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States’ Duty Under The Federal Elections Clause And A Federal Right To Education, Evan Caminker Dec 2023

States’ Duty Under The Federal Elections Clause And A Federal Right To Education, Evan Caminker

Articles

Fifty years ago, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court failed to address one of the preeminent civil rights issues of our generation—substandard and inequitable public education—by holding that the federal Constitution does not protect a general right to education. The Court didn’t completely close the door on a narrower argument that the Constitution guarantees “an opportunity to acquire the basic minimal skills necessary for the enjoyment of the rights of speech and of full participation in the political process.” Both litigants and scholars have been trying ever since to push that door open, pressing …


States Have Long Tried To Ban Ideas From The Classroom: The Current Road Brings A Fresh Evil, Leonard Niehoff Jan 2023

States Have Long Tried To Ban Ideas From The Classroom: The Current Road Brings A Fresh Evil, Leonard Niehoff

Other Publications

Efforts by state and local officials to ban ideas and books from public school classrooms are nothing new. Recent attempts to do so, however, have a uniquely pernicious characteristic. The current wave of bans doesn’t just seek to censor thoughts or words; it seeks to censor identity.


Resources For Special Education Advocacy, Virginia A. Neisler Nov 2019

Resources For Special Education Advocacy, Virginia A. Neisler

Law Librarian Scholarship

The CDC reports that approximately 1 in 6 children in the United States has a developmental disability.1 Certain types of developmental disabilities are becoming rapidly more prevalent, with autism spectrum disorder affecting 1 in 59 children in 2014 (as compared to 1 in 150 as recently as 2002).2 From 1997 to 2008, all incidences of developmental disabilities in children in the United States increased in prevalence by more than 17 percent.3 This represents a significant part of our population and in recent decades has given rise to a complex system of legal rights and protections for developmentally disabled children that …


The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias Mar 2018

The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias

Articles

As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court’s more liberal …


Educational Equality For Children With Disabilities: The 2016 Term Cases, Samuel R. Bagenstos Nov 2017

Educational Equality For Children With Disabilities: The 2016 Term Cases, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Book Chapters

One of the most longstanding debates in educational policy pits the goal of equality against the goal of adequacy: Should we aim to guarantee that all children receive an equal education? Or simply that they all receive an adequate education? The debate is vexing in part because there are many ways to specify “equality” and “adequacy.” Are we talking about equality of inputs (which inputs?), equality of opportunity (to achieve what?), or equality of results (which results?)? Douglas Rae and his colleagues famously argued that there are no fewer than 108 structurally distinct conceptions of equality. And how do we …


Doe V. University Of Michigan: Free Speech On Campus 25 Years Later, Leonard M. Niehoff Jan 2017

Doe V. University Of Michigan: Free Speech On Campus 25 Years Later, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

I would like to use as the launching pad for my remarks today the 1989 federal district court decision in Doe v. University of Michigan. Doe is the seminal case on campus speech codes and it just recently passed its twenty-fifth anniversary. I thought this symposium would be a good occasion to look back, see where we were, assess where we are, and ask whether we have made any progress. Spoiler alert: the news is not good.


The Disability Cliff, Samuel R. Bagenstos Jan 2015

The Disability Cliff, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

We’re pretty good about caring for our disabled citizens—as long as they’re children. It’s time to put equal thought into their adulthoods.


The Mismatch Myth In U.S. Higher Education: A Synthesis Of The Empirical Evidence At The Law School And Undergraduate Levels, William C. Kidder, Richard O. Lempert Jan 2015

The Mismatch Myth In U.S. Higher Education: A Synthesis Of The Empirical Evidence At The Law School And Undergraduate Levels, William C. Kidder, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education commonly cite two principles to justify their opposition. One is that admissions to institutions of higher education should be based on "merit," which is often treated by critics of affirmative action as consisting of little more than test score results and high school or undergraduate grades. The second is the legal and moral imperative of not making consequential decisions based on race. We shall not address these principles except to note that others have shown that they do not make the case against affirmative action (Carbado & Harris 2008, Shultz & Zedeck 2011, …


The Intersection Of Family Law And Education Law, Debra Chopp Jul 2014

The Intersection Of Family Law And Education Law, Debra Chopp

Articles

It is well-established that parents have a fundamental liberty interest in directing the education of their children. As family law practitioners know, however, parents do not always agree with each other on matters pertaining to their child's education. Where education issues arise in family law cases, it is important for members of the family law bar to have familiarity with education laws so that they may properly advise their clients. This article will identify and briefly discuss common intersections of family law and education law.


