Law Commons^™

Justice For All: Demanding Accessibility For Underrepresented Communities In The Law: A Roger Williams University Law Review, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic …

The New Tipping Point: Disruptive Politics And Habituating Equality, Sarah E. Waldeck, Rachel D. Godsil

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Essay argues that the events of 2020 opened a window of political opportunity to implement policies aimed at dismantling structural injustice and systemic racism. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Mills and political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward, we argue that the Black Lives Matter Movement constituted the “disruptive politics” necessary to shift dispositions of many in the United States toward racial equity by interrupting the white “epistemologies of ignorance.” Moreover, because policies that correct structural injustice are beneficial for people across race, even those whose hearts and minds remained closed may embrace legislative policies that function to dismantle …

Home Equity: Rethinking Race And Federal Housing Policy, Sarah E. Waldeck, Rachel D. Godsil

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Neighborhoods shape every element of our lives. Where we live determines economic opportunities; our exposure to police and pollution; and the availability of positive amenities for a healthy life. Home inequity—both financial and racial—is not accidental. Federal government programs have armed white people with agency to construct “white” spaces while stigmatizing “Black” spaces. The urgency of addressing structural injustice in housing has been laid bare by police-involved shootings and the disparate death rates linked to COVID-19.

Using political philosopher Tommy Shelbie’s theory of corrective justice, this Article explores the historical and present-day harms that need to be rectified and then …

Home Equity: Rethinking Race And Federal Housing Policy, Rachel D. Godsil, Sarah E. Waldeck

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Neighborhoods shape every element of our lives. Where we live determines economic opportunities; our exposure to police and pollution; and the availability of positive amenities for a healthy life. Home inequity—both financial and racial—is not accidental. Federal government programs have armed white people with agency to construct “white” spaces while stigmatizing “Black” spaces. The urgency of addressing structural injustice in housing has been laid bare by police-involved shootings and the disparate death rates linked to COVID-19.

Using political philosopher Tommy Shelbie’s theory of corrective justice, this Article explores the historical and present-day harms that need to be rectified and then …

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 …

The Pieces Of Housing Integration, Kristen Barnes

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding the enactment of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, accomplishing racially-integrated housing across the United States remains an unattained goal. The costs associated with this failure are innumerable. Black Americans have endured harms in many areas, including health, education, wealth, and employment. More broadly, the nation has incurred considerable socioeconomic and political costs. In the interdisciplinary book, Moving Toward Integration, authors Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff analyze why the promise of racially-integrated housing remains unfulfilled and identify noteworthy strategies for changing course. Engaging with their arguments, this article highlights several structural impediments to altering racial housing …

In West Philadelphia Born And Raised Or Moving To Bel-Air? Racial Steering As A Consequence Of Using Race Data On Real Estate Websites, Nadiyah J. Humber

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disabling Fascism: A Struggle For The Last Laugh In Trump’S America, Madeleine M. Plasencia

Articles

Six years before the start of the Second World War and seven months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, the German government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” The moral depravity that started as a sterilization program targeting “useless eaters” and lives “unworthy of life” degenerated into a “euthanasia” program that murdered at least 250,000 people with mental and physical dis/abilities as an “open secret” until 1941, when the Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Count von Galen, delivered a sermon protesting the killing of “unproductive people.”2 Although the Trump Administration has not yet driven …

Supbrime Lending/Foreclosure Crisis, Jacob Rugh

Faculty Publications

Subprime mortgage lending in the USA rose alongside home prices and lasted about 15 years, ending abruptly in late 2007, setting off a national foreclosure crisis. Between 2007 and 2012 there were 9 to 12 million foreclosures filings and 4 to 5 million completed foreclosures. The ensuing foreclosure crisis stemmed more from falling home prices but its unequal distribution across society by race and space was also the product of legacies of exclusion and a shared consensus on the expansion of mortgage credit and home ownership. Modest federal interventions to buffer communities and homeowners from the crisis likely reinforced the …

Unjust Cities? Gentrification, Integration, And The Fair Housing Act, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

