industry Reform Came Only With A Rethinking Of Race, Mary L. Heen
Law Faculty Publications
Earlier this decade, some of America’s best-known life insurance companies quietly settled multimillion-dollar civil rights lawsuits challenging race-based life insurance rates and benefits. As a result, those companies closed a chapter of American economic history that began after the Civil War with the door-to-door marketing of small individual life insurance policies to poor workers, including former slaves, and their families. The closing of this chapter in history also marked the end of a form of Jim Crow race discrimination largely invisible to the American public.
Another Hair Piece: Exploring New Strands Of Analysis Under Title Vii, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Another Hair Piece: Exploring New Strands Of Analysis Under Title Vii, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay re-examines antidiscrimination case law that allows employers to enforce hair grooming policies that prohibit natural hairstyles for black women, such as braids, locks, and twists. In so doing, this Essay sets forth an intersectional, biological - as opposed to cultural - argument for why such bans are discriminatory under Title VII. Specifically, this Essay argues that antidiscrimination law fails to address intersectional race and gender discrimination against black women through such grooming restrictions because it does not recognize braided, twisted, and locked hairstyles as black-female equivalents of Afros, which are protected as racial characteristics under existing law. The …
The Meeting: A Transformational Train Ride Through Race In America And Apartheid In South Africa, Joseph Karl Grant
The Meeting: A Transformational Train Ride Through Race In America And Apartheid In South Africa, Joseph Karl Grant
Journal Publications
No abstract provided.
Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race And Mental Status, Camille Nelson
Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race And Mental Status, Camille Nelson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
No abstract provided.
Book Review: What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law And The Making Of Race In America, Taunya L. Banks
Book Review: What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law And The Making Of Race In America, Taunya L. Banks
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Alienated: A Reworking Of The Racialization Thesis After September 11, Ming H. Chen
Alienated: A Reworking Of The Racialization Thesis After September 11, Ming H. Chen
Publications
This article revises widespread application of the racialization thesis to Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians following September 11. It suggests in its place an “alienation thesis” to describe the formation of an alien identity for those perceived and treated as noncitizens. This thesis draws on Asian American and critical race scholarship to re-interpret sociological understandings of the post-September 11 response to Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. The article concludes that shifting conceptions of this phenomenon is critical to reforming “alienating” practices that function not only to cause harm to their intended targets, but also to distort the legal requirements of …
Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero
Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held liable for discriminatory conduct when they purposefully rely on a forbidden characteristic, such as race or gender, in promulgating policy; to simply know that minorities and women will be adversely affected by the law does not deny these groups equal protection under the law. This Essay interrogates this doctrine by taking a closer look at Iqbal and Feeney, the thirty-year-old precedent the majority cited as the source of its antidiscrimination standard. Because Feeney was cited in neither of the …
Significant Statistics: The Unwitting Policy Making Of Mathematically Ignorant Judges, Michael I. Meyerson, William Meyerson
Significant Statistics: The Unwitting Policy Making Of Mathematically Ignorant Judges, Michael I. Meyerson, William Meyerson
All Faculty Scholarship
This article will explore several areas in which judges, hampered by their mathematical ignorance, have permitted numerical analysis to subvert the goals of our legal system. In Part II, I will examine the perversion of the presumption of innocence in paternity cases, where courts make the counter-factual assumption that regardless of the evidence, prior to DNA testing, a suspect has a 50/50 chance of being the father. In Part III, I will explore the unnecessary injection of race into trials involving the statistics of DNA matching, even when race is entirely irrelevant to the particular case. Next, in Part IV, …
Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo
Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo
All Faculty Scholarship
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …
Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick
Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick
All Faculty Scholarship
The United States has a long and somewhat conflicted history of espousing egalitarian values and yet tolerating a certain level of subordination of particular groups to a greater or lesser extent at the same time. Like many countries, it struggles with reconciling the goals of equality, pluralism, and liberty, and the balance has been struck differently at different times. In the current wave of such efforts, the Supreme Court is marking an increasingly formalist approach to the question of discrimination, while Congress appears to be pushing a slightly more substantive approach to discrimination. This short paper analyzes the Court’s recent …
Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N'Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, Adrienne D. Davis
Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N'Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, Adrienne D. Davis
Faculty Scholarship
Most of the legal scholarship on reparations for Blacks in America focuses on its legal or political viability. This literature has considered both procedural obstacles, such as statutes of limitations and sovereign immunity, as well as the substantive conception of a defensible cause of action. Indeed, Congressman John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, in 1989 and every Congressional session since, and there have been three law suits that have received national attention. This Essay takes a different approach, considering reparations as a social movement with a rich and under-explored history. As Robin Kelley explains, such an …
Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N’Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adrienne D. Davis, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro
Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N’Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adrienne D. Davis, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro
Scholarship@WashULaw
Most of the legal scholarship on reparations for Blacks in America focuses on its legal or political viability. This literature has considered both procedural obstacles, such as statutes of limitations and sovereign immunity, as well as the substantive conception of a defensible cause of action. Indeed, Congressman John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, in 1989 and every Congressional session since, and there have been three law suits that have received national attention. This Essay takes a different approach, considering reparations as a social movement with a rich and under-explored history. As Robin Kelley explains, such an …
Discrimination Redefined, Ann C. Mcginley
Discrimination Redefined, Ann C. Mcginley
Scholarly Works
In this Response to Professor Natasha Martin's article Pretext in Peril, Professor Ann McGinley argues that courts' retrenchment in cases interpreting Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act results from a narrow definition of discrimination that focuses on conscious, intentional discrimination. Increasingly social science research demonstrates that much disparate treatment occurs as a result of unconscious biases, but the courts' reluctance to consider this social science has led, in many cases, to a literal, narrow definition of “pretext." Moreover, she posits that the recent Supreme Court case of Ricci v. DeStefano redefines discrimination in an ahistorical and acontextual …
Ricci V. Destefano: A Masculinities Theory Analysis, Ann C. Mcginley
Ricci V. Destefano: A Masculinities Theory Analysis, Ann C. Mcginley
Scholarly Works
This Article applies masculinity theory to explore the aspects Ricci v. Destefano and its political reverberations. Empirical evidence showed that virtually all written tests have a disparate impact on minorities, that a neighboring city had reached less discriminatory results using a different weighting system, and that other fire departments used assessment centers to judge firefighters' qualifications for promotions. While the black male and all female firefighters were made invisible by the case and the testimony, the fact that Ricci's and Vargas' testimony lionized a particularly traditional form of heterosexual masculinity was also invisible. While the command presence required of a …
The Future Of Disparate Impact, Richard A. Primus
The Future Of Disparate Impact, Richard A. Primus
Articles
The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano foregrounded the question of whether Title VIl's disparate impact standard conflicts with equal protection. This Article shows that there are three ways to read Ricci, one of which is likely fatal to disparate impact doctrine but the other two of which are not.
Negotiating The Situation: The Reasonable Person In Context, Lu-In Wang
Negotiating The Situation: The Reasonable Person In Context, Lu-In Wang
Articles
This Essay argues that our understanding of the reasonable person in economic transactions should take into account an individual’s race, gender, or other group-based identity characteristics - not necessarily because persons differ on account of those characteristics, but because of how those characteristics influence the situations a person must negotiate. That is, individuals’ social identities constitute features not just of themselves, but also of the situations they inhabit. In economic transactions that involve social interaction, such as face-to-face negotiations, the actor’s race, gender, or other social identity can affect both an individual actor and those who interact with him or …
Introduction To The Symposium: The Politics Of Identity After Identity Politics, Adrienne D. Davis
Introduction To The Symposium: The Politics Of Identity After Identity Politics, Adrienne D. Davis
Scholarship@WashULaw
The Essays in this volume seek to shed some light on the politics of identity after the 2008 Presidential election in which identity politics dominated. To explore how 2008 and its aftermath have shifted both academic and political debates, Professor Adrienne Davis invited scholars from a variety of disciplines who embrace diverse methodologies—political theory; cultural studies; history; and law. These authors explore identity politics as a field of academic inquiry; a cultural discourse; a legal claim; a negotiation of institutions and power; and a predicate for political alliances. Collectively, the Articles both develop new frameworks and intervene in old ones …
Race Audits, Robin A. Lenhardt
Race Audits, Robin A. Lenhardt
Faculty Scholarship
The U.S. Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence suffers from a stunning lack of imagination where possibilities for meaningful local government involvement in combating structural racial inequality are concerned. Cases such as Parents. and Ricci limit dramatically the freedom that localities have to address racial inequity within their borders. Instead of constraints on local efforts in the race context, Professor Lenhardt argues that what we need, if persistent racial inequalities are ever to be eliminated, is greater innovation and experimentation. In this article, Professor Lenhardt thus introduces an extra-judicial tool called the race audit, which would permit individual cities or a regional …
From Reconstruction To Obama: Understanding Black Invisibility, Racism In Appalachia, And The Legal Community's Responsibility To Promote A Dialogue On Race At The Wvu College Of Law, Brandon Stump
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
This Note focuses on legal education in the United States and West Virginia in particular. Discussions on race, racism, and American law should take place in every legal classroom where race is relevant to the subject being discussed as a way to bridge gaps between communities. This is especially true for the West Virginia University College of Law ("College of Law"), which sits in the third whitest state in the country. The College of Law is the only law school in the state, and a majority of students at the College of Law are white and West Virginian. Thus, at …