Law Commons^™

A New #Metoo Result: Rejecting Notions Of Romantic Consent With Executives, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

With the growth of the #MeToo movement since October 2017, more than 200 prominent male executives have lost their jobs. Some pushback has occurred as many of these executives have asserted their behavior was not inappropriate because their acts were consensual. Essentially, this argument requires companies evaluating this behavior to find nothing wrong when executives use their vast power and influence to have romantic and sexual relationships with their subordinates who do not say “no.”

Those suggesting that the #MeToo movement has gone too far believe it will result in unintended consequences where totally benign and even positive engagement between …

What About #Ustoo?: The Invisibility Of Race In The #Metoo Movement, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Women involved in the most recent wave of the #MeToo movement have rightly received praise for breaking long-held silences about harassment in the workplace. The movement, however, has also rightly received criticism for both initially ignoring the role that a woman of color played in founding the movement ten years earlier and in failing to recognize the unique forms of harassment and the heightened vulnerability to harassment that women of color frequently face in the workplace. This Essay highlights and analyzes critical points at which the contributions and experiences of women of color, particularly black women, were ignored in the …

Martin Luther King Jr. And Pretext Stops (And Arrests): Reflections On How Far We Have Not Come Fifty Years Later, Tracey Maclin, Maria Savarese

Faculty Scholarship

By January, 1956, the Montgomery Bus boycott was in full-swing. Black citizens in Montgomery, Alabama were refusing to ride the city’s private buses to protest racially segregated seating. On the afternoon of January 26, 1956, twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. had finished his day of work at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. On his drive home, King stopped his vehicle to offer a ride to a group of bus boycotters standing at a downtown car-pool location. After the boycotters entered King’s car, two motorcycle policemen pulled-in behind King’s vehicle. While everyone in King’s car tried to remain calm, …

Prejudice, Constitutional Moral Progress, And Being "On The Right Side Of History": Reflections On Loving V. Virginia At Fifty, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

What does it mean to be on the “right” or “wrong” side of history? When Virginia’s Attorney General explained his decision not to defend Virginia’s “Defense of Marriage Law” prohibiting same-sex marriage, he asserted that it was time for Virginia to be on the “right” rather than “wrong” side of history and the law. He criticized his predecessors, who defended the discriminatory laws at issue in Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and United States v. Virginia. Loving played a crucial role in the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, even as the dissenters disputed …

Fiscal Pressures And Discriminatory Policing: Evidence From Traffic Stops In Missