Law Commons^™

A Partial History Of Umkc School Of Law: The 'Minority Report', Robert C. Downs, Harry D. Pener, Steven D. Gilley

Faculty Works

In the modern era efforts at recruitment, selection, admission and retention of minorities to law school, while not always consistent, began and now continue to emphasize not only the manner in which a truly diverse student body enhances and enriches the learning experience of all students, but also the need to remedy the inequities and indignities visited by past discrimination. Any perspective on this law school's experience in minority recruitment, admissions and retention, necessitates at least an acknowledgment of the historical context in which the law school began and the social-political climate in which it developed. The announcement of the …

Supervisors Individually Liable Under The Iowa Civil Rights Act, Tory L. Lucas

Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using federal law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as a model, the State of Iowa enacted the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1965 (ICRA) to strengthen anti-discrimination laws on a state level. But the ICRA was not simply a carbon copy of Title VII; instead, the ICRA contained its own unique language, which provided state-specific distinctions to further the interests of Iowans. For thirty-four years, it was an open question as to whether the ICRA authorized individual liability against supervisory employees — as opposed to only employers — for unlawful discrimination. In Vivian v. Madison, 601 …

Use Of Race In "Stop-And-Frisk": Stereotypical Beliefs Linger, But How Far Can The Police Go?, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The power of police to detain persons for a brief period to investigate suspected criminal activity--commonly known as “stop-and-frisk”--has always been one of the most contentious issues in law enforcement. Although there is general consensus that street stops are an important weapon in crime prevention, the belief has always existed that stop-and-frisk tactics are often used indiscriminately and abusively against minority groups.

The Case Against Private Disparate Impact Suits, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

This article argues that the Third Circuit, and the courts that have implicitly approved private disparate impact suits, have erred in construing Title VI to permit private plaintiffs to sue federally funded entities for discrimination based on disparate impact alone. From a policy standpoint, permitting private disparate impact suits is a bad idea, for the threat of such suits will lead to deterrence of actions and decisions that have incidental disparate effects but are, on the whole, good.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.: Who Will Carry The Baton?, F. Michael Higginbotham, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

It was a rainy November day during Thanksgiving weekend of 1997. The scene was the Washington, D.C., childhood home of Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.'s beloved wife. Our assignment was to assist in the removal, packing, and transport of a few prized family heirlooms that were to be taken to their home in Newton, Massachusetts.

On the early morning drive into Washington, D.C., our conversation was mostly idle chit-chat. Little did we know that the circumstances of the day would lead to an amazing set of discussions, the importance of which we could never have imagined at …

Discrimination And Business Regulation (The Supreme Court And Local Government Law: The 1999-2000 Term), Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Shape Of The Michigan River As Viewed From The Land Of Sweatt V. Painter And Hopwood: Comments On Lempert, Chambers, And Adam's Study Of The University Of Michigan Law School's Minority Graduates, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The piece considers the Lempert, Chambers, Adams study of Michigan's law graduates of color from the vantage point of the history of The University of Texas's law school's history.

Colorism: A Darker Shade Of Pale, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Banks argues that colorism, skin tone discrimination against dark-skinned but not light-skinned blacks, constitutes a form of race-based discrimination. Skin tone discrimination coexists with more traditional forms of race discrimination that impact all blacks without regard to skin tone and phenotype, yet courts seem unwilling to recognize this point. Professor Banks uses employment discrimination cases to illustrate some courts' willingness to acknowledge subtler forms of race-based discrimination, like skin tone discrimination, for white ethnic and Latina/o plaintiffs, but not for black plaintiffs. The inability of courts to fashion coherent approaches to colorism claims involving black claimants …

Insurance Contracts And Judicial Decisions Over Whether Insurers Must Defend Insureds That Violate Constitutional And Civil Rights: An Historical And Empirical Review Of Federal And State Court Declaratory Judgments 1900-2000, Willy E. Rice

Faculty Articles

Empirical findings suggest that extralegal factors, such as geographic location, ethnicity, gender, disability, perceived sexual orientation, and age of third-party victims, influence judicial decisions as to whether liability carriers must defend or reimburse the costs of defending various lawsuits. After the introduction, Part II of this article presents a brief discussion of state and federal declaratory judgment statutes and of the public policy behind liability and indemnification insurance contracts. Part III examines the origin and scope of insurers’ duty to defend, duty to pay legal expenses, and duty to reimburse litigation costs when third-party victims sue policyholders. Part IV argues …

The Power Of The Treasury: Racial Discrimination, Public Policy And "Charity" In Contemporary Society, David A. Brennen

Scholarly Works

The Treasury Department is empowered to enforce “established public policy” with respect to tax-exempt charities. Under this public policy power, the Treasury has revoked the tax-exempt charitable status of organizations that discriminated against blacks, organizations whose members engaged in civil disobedience against war, and organizations involved in illegal activity. The Treasury interprets its public policy power as applying to any activity that violates clear public policy. Thus, presumably, the Treasury could use this power to deny tax-exempt charitable status to an organization that engages in conduct that violates assisted suicide laws, anti-abortion laws, or other sufficiently “established” public policies.

