Law Commons^™

New Report Documenting Abortion Bans In Protestant & Secular Hospitals In The U.S. South, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Hospitals across the U.S. South strictly regulate the provision of abortion, leading to delays and denials of care for patients facing severe pregnancy complications according to this report released by Columbia Law School’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project (LRRP) in partnership with investigative reporter Amy Littlefield.

Recent Court Filings Reveal $17 Million In Payments From Dakota Access Llc To Tigerswan, Columbia Center For Contemporary Critical Thought

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

New York, October 1, 2021— The private security firm TigerSwan received over $17 million from Dakota Access LLC for its work related to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, recent court filings and documents produced in response to a judicial order in the ongoing litigation Thunderhawk v. County of Morton reveal. Plaintiffs have alleged in that suit that TigerSwan acted in close cooperation with law enforcement to enforce discriminatory police practices.

Columbia Law School's Era Project Files Amicus Brief With Pa Supreme Court Explaining Why Banning Public Funding For Abortion Violates The State Era, Center For Gender And Sexuality Law

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

On October 13, 2021, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project at Columbia Law School submitted an amicus — or friend of the court — brief with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explaining why a state ban on public funding for abortion is a form of sex discrimination, in violation of the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. In the brief filed in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, the ERA Project provided the Court with an overview of how the denial of reproductive health care in general, and access to abortion in particular, has been found by the …

Our Work In The World, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Our work is having a significant impact on the meaning of religious freedom and developments in the role of religion in public life. Read on to find out how we’re shaping the discourse around religious liberty.

American Civil Liberties Union Files Amicus Brief In Standing Rock Thunderhawk Litigation, Columbia Center For Contemporary Critical Thought

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

New York, February 2, 2021 — Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), together with its North Dakota affiliate (ACLU of ND), filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Thunderhawk plaintiffs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Amicus Curiae or “friend of the court” briefs are filed by third parties with an interest in the litigation, and can carry significant weight with the court when submitted by organizations with expertise in an issue salient to the case — such as with the ACLU and free speech.

The ACLU brief centers on the key issue …

Vaccination Equity By Design, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines how states’ initial COVID-19 vaccine-distribution strategies tended to disadvantage populations of color, including Black, Latinx, and Native American communities. These dynamics resonate with “inverse equity” effects of other public-health innovations. We argue for a federal regulatory framework to reduce inequity-forcing effects during initial vaccine rollout.

The Equity E.O.: Building A Regulatory Infrastructure Of Inclusion, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Among his first acts, President Biden signed Executive Order 13,985 to advance “Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Alongside an order directing regulatory review to include “social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations” and an ambitious infrastructure plan, this Equity E.O. signals a new engagement of the administrative state in proactively promoting racial equity and other dimensions of inclusion. The outlines of the infrastructure initiative are still emerging, but what appears key is its conceptualization of infrastructure as extending beyond roads and buildings to the social and …

Mine The Gap: Using Racial Disparities To Expose And Eradicate Racism, James S. Liebman, Kayla C. Butler, Ian Buksunski

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, lawyers and legal scholars have disagreed over how much resource redistribution to expect from federal courts and Congress in satisfaction of the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection. Of particular importance to this debate and to the nation given its kaleidoscopic history of inequality, is the question of racial redistribution of resources. A key dimension of that question is whether to accept the Supreme Court's limitation of equal protection to public actors' disparate treatment of members of different races or instead demand constitutional remedies for the racially disparate impact of public action.

For a substantial segment of the …

Standing Rock Thunderhawk Litigation Advances In Appeals Court And In Discovery Toward Trial, Columbia Center For Contemporary Critical Thought

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

New York, January 25, 2021 — Advancing yet another step toward trial set for August 2021, the Standing Rock Thunderhawk litigation is now in discovery against Morton County and TigerSwan, LLC, and briefed on qualified immunity at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Disability Admin: The Invisible Costs Of Being Disabled, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay comes in five parts. After this Introduction, Part I begins by briefly sketching the concept of life admin and setting out the understanding of disability that informs the ADA. Part II demonstrates the special burdens that admin places on people with disabilities and uses this argument to refine the social model of disability and clarify its implications. This theoretical insight lays the groundwork for Part III to fill a gap in the analysis of “reasonable” accommodation under Title I. This Part shows that, although courts have set out a cost-benefit analysis as the framework for determining the “reasonableness” …

Banning The Full-Face Veil: Freedom Of Religion And Non-Discrimination In The Human Rights Committee And The European Court Of Human Rights, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

What is, or should be, the relationship between claims of violations of the right to manifest one’s religion as a result of a generally applicable law or policy, and claims of indirect discrimination on grounds of religion?

The interrelationship of human rights protections is not a new question. Just as rights may conflict, rights may also overlap. The arrest of a human rights activist for expressing her views could violate both the prohibition against arbitrary detention and her freedom of expression. Excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators could violate their rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and …

The Southern Hospitals Report, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Candace Bond-Theriault, Amy Littlefield

Faculty Scholarship

When research for this report was first initiated, it was intended to answer a narrow question: is abortion care restricted at historically Protestant hospitals in the U.S. South? Strict limits on access to abortion at Catholic hospitals — and the ways in which this can obstruct and delay even emergency medical care — are already well documented in legal and medical literature and news media. In contrast, restrictions at Protestant hospitals have not been extensively studied and are not well understood. Our research sought to fill this gap in knowledge. We focused on the U.S. South because Catholic hospitals are …

Towards A Law Of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing For A Non-Sexist City”, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Noah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape …

We The People (Of Faith): The Supremacy Of Religious Rights In The Shadow Of A Pandemic, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Katherine M. Franke, Lilia Hadjiivanova

Faculty Scholarship

Late on a Friday evening in April 2021, over a year into the COVID-19 crisis, the Supreme Court issued a brief opinion that dramatically transformed constitutional law. In the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, the Court ruled in Tandon v. Newsom that state and local governments seeking to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus may not restrict in-person religious gatherings more rigorously than any other type of activity, such as shopping for groceries or working at a warehouse. The opinion was only one in a barrage of cases filed in federal courts across the country — many …