Tenure, The Aberrant Consumer Contract, James J. White Jan 2014

Tenure, The Aberrant Consumer Contract, James J. White

Articles

This symposium concerns asymmetric contracts, usually contracts where one party has great power and the other has little. The papers deal generally with contracts between consumers who get a “take it or leave it” offer and corporations such as Hertz, Microsoft, Verizon, and General Motors who draft the contracts according to their wishes. In almost all of these asymmetric contracts the stronger (corporations) writes the terms and presents them to the weaker (consumers) for signing without negotiation. Indeed the corporate agent with whom the consumer deals (e.g., the person at the Hertz desk) has no authority to change the contract …


Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2013

Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Precedent from the Roberts Court shows the Justices taking three distinct approaches to precedent they dislike. Each provides a template for the Court to criticize race-based affirmative action in higher education, as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is widely expected to do. Most narrowly, the Court might use Fisher to issue a warning, much like it did in 2009 when it sidestepped a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act; under this approach, the opinion would spell out why the Justices think the diversity celebrated in Grutter v. Bollinger no longer provides sufficient justification for the use of …


School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp Jan 2012

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …


The Nondischargeability Of Student Loans In Personal Bankruptcy Proceedings: The Search For A Theory, John A. E. Pottow Jan 2007

The Nondischargeability Of Student Loans In Personal Bankruptcy Proceedings: The Search For A Theory, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

In fiscal year 2002, approximately 5.8 million Americans borrowed $38 billion (USD) in federal student loans. This was more than triple the $11.7 billion borrowed in 1990. As a rule of thumb, tuition has been increasing at roughly double the rate of inflation in recent years. This troubling trend of accelerating tuition, coupled with the fact that real income has stagnated for men and increased only modestly for women over the past two decades, means that more and more students are going to need to turn to borrowed money to finance their degrees absent a radical restructuring of the postsecondary …


Confidentiality Of Educational Records And Child Protective Proceedings, Frank E. Vandervort Jan 2007

Confidentiality Of Educational Records And Child Protective Proceedings, Frank E. Vandervort

Book Chapters

The Federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which provides funding for state educational programming, requires that student records be disclosed to a nonparent only with the written consent of the child’s parent, unless the disclosure falls within one of the several exceptions detailed in the statute. One of the exemptions provided for in the federal law permits a school to disclose information to “state or local officials or authorities to whom [that] information is allowed to be reported or disclosed pursuant to state statute,” if that official certifies in writing “that the information will not be disclosed to …


Post-Admissions Educational Programming In A Post-Grutter World: A Response To Professor Brown, Evan H. Caminker Jan 2006

Post-Admissions Educational Programming In A Post-Grutter World: A Response To Professor Brown, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

When asked to provide commentary on another scholar's reflections on Grutterl and Gratz and affirmative action, I am usually struck by two fears. First, because so much ink has been spilled on this topic, I worry the main presenter will have nothing new and interesting to say. Today this worry has been put to rest; I am so pleased that Professor Dorothy Brown offers a number of novel and intriguing observations and, in the end, advances a novel and intriguing proposal about the role Critical Race Theory ought to play in our nation's law school classrooms. Second, for the same …


A Glimpse Behind And Beyond Grutter, Evan H. Caminker Jan 2004

A Glimpse Behind And Beyond Grutter, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Many people have suggested that the recent battle over affirmative action was a defining moment for the contemporary relevance of Brown v. Board of Education and that it would determine the promise and potential for widespread societal integration. In my remarks, I want to comment upon a couple of comparisons and links between the Brown, Bakke, Grutter, and Gratz cases.


Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker Jan 2003

Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Most Supreme Court watchers were unsurprised that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's vote proved pivotal in resolving the University of Michigan affirmative action cases; indeed, Justice O'Connor has been in the majority in almost every case involving race over the past decade, and was in the majority in each and every one of the 5-4 decisions the Court handed down across a broad range of difficult issues last Term. Some smaller number of observers were unsurprised that Justice O'Connor decided (along with the four Justices who in the past have voted to allow latitude with regard to race-based affirmative action programs) …


Minority Preferences Reconsidered, Terrance Sandalow Jan 1999

Minority Preferences Reconsidered, Terrance Sandalow

Reviews

During the academic year 1965-66, at the height of the civil rights movement, the University of Michigan Law School faculty looked around and saw not a single African-American student. The absence of any black students was not, it should hardly need saying, attributable to a policy of purposeful exclusion. A black student graduated from the Law School as early as 1870, and in the intervening years a continuous flow of African-American students, though not a large number, had been admitted and graduated. Some went on to distinguished careers in the law.


Rejoinder (Response To Article By William G. Bowen And Derek Bok), Terrance Sandalow Jan 1999

Rejoinder (Response To Article By William G. Bowen And Derek Bok), Terrance Sandalow

Articles

In The Shape of the River, presidents Bowen and Bok pronounce the race-sensitive admission policies adopted by selective undergraduate schools a resounding success. The evidence they adduce in support of that conclusion primarily concerns the performance of African-American students in and after college. But not all African-American students in those institutions were admitted in consequence of minority preference policies. Some, perhaps many, would have been admitted under race-neutral policies. I argued at several points in my review that since these students might be expected to be academically more successful than those admitted because of their race, the evidence on which …


The Moral Responsibilities Of Universities, Terrance Sandalow Jan 1991

The Moral Responsibilities Of Universities, Terrance Sandalow

Book Chapters

IN THE YEARS SINCE the Second World War, "higher education" has emerged as one of the major influences in American life. Well over 50 percent of the age cohort now in its teens or early twenties will attend a college or university, more than a five-fold increase from the prewar period. Moreover, colleges and universities now engage in so broad a range of activities that the appellation "higher education" no longer seems entirely appropriate to describe the institutions. Community colleges, but also four-year colleges and universities, play a major role in training individuals for skilled and semiskilled occupations. Universities are …


Comment On Preliminary Report On Freedom Of Expression And Campus Harassment Codes, Terrance Sandalow Jan 1991

Comment On Preliminary Report On Freedom Of Expression And Campus Harassment Codes, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Campus harassment codes pose an unprecedented problem for the AAUP, not only because the issues of academic freedom they raise are novel, but also because the academic community is itself deeply divided over those issues. Historically, the major assaults upon academic freedom have come from outside the academy--from politicians, trustees, and donors who have sought to limit inquiry and restrict the expression of unpopular views. Ideas about academic freedom have been shaped in the course of repelling these assaults and in constructing barricades that will safeguard the freedoms to teach and to learn that are at the center of the …


Defining The Terms Of Academic Freedom: A Reply To Professor Rabban, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1988

Defining The Terms Of Academic Freedom: A Reply To Professor Rabban, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

I suspect Professor Rabban is right in saying that we have more than a semantic dispute. But it is difficult to identify our areas of substantive disagreement with any precision because of a major difference in the meanings that each of us ascribes to certain key words and phrases. The essence of my argument is as follows: What I call "the traditional American conception of academic freedom" justifies professional autonomy for faculty members as a means of furthering certain academic values. But the mechanism of faculty autonomy fails to protect these traditional academic values in the contemporary context of externally …


Academic Freedom And Academic Values In Sponsored Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1988

Academic Freedom And Academic Values In Sponsored Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

