Law Commons^™

Race And Equality Across The Law School Curriculum: The Law Of Tax Exemption, David A. Brennen

Scholarly Works

What is the relevance of race to tax law? The race issues are apparent when one studies a subject like constitutional law. The Constitution concerns itself explicitly with such matters as defining rights of citizenship, allocating powers of government, and determining rights with respect to property. Given the history of our country -- with slavery followed by periods of de jure and de facto racial discrimination -- these constitutional law matters obviously must have racial dimensions.

Tax law, however, does not generally concern itself explicitly with matters of race. Tax law is often thought of as completely race neutral in …

The Network Economic Effects Of Whiteness, Brant T. Lee

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In this Essay I demonstrate that a network economic analysis of race provides an important and intuitive explanation of racial inequality. In short, Whiteness is Microsoft's Windows operating system, or the QWERTY keyboard, or the standard (non-metric) measurement system, and it is difficult to dislodge for many of the same reasons. Network effects explain how (1) the establishment of a dominant market standard can be contingent on historical context, and it is not necessarily derived from superior intrinsic merit, and (2) a dominant standard exhibits strong self-reinforcing characteristics that can maintain the dominance of the standard in perpetuity, even in …

Juror First Votes In Criminal Trials, Stephen P. Garvey, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Valerie P. Hans, Nicole L. Mott, G. Thomas Munsterman, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Our analysis of the voting behavior of over 3,000 jurors in felony cases tried in Los Angeles, Maricopa County, the District of Columbia, and the Bronx reveals that only in D.C. does a juror's race appear to relate to how he or she votes. African-American jurors in D.C. appear more apt to vote not guilty on the jury's first ballot in cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses. We find no evidence, however, that this effect survives into the jury's final verdict.

Brown'S Legacy Then And Now: Race And Law School Admissions Debates Continue After Nearly 70 Years, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Although this case represents a major victory in the battle for civil rights, the struggle against racism in education began some 20 years prior to Brown. During the 1930s and 1940s, at least seven African-American law school candidates aggressively challenged the unequal treatment of minority applicants in state courts, some eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Early successes in these cases lead to the more sweeping Brown decision, which then contributed to further law school admission policy reform. Discussion about the role of …

Introduction To Law, Ethics, And Affirmative Action In America, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article discusses the language of the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. The rhetoric and language that we use to address race is difficult, if not tortured. The article explains why Grutter should have been an easy case and a simple opinion, and the ways in which the final opinion was anything but simple.

Reform Or Retrenchment: Single Sex Education And The Construction Of Race And Gender, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As parents, policymakers, and educators search for solutions to the crisis in the nation's public schools, single sex education emerges time and again as a promising strategy, particularly for African American students. This article argues that, in order to comprehend fully the implications of single sex schooling in inner city schools, examining the history of sex-based and race-based segregation in education is essential.

History demonstrates that sex and racial segregation in education has supported gender and hierarchies and the attendant subordination of African Americans and white women. For example, when public education became available for Blacks, its primary purpose was …

Reparations For Apartheid's Victims: The Path To Reconciliation?, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

Despite the wisdom of separating the service and enforcement functions of our immigration bureau, the new tripartite system under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security risks fueling the "immigrant Arab as terrorist" stereotype, rather than helping to re-establish the reality that noncitizen terrorists, like U.S. citizen ones, are a rare species.

Retooling The Intent Requirement Under The Fourteenth Amendment, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Racial classifications carry the largest taint and require the most justification. Strict scrutiny-the level of scrutiny with which the remainder of the article will be concerned-requires that race-based differentiation serve a compelling state interest and be narrowly tailored to serve that interest, guaranteeing that the reason for the differentiation is extremely important and that the link between the means chosen to meet the ends is extremely tight. Though strict scrutiny is difficult to survive, it is triggered only when a state actor engages in intentional or purposeful racial discrimination. Controversy surrounds whether such a trigger is necessary. However, rather than …

Race, Face, And Rawls, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lessons From La Morenita Del Tepeyac, Ana M. Novoa

Faculty Articles

The concept that the powerful and wealthy have the absolute obligation to offer political, financial, and social liberation to those at the margins of society should have special importance to those who are lawyers and professionals of color. People spend considerable time working through, working in, and centered in the dominant, or caucasian European culture. The legal system regularly fails to see, accept, realize, or believe when truth is presented at the margins. Nonetheless, it is at the margins that true legal and personal reform take place. Even in a friendly environment, where people are encouraged to step outside the …

Workplace Mediation: The First-Phase, Private Caucus In Individual Discrimination Disputes, Emily M. Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

Two Wrongs Make A Right: Hybrid Claims Of Discrimination, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

This Note reinterprets and recontextualizes the pronouncement in Employment Division v. Smith (Smith II) that exemptions from generally applicable laws will not be granted unless claims of free exercise are accompanied by the assertion of another constitutional right. It argues that when Arab American Muslims, and others who are of minority race and religion, bring claims for exemption from generally applicable laws on the basis of free exercise and equal protection principles, they ought to be able to invoke Smith II's hybridity exception, thus meriting heightened judicial scrutiny and increased solicitude from courts.

United States' Trade Policy And The Exportation Of United States' Culture, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The United States Trade Representative and the policies that he (or she) attempt to impose on our trading partners have the serious and perhaps unintended effect of destroying local culture particularly in the area of film production.

Diversity And The Practice Of Interest Assessment, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Is There A Place For Race As A Legal Concept, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

What does "race" mean? The word "race" is omnipresent in American social, political, and legal discourse. The concept of "race" is central to contemporary debate about affirmative action, racial profiling, hate crimes, health inequities, and many other issues. Nevertheless, the best research in genetics, medicine, and the social sciences reveals that the concept of "race" is elusive and has no reliable definition.

