Law Commons^™

Symposium: Defining Race: Colorblind Diversity: The Changing Significance Of "Race" In The Post-Bakke Era, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

In 1954, fifty-eight years after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court was afforded another opportunity to reverse the “separate but equal doctrine” in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Brown I). Brown I was a consolidation of five civil rights cases from the District of Columbia, Delaware, Kansas, Virginia, and South Carolina that attempted to change race relations in America by affording African Americans a piece of the pie. A few other cases soon followed Brown I. In 1963, Goss v. Board of Education of Knoxville proclaimed that any program that structurally appeared to maintain segregation would …

Eliminating Racial Discrimination In The Subprime Mortgage Market: Proposals For Fair Lending Reform, Winnie F. Taylor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dr. King And The Battle For Hearts And Minds, Wendy B. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court held that laws requiring dual public school systems, separated solely on the basis of race, violated the rights afforded to African American children under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Due Process clauses. Brown v. Board of Education marked the beginning of a judicial assault on what the Court in Loving v. Virginia called statutory schemes and state court decisions that served as “an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy.” Both Chief Justice Earl Warren and Dr. King recognized that the practice of White Supremacy did more than keep people separated. In Brown, …

Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About The Internment Of Japanese Americans, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment from 1942 through 2007. It argues that while later film narratives, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony. Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template … Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities — hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori’s documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon (2004), …

Equality And Sorority During The Decade After Brown, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Multilayered Racism: Courts' Continued Resistance To Colorism Claims, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Troubled Waters: Mid-Twentieth Century American Society On "Trial" In The Films Of John Waters, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article Professor Banks argues that what makes many of filmmaker John Waters early films so subversive is his use of the “white-trash” body—people marginalized by and excluded from conventional white America—as countercultural heroes. He uses the white trash body as a surrogate for talk about race and sexuality in the early 1960s. I argue that in many ways Waters’ critiques of mid-twentieth century American society reflect the societal changes that occurred in the last forty years of that century. These societal changes resulted from the civil rights, gay pride, student, anti-war and women’s movements, all of which used …

Brief For Amicus Curiae David A. Super: Supporting Plaintiff-Appellants Urging Reversal, In Howard V. Hawkins (2009)., David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has consistently held that congressional intent governs whether federal statutes are privately enforceable. Where Congress has been silent, a line of cases culminating in Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe, 536 U.S. 273 (2002), prescribes a formula for inferring congressional intent from the structure of a statute. Here, however, Congress has not been silent: the Food and Nutrition Act specifies the amount of retroactive benefits that may be awarded households in “any judicial action arising under this Act” and makes certain records of state agencies “available for review in any action filed by a household to enforce any provision …

Woman Of Valor, Sherrilyn A. Ifill

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Burning Shoes And The Spirit World: The Charade Of Neutrality, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Abolishing The Time Tax On Voting, Elora Mukherjee

Faculty Scholarship

A “time tax” is a government policy or practice that forces one citizen to pay more in time to vote compared with her fellow citizens. While few have noticed the scope of the problem, data indicate that, due primarily to long lines, hundreds of thousands if not millions of voters are routinely unable to vote in national elections as a result of the time tax, and that the problem disproportionately affects minority voters and voters in the South. This Article documents the problem and offers a roadmap for legal and political strategies for solving it. The Article uses as a …

The Notsogolden Years Why Hate Crime Legislation Is Failing A Vulnerable Aging Population, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Can We Talk? How Triggers For Unconscious Racism Strengthen The Importance Of Dialogue, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Qualified Immunity And Constitutional Avoidance, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s elimination of the subjective element of the qualified immunity defense in constitutional tort cases had the unanticipated side effect of creating the potential for constitutional stagnation. To avoid this stagnation and although it appears to violate the general practice of constitutional avoidance, in Saucier v. Katz, the Court held that federal courts must decide the constitutional merits before deciding whether the defendant is immune from damages relief. Lower court judges and some Supreme Court Justices were unhappy at the prospect of addressing constitutional issues in all immunities cases, especially in those cases in which it was clear …