What does gentrification mean for fair housing? This article considers the possibility that gentrification should be celebrated as a form of integration alongside a darker narrative that sees gentrification as necessarily unstable and leading to inequality or displacement of lower-income, predominantly of color, residents. Given evidence of both possibilities, this article considers how the Fair Housing Act might be deployed to minimize gentrification’s harms while harnessing some of the benefits that might attend integration and movement of higher-income residents to cities. Ultimately, the article urges building on the fair housing approach but employing a broader set of tools to advance …

Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …

Laying The Foundation: The Private Rental Market And Affordable Housing, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The private rental housing market plays a critical, and often overlooked, role in shaping the lives of the poor and the surrounding community. This brief Article presents Matthew Desmond’s rich portrayal of low-income tenants and their landlords in his groundbreaking new book, Evicted, which shows how poor housing conditions and cycles of eviction impact poor families. The Article, which also draws upon Courtney Anderson’s work connecting housing instability with problematic student turnover at an elementary school, highlights the importance of story-telling. Without some sort of subsidy to cover the gap between the ability of the poor to pay for housing …

Counting Casualties In Communities Hit Hardest By The Foreclosure Crisis, Matthew Rossman

Faculty Publications

Recent statistics suggest that the U.S. housing market has largely recovered from the Foreclosure Crisis. A closer look reveals that the country is composed not of one market, but of thousands of smaller, local housing markets that have experienced dramatically uneven levels of recovery. Repeated waves of home mortgage foreclosures inundated certain communities (the “Hardest Hit Communities”), causing their housing markets to break rather than bend and resulting in what amounts to a permanent transition to a lower value plateau. Homeowners in these predominantly low and middle income and/or minority communities who endured the Foreclosure Crisis lost significant equity in …

Can't We Be Your Neighbor? Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, And The Resistance To Blacks As Neighbors, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was designed to address discrimination in one of our most intimate space — neighborhoods. Fifty-six years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, Americans remain fiercely resistant to the concept of neighborhood integration. This Article uses an unlikely event, the killing of Trayvon Martin, to discuss one manifestation of that resistance with disturbing implications.

Grandma In The White House: Legal Support For Intergenerational Caregiving, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Marian Robinson’s status as the live-in First Grandmother is an example of a growing trend in the United States - the multigenerational family. The 2010 United States Census Data reflects that the number of households with multiple generations living under one roof has increased by 25% this decade. Mrs. Robinson also reflects another new development in American families: grandparents helping their adult children with caregiving. More than 70% of grandparents are taking care of their grandkids on a regular basis, and 13% are primary caretakers. Many grandparents treat their role as caregiver like a profession, and they sacrifice jobs, residences, …

Overcoming Structural Barriers To Integrated Housing: A Back-To-The-Future Reflection On The Fair Housing Act's "Affirmatively Further" Mandate, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A key goal of the 1968 Fair Housing Act (“FHA”), which was passed as an immediate response to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, was to replace the ghettos with “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” It hasn’t happened. Today, more than four decades after the FHA’s passage, “residential segregation remains a key feature of America’s urban landscape,” continuing to condemn new generations of minorities to a second–class set of opportunities and undercutting a variety of national goals for all citizens.

But recent developments dealing with an underutilized provision of the FHA – § 3608’s mandate that federal housing funds …

Community Economic Development And The Paradox Of Power, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article starts from the premise that poverty is a growing problem in the United States. Intergenerational poverty, the entrenchment of a class of very poor people, is a major sub set of that problem and is tied very closely to the issue of race. The author claims that missing in the fight by the poor and their allies against stratified poverty is the creation and utilization of power. This paper examines the disparate ways in which commentators have defined power. It suggests that those seeking to obtain power must understand the concept’s varying meanings and direct their activities to …

A Conversation With President Obama: A Dialogue About Poverty, Race, And Class In Black America, Joseph Karl Grant