This article argues that "race" is an unnecessary and potentially pernicious concept. As evidenced by the history of slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, and other human tragedies, the idea of "race" can perpetuate prejudices and misconceptions and serve as …

The Racial Gap In Ability: From The Fifteenth Century To Grutter And Gratz, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Justice O'Connor’s opinion for the United States Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan. Beneficiaries of affirmative action clearly meet the necessary qualifications for admissions to selective colleges, universities, and graduate programs. But, the justifications for affirmative action articulated by Justice O'Connor implicitly recognized that underrepresented minorities with a history of discrimination are not as academically qualified as their non-Hispanic white (and Asian counterparts). Their inclusion in affirmative action plans is based on the belief that they provide enough educational and non-educational benefits to offset their academic shortcomings.

There are measurable …

Grutter V. Bollinger: This Generation's Brown V. Board Of Education, Michelle Adams

Articles

At first blush, Grutter appears to be a deviation from the body of the Court's recent affirmative action jurisprudence: it says "yes" where the other cases said "no." But it is not so clear that Grutter is a deviation from current law. Instead, it might be seen as consistent with it, in that the justification for the racial preference recognized in Grutter transcended the justifications offered in the previous cases, and the method used to achieve that end, "race as a factor," diffused rather than highlighted race. From this perspective, Grutter addressed several concerns that had troubled the Court for …

Comparing Remedies For School Desegregation And Employment Discrimination, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: Ten years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, now a symbol of the beginning of the end of racial discrimination, Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII opened the workplace to all races and women in ways that had not previously existed. While discrimination in the workplace has not disappeared in the forty years since Title VII's enactment, one sees minorities and women in a greater variety of jobs, and at higher levels, than one would have seen a generation ago. The promise of Brown, however, has not been …

Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Under the doctrine of reverse incorporation, generally identified with the Supreme Court's decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, equal protection binds the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. Since Bolling, however, the courts have almost never granted relief to litigants claiming unconstitutional racial discrimination by the federal government. Courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on nonracial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against racial minorities, Boiling has virtually no …

Race As Proxy: Situational Racism And Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

In our society, race can act as a proxy for a long list of characteristics, qualities, and statuses. For people of color, the most powerful of these associations have too often been negative, and have carried with them correspondingly negative consequences. We often link color with undesirable personal qualities such as laziness, incompetence, and hostility, as well as disfavored political viewpoints such as lack of patriotism or disloyalty to the United States. Race even acts as a proxy for susceptibility to some diseases. Medical professionals so often diagnose schizophrenia in blacks, for example, that the association has come full circle, …

Understanding The Mark: Race, Stigma, And Equality In Context, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

In its Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, the Supreme Court regards intentional discrimination as the principal source of racial injury in the United States. In this Article, R.A. Lenhardt argues that racial stigma, not intentional discrimination, constitutes the main source of racial harm and that courts must take the social science insight that most racialized conduct or thought is unconscious, rather than intentional, into account in their constitutional analyses of acts or policies challenged on the grounds of race. Drawing on the social science work of Erving Goffman and the ground-breaking work of Charles H. Lawrence, Professor Lenhardt argues that courts should …

A Thirteenth Amendment Framework For Combating Racial Profiling, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Law enforcement officers’ use of race to single persons out for criminal suspicion (“racial profiling”) is the subject of much scrutiny and debate. This Article provides a new understanding of racial profiling. While scholars have correctly concluded that racial profiling should be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and existing federal statutes, this Article contends that the use of race as a proxy for criminality is also a badge and incident of slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Racial profiling is not only a denial of the right to equal treatment, but …

Grutter And Gratz: A Critical Analysis, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article will analyze the Grutter and Gratz opinions, especially Justice O'Connor's important opinion for the majority in Grutter, and will consider the significance of these decisions in terms of university admissions policy, justifications for racial preferences, and equal protection doctrine. The article will conclude that the Court's defense of the use of racial preferences does not square well with the Powell opinion in Bakke on which it relied so heavily. It will suggest that the Court could have offered a more persuasive explanation for the result it reached but probably felt precluded by precedent from doing so.

'But I Thought He Had A Gun' - Race And Police Use Of Deadly Force, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

It is undisputed that Blacks are disproportionately represented among the victims of police shootings. In a comprehensive review of the literature on police use of deadly force, James Fyfe reports that every study that has examined this issue [has] found that blacks are represented disproportionately among those at the wrong end of police guns. Although Blacks represent approximately 13 percent of the population in the United States, in parts of the country they constitute 60 to 85 percent of the victims of police shootings. On average, Blacks are more than six times as likely as Whites to be shot by …

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other: Analogizing Ageism To Racism In Employment Discrimination Cases, Rhonda M. Reaves

Journal Publications

The development of anti-discrimination law in the employment context was designed and applied with the elimination of race discrimination in mind. The expansion of anti-discrimination law to older workers has taken place within a legal system that encourages groups to present themselves as "similar to" African Americans. This article explores the difficulty of applying general anti-discrimination principles to the uniquely positioned group of older workers.

Brown Did Not Fail America, America Failed Brown, Patricia A. Broussard

Journal Publications

It is my belief that the failure of Brown v. Board of Education and the continuing problem of race in America stems from the fact that America never took ownership of the promise of Brown, and instead, viewed the decision purely in terms of desegregation, as opposed to integration. Consequently, integration has remained a concept instead of an action item. Implicit in this notion of desegregation is the idea that the races sit next to one another, while the concept of integration carries with it a much heavier burden. It appears that the races have never made a personal …

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.

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.