Dissident Citizen, The Symposium: Sexuality & Gender Law: Assessing The Field, Envisioning The Future, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

We have arrived at a crossroads in terms of the intersection between law, sexuality, and globalization. Historically, and even today, the majority of accounts of GLBT migration tend to remain focused on “a narrative of movement from repression to freedom, or a heroic journey undertaken in search of liberation.” Within this narrative, the United States is usually cast as a land of opportunity and liberation, a place that represents freedom from discrimination and economic opportunity. But this narrative also elides the complexity that erupts from grappling with the reality that many other jurisdictions outside of the United States can be …

Marriage As Monopoly: History, Tradition, Incrementalism, And The Marriage/Civil Union Distinction, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

History and tradition have taken a prominent place as favored rationales for the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. Incrementalism likewise has been invoked to suggest that states can permissibly move “one step at a time” to redress the unequal status of same-sex couples, including by creating a civil union/marriage regime instead of providing marriage for all. Yet constitutional jurisprudence is clear that neither longevity nor tradition alone can justify the continuation of a discriminatory rule. This Article asks, then, what work these rationales perform in the marriage/civil union jurisprudence and debate, given their inadequacy from a doctrinal standpoint.

The …

Do We Care Enough About Racial Inequality? Reflections On The River Runs Dry, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

In response to Kimberly West-Faulcon, The River Runs Dry: When Title VI Trumps State Anti–Affirmative Action Laws, 157 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1075 (2009)

You’Ve Come A Long Way, Baby: Two Waves Of Juvenile Justice Reforms As Seen From Jena, Louisiana, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the origins and impact of two modern reforms that dramatically rewrote the law governing the prosecution of juvenile offenders: the Warren Court’s due process decisions and the juvenile justice legislation of the 1990s. Beginning with the prosecution of Mychal Bell, who was one of the Jena 6, the article provides a broader historical and analytical framework to assess the procedural protections available to juveniles charged with serious offenses, particularly the adequacy of the remedies to challenge prosecutorial discretion and disparate treatment by the prosecution.

The article first describes the key role race played in the Warren Court’s …

Making Good On Good Intentions: The Critical Role Of Motivation In Reducing Implicit Workplace Discrimination, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination in today’s workplace is largely implicit, making it ambiguous and often very difficult to prove. Employment discrimination scholars have proposed reforms of Title VII to make implicit discrimination easier to establish in court and to expand the kinds of situations to which liability attaches. The reform proposals reflect a broad consensus that strong legal norms are crucial to addressing the problem. Yet it is mistaken to assume that strengthening plaintiffs’ hands in implicit discrimination cases will necessarily achieve the long-term goal of reducing its occurrence. This Article brings together several strands of social science research showing that (1) implicit …

Unshackling Speech (Book Review), David L. Lange

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing, Brian C. Anderson and Adam D. Thierer, A Manifesto for Media Freedom (2008))

Intimate Discrimination: The State's Role In The Accidents Of Sex And Love, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state's role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination – through official policies such as segregation – to prohibiting discrimination – through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize.

At this challenging moment, the intimate domain presents a vital terrain for study in two main ways. First, conceptually, studying the intimate domain permits new insights into discrimination and the law's identity categories, because people are …

Integration, Reconstructed, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines Parents Involved for the light it sheds on integration's continuing relevance to educational and social equity. Part I examines the story of school integration in Jefferson County and shows how this largely successful metropolitan integration plan challenges claims of racial integration's futility. Part II puts forward the empirical evidence that plaintiffs in Parents Involved used in seeking to establish that school boards have a compelling interest in promoting racial integration and avoiding the harm of racially isolated schools. This part argues that the empirical case for racial integration, while not without limitations, moves beyond stigmatization, psychological harm, …