The …

The Bill Of Rights And The Constitution: Facing The Challenge Of The Future, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Employment Law Decisions Of The October 1999 Term Of The Supreme Court: Review And Analysis, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

The five employment law cases decided by the Supreme Court during the October 1999 Term bring to nineteen the total number of significant employment law cases decided by the Court during the last three terms. The October 1997 Term cases were marked by primary focus on employer liability, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for sexual harassment by supervisors. Primary focus during the 1998 Term was on disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and on the constitutionality of actions brought by private parties against states under the Fair Labor Standards Act …

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …

¡Viva La Evolución!: Recognizing Unconscious Motive In Title Vii, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article analyzes the different proof mechanisms developed under Title VII discriminatory treatment doctrine, demonstrating their ability to identify unconscious, as well as conscious, discriminatory behavior. It demonstrates that soon after its enactment Title VII began to evolve, expanding its reach to unconscious discrimination. Although in many instances courts were unaware of this expansion, courts appear to have followed their intuition to further the broad remedial and preventive purposes of the statute. In response to the evolution and to the courts' failure to articulate a justification for their decisions, a counter-evolution is currently occurring, with many courts attempting rigidly to …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance Law in the years 1999 and 2000.

Race And The Right To Vote After Rice V. Cayetano, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Last Term, the Supreme Court relied on Gomillion [v. Lightfoot] to hold that Hawaii, like Alabama before it, had segregated voters by race in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The state law at issue in Rice v. Cayetano provided that only "Hawaiians" could vote for the trustees of the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs ("OHA"), a public agency that oversees programs designed to benefit the State's native people. Rice holds that restricting the OHA electorate to descendants of the 1778 inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands embodied a racial classification that effectively "fenc[ed] out whole classes of ...ci tizens from decisionmaking …

Comparing Race And Sex Discrimination In Custody Cases, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …

Davis V. Monroe County Board Of Education: The Unresolved Questions,, Joan E. Schaffner

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article focuses on the recent trend of permitting liability of schools when students are sexually harassed, which the Supreme Court has only recognized for twenty years. I examine the majority and dissenting opinions of the Court’s most recent decision about this topic, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education and analyze three questions brought to light by Davis and Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District. These questions are: (1) what qualifies as “actionable” sexual harassment, (2) who must receive notice, and (3) what satisfies the “deliberate indifference” standard from Davis. The answers to these questions are just …

Employment Discrimination In Higher Education, Oren R. Griffin, Thomas P. Hustoles

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

During 1999, the most significant development in employment discrimination law involving colleges and universities, by a large margin, was a series of cases affirming that Eleventh Amendment immunity from private money damage claims brought pursuant to various federal employment discrimination statutes applied to state colleges and universities. This development eventually culminated in the Supreme Court's year 2000 decision in Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents.' Numerous other interesting decisions were rendered that, although not creating any bold new law, either affirmed trends in past cases, or illustrated important practical implications for generally predicting judicial outcomes given certain fact patterns. After …

Charitable Choice And The Critics, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

First, the statute prohibits the government from discriminating with regard to religion when determining whether providers are eligible to deliver social services under these programs. Second, the statute imposes on government the duty not to intrude into the religious autonomy of faith-based providers. Third, the statute imposes on both government and participating FBOs the duty not to abridge certain rights of the ultimate beneficiaries of these programs. I will touch on these three principles below, and do so in reverse order.

Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law, Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Some commentators, perhaps a minority, have argued that the Equal Protection Clause should be read to require the use of race-conscious policies when necessary to eradicate or remedy the most serious consequences of racial inequality. Others have argued that such policies, though not required, should be permitted when duly adopted by the majority of the populace to promote the interests of an historically oppressed minority. Still others, including now a majority of the Supreme Court, take the view that the Constitution forbids virtually all explicit uses of race by the state.

In this Essay, we do not enter this debate …

The Bank Manager Always Rings Twice: Stereotyping In Equity After Garcia, Richard Haigh, Samantha Hepburn

Articles & Book Chapters

Stereotyping is an inevitable part of human interaction. Everyone is judged, to some extent, according to individual perception, with reference to such factors as physical appearance, social position, marital status, language facility and ethnicity. It is not possible to eradicate stereotyping because it is a natural, automatic - sometimes instinctive - human response. In a legal context, however, there is a need for some mechanisms to control the degree to which stereotyping influences judicial decision-making so as to ensure that justice is administered in as neutral and impartial a manner as possible. Whether it be in the determination of facts …

Discrimination Cases In The Supreme Court’S 1998 Term, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

In the Supreme Court's 1997 Term, the Supreme Court had decided a record number of statutory discrimination cases. However, that record was exceeded in the Supreme Court's 1998 Term with the Court addressing issues arising under Title VII, which covers discrimination in employment; Title IX, which covers discrimination in schools; and most significantly, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. Overall, the term scored significant victories for employers who were given considerable latitude to set their own physical characteristic standards and who were, to a large extent, immunized from liability for punitive damages. There was an …

The Power Of The Treasury: Racial Discrimination, Public Policy, And "Charity" In Contemporary Society, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Treasury Department is empowered to enforce “established public policy” with respect to tax-exempt charities. Under this public policy power, the Treasury has revoked the tax-exempt charitable status of organizations that discriminated against blacks, organizations whose members engaged in civil disobedience against war, and organizations involved in illegal activity. The Treasury interprets its public policy power as applying to any activity that violates clear public policy. Thus, presumably, the Treasury could use this power to deny tax-exempt charitable status to an organization that engages in conduct that violates assisted suicide laws, anti-abortion laws, or other sufficiently “established” public policies.

The …