Law Commons^™

Segregative-Effect Claims Under The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Two types of discriminatory-effect claims have been recognized under the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA): (1) disparate impact; and (2) segregative effect. Neither requires a showing of illegal intent, and both, according to a 2013 regulation promulgated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are subject to the same three-step burden-shifting proof scheme, which assigns the plaintiff the initial burden of proving that the defendant’s challenged practice causes a discriminatory effect. Both the disparate-impact and segregative-effect theories date back to appellate decisions from the 1970s, although the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the former in 2015 in Texas …

Proving Disparate Impact In Fair Housing Cases After Inclusive Communities, Robert G. Schwemm, Calvin Bradford

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Disparate-impact claims under the federal Fair Housing Act (“FHA”) are now a well-established part of housing discrimination law, having been recognized for decades by the lower courts and recently endorsed by the Supreme Court in Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The Court in Inclusive Communities saw the impact theory as a way of bolstering the FHA’s “role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society,” but it also set forth certain “cautionary standards” to guard against “abusive” impact claims. Under these standards, which are similar to those adopted in a 2013 HUD …

Same Sex Marriage In A Post-Perry And Windsor America, Kathryn L. Moore, Allison I. Connelly, Ross T. Ewing

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

These materials accompanied a presentation at the 2014 Kentucky Bar Association Annual Convention entitled Same Sex Marriage in a Post-Perry and Windsor America. The focus of this presentation was on: the legal landscape following major LGBTQ civil rights cases; how these cases would impact families in Kentucky; and any employment or retirement issues.

Medicaid Expansion As Completion Of The Great Society, Nicole Huberfeld, Jessica L. Roberts

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On the doorstep of its fiftieth anniversary, Medicaid at last could achieve the ambitious goals President Lyndon B. Johnson enunciated for the Great Society upon signing Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965. Although the spotlight shone on Medicare at the time, Medicaid was the “sleeper program” that caught America’s neediest in its safety net—but only some of them. Medicaid’s exclusion of childless adults and other “undeserving poor” loaned an air of “otherness” to enrollees, contributing to its stigma and seeming political fragility. Now, Medicaid touches every American life. One in five Americans benefits from Medicaid’s healthcare coverage, and that …

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 …

For The Rest Of Their Lives: Seniors And The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm, Michael Allen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

America's population is growing older. According to the 2000 census, more than 35 million people in the United States (12% of the total population) are over 65 years old. These figures are expected to grow dramatically in the early decades of the twenty-first century as the "Baby Boom" generation reaches retirement age and as improvements in health care make it possible for more people to live to an advanced age.

Providing housing for this segment of the American population is already a massive industry and one that will certainly grow as the number of, older persons increases. One of the …

Tax Expenditures, Social Justice And Civil Rights: Expanding The Scope Of Civil Rights Laws To Apply To Tax-Exempt Charities, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In recent years, courts have decided a number of cases in which private organizations discriminated against people based solely on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other immutable traits. For example, in 2000, the Boy Scouts of America revoked a New Jersey man's membership in the Boy Scouts because he was gay. New Jersey's supreme court held that the Boy Scouts' action violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination law. Notwithstanding the state court's holding, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the First Amendment prevented any court from forcing the Boy Scouts to keep a gay man as a member of its …

Government Lawyers And Their Private “Clients” Under The Fair Housing Act, Eugene R. Gaetke, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In strengthening enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act, Congress in the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act ("FHAA") authorized government lawyers from the Justice Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and state and local civil rights agencies to prosecute cases "on behalf of” persons aggrieved by housing discrimination. This new enforcement scheme has led to a heightened level of administrative complaints and litigated cases in which government lawyers are put in the potentially difficult position of having to represent both their agency and private complainants.

The "triangular" relationships created by the FHAA between government lawyers and their public …

Introduction, The Sesquicentennial Of The 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: American Women's Unfinished Quest For Legal, Economic, Political, And Social Equality, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On July 19, 1998, America celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. Almost three hundred women and men including Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass met on that July date in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, for a two-day discussion of the "social, civil and religious rights of woman." At the conclusion of the meeting, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a Declaration of Sentiments and this country's organized women's rights movement began. The Declaration of Sentiments was the earliest, systematic, public articulation in the United States of the ideas that fuel …

Privacy And The Sex Bfoq: An Immodest Proposal, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Since the adoption of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, courts have been called upon to determine whether an employer can avoid liability for refusing to hire employees of one sex by invoking the privacy rights of its customers. Two recent court decisions are illustrative of the question and its resolution. In Backus v. Baptist Medical Center, the defendant employer's policy of excluding male nurses from the labor and delivery section of its obstetrics and gynecology department was challenged. The defendant established that most of the duties of a labor and delivery nurse involve exposure to …

Intracorporate Plurality In Criminal Conspiracy Law, Sarah N. Welling

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The concept of conspiracy currently plays a significant role in three areas of substantive law: antitrust, civil rights, and criminal law. Although the role of conspiracy in these substantive areas of law differs in many ways, all three require that the conspiracy consist of a plurality of actors. Determining what constitutes a plurality of actors when all the alleged conspirators are agents of a single corporation poses a continuing problem.

This problem raises two distinct questions. The first is whether, when one agent acts alone within the scope of corporate business, the agent and the corporation constitute a plurality. The …

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 …