Law Commons^™

Compensatory Damages In Federal Fair Housing Cases, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The federal fair housing laws became effective in 1968. Since then, courts have often awarded damages to victims of housing discrimination, but their decisions have provided little guidance for assessing the amount of such awards. There is a great range of awards, with some courts awarding only nominal damages of $1 and others setting awards of over $20,000. Compounding the problem is the difficulty of measuring the principal element of damages claimed by most plaintiffs in fair housing cases, noneconomic emotional harm or other forms of intangible injury.

Rarely is the basis for the amount of the court's award satisfactorily …

Quantification Of Federal Reserved Rights—Litigation, Legislation Or Negotiation? [Outline], John Undem Carlson

Water Resources Allocation: Laws and Emerging Issues: A Short Course (Summer Conference, June 8-11)

1 page.

The Role Of Comity In The Law Of Federal Courts, Michael L. Wells

Scholarly Works

Considerations of comity often require federal courts to defer to state courts when federal issues could be raised in state proceedings. Contexts in which such deference is required include Younger abstention, habeus corpus exhaustion and procedural default, and Pullman and Burford abstention. In this Article, Professor Wells demonstrates that the Supreme Court's opinions fail to make a distinction between cases where comity requires restraint and those where it does not. The Court's motive in invoking comity is not to decrease access to federal courts, but instead to strike a compromise between the individual's interest in a federal forum and the …