In this Article I examine the traditional American conception of academic freedom and analyze its implications for universities formulating policies on the acceptance of sponsored research. I begin by reviewing the basic policy statements of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on academic freedom to identify both the academic values implicit in those statements and the assumptions about institutional relationships and individual incentives underlying their prescriptions for advancing those values. I then evaluate the validity of those underlying assumptions in contemporary sponsored research and argue that academic freedom as traditionally conceived might no longer effectively advance academic values in …


The Funding Of Children's Educational Costs, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1985

The Funding Of Children's Educational Costs, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

A plan for reduction of educational costs should take federal transfer taxes into account. The method chosen for reducing income tax liability usually will involve making gifts. To the extent that it is convenient to do so, the transfer tax consequences of making such gifts should be minimized. This article will examine the estate and gift tax consequences of the income tax reduction arrangements described herein and will consider means of structuring the transactions so as to minimize those consequences.


Clash In The Classroom, David L. Chambers Jul 1979

Clash In The Classroom, David L. Chambers

Reviews

David L. Chambers reviews two books covering Brown vs. Bakke in The Washington Post. Chambers discusses ‘The Bakke Case: Politics of Inequality’ by Joel Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence III, and ‘From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration’ by J. Harvie Wilkinson.


The Administrative Tribunal, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1971

The Administrative Tribunal, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

During the past summer I have had the good fortune to join with colleagues of the university community from the administration and from the student body in two separate but related endeavors: first, to draw up a body of substantive rules for nonacademic conduct on the campus and, second, to establish a judicial body to enforce those rules. The latter problem, the composition of a university judiciary, is the subject of this discussion. The views I shall present about structuring a university judiciary are drawn in large part from the discussions of the committees to which I belong. In addition, …


A Statement To The Alumni, Henry M. Bates Jan 1915

A Statement To The Alumni, Henry M. Bates

Articles

Plans are now complete for the demonstration by Michigan alumni of their loyalty to and interest in their Alma Mater. Michigan has never before called upon all of her former students to help her in any great movement for the benefit of the entire University. It has required some all comprehending movement like the Union to afford this opportunity, but now the time and the opportunity are at hand, when Michigan men may put their shoulders to the wheel and carry through a project, which "Prexy" Angell, President Hutchins, the Board of Regents, the Senate Council and the Alumni Association …


Law As A Culture Study, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1906

Law As A Culture Study, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

That acute observer and commentator on American institutions, James Bryce, in an oft-quoted statement in his American Commonwealth, pays a high tribute to the efficiency of American law schools. "I do not know if there is anything," he writes, "in which America has advanced more beyond the mother country than in the provision she makes for legal education." In passing this generous judgment, in which many other eminent Englishmen have concurred, he views our law schools simply as institutions for developing technical proficiency among students destined to fill the ranks of the legal profession. And this is, indeed, the principal …


What Is The Michigan Union?, Henry M. Bates Jan 1905

What Is The Michigan Union?, Henry M. Bates

Articles

The fundamental idea upon which the University of Michigan Union is formed is the invention or conception of no one individual or group of individuals. The inevitable product of inherent and universal human traits and aspirations, developed and intensified by local conditions, the Union is based upon an idea; it is compelled by forces which are imperative, persistent and irresistible, which will not be denied, but which must ultimately result in some realization of the hopes and plans of practically all of Michigan's constituency. This idea found expression in somewhat definite form in plans proposed at least eight years ago; …


What Shall The Union Club House Be?, Henry M. Bates Jan 1905

What Shall The Union Club House Be?, Henry M. Bates

Articles

In the October issue of The Alumnus, Mr. William N. Brown raises the question, whether, if the Memorial Committee should depart from its original plan to erect such a memorial building as was at first contemplated, and incorporate into its scheme some of the features proposed for the Union club house, it would be wise to include any sort of restaurant department. From the beginning, the board of directors of the Union have adhered steadfastly to the opinion that a restaurant department is necessary to the complete success of its proposed club house and to the full realization of all …