Journal Publications

The date is November 13, 2012.1 Just mere days ago, I received the invitation of a lifetime. Last night, I arrived in Washington, D.C. I am staying in the Hay-Adams Hotel on the third floor. I still cannot believe the extent of my life's journey. I have just been summoned to the White House by second term President-elect Barack Obama, who defeated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President on November 6, 2012. The 2012 Presidential Election was a hard-fought battle between Barack Obama on the Democratic side, and Mitt Romney on Republican side. The election was a like the …

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 …

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, And Housing Discrimination, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

In the face of federal inability to effectively police our national borders and to remove unauthorized immigrants, many local governments have recently sought to take measures into their own hands by passing anti-illegal immigrant ("AII") ordinances. These ordinances usually contain a combination of provisions restricting housing, employment, and public benefits for unauthorized immigrants, among other things.This Article focuses on AII provisions that are targeted at private rental housing, which typically take the form of sanctions against landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants.

The Right To The City, Ngai Pindell

Scholarly Works

The identity and character of cities in America have been profoundly influenced by race. In the past, laws mandating the segregation of African American and white urban residents through racially discriminatory housing and lending policies created racial geographic boundaries within cities and between cities and suburbs. The impact of this racial segregation in cities can be seen in the creation and persistence of an urban African American underclass in some cities as well as many urban neighborhoods marked by racial homogeneity and economic underinvestment.

The racial climate in the United States in more recent years has been decidedly different. Overt …

A Domestic Right Of Return?: Race, Rights, And Residency In New Orleans In The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article begins with a critical account of what occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This critique serves as the backdrop for a discussion of whether there are international laws or norms that give poor, black Katrina victims the right to return to and resettle in New Orleans. In framing this discussion, this article first briefly explores some of the housing deprivations suffered by Katrina survivors that have led to widespread displacement and dispossession. The article then discusses two of the chief barriers to the return of poor blacks to New Orleans: the broad perception of a race-crime nexus …

Why Do Landlords Still Discriminate (And What Can Be Done About It)?, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Let's say you have a serious, though not life-threatening, medical condition, such as a non-malignant growth in your back that causes considerable pain and impairs your ability to walk. At first, your doctor tells you there is no cure, but then one day, a new drug specifically designed to eliminate this kind of problem is approved. You take this drug, but notice no change. With your doctor's encouragement, you continue to take the drug, hoping that its cumulative effect will achieve the desired result. Twenty years go by with no relief. Then, your doctor tells you that a much stronger …

Oral Argument In Meyer V. Holley (No. 01-1120), Robert G. Schwemm, Douglas G. Benedon, Malcolm L. Stewart

Law Faculty Advocacy

The matter of Meyer v. Holley, 537 U.S. 280 (2003) was argued before the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday, December 3, 2002. Professor Robert G. Schwemm argued on behalf of the Respondents. This document is a transcript of the oral argument.

The Future Of Fair Housing Litigation, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article is a revised version of the keynote address I gave at a conference entitled "Where is Fair Housing Headed in This Decade?" sponsored by The John Marshall Law School in the Fall of 1992. As its title implies, the conference focused on the future of fair housing, and my address dealt with certain developments that I felt were not only observable in the early years of the 1990s, but were also likely to be important in the remaining years of this decade.

Many of these developments—such as the growing role of the federal government in fair housing enforcement …

Private Enforcement And The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The first section of the Fair Housing Act declares that "[i]t is the policy of the United States to provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States." If the United States has been officially committed to providing for fair housing for the past 20 years, why is segregated housing still the prevailing norm throughout our nation? Why does discrimination still regularly occur when minority homeseekers venture into white areas? Why are the opportunities for living in stable, integrated neighborhoods only marginally better now than they were a generation ago in the days of Lyndon Johnson, Everett McKinley …

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 …

Discriminatory Effect And The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article addresses the question of whether housing practices that produce discriminatory effects violate the Fair Housing Act. The language and legislative history of the statute are examined, the analogy to employment discrimination law is explored, and the principal Title VIII cases are considered in an effort to determine just what racial discrimination is under the Fair Housing Act. This analysis leads to a suggested approach for evaluating Title VIII cases that are based on discriminatory effect, including how such an effect may be shown by the plaintiff and what significance such a showing should have in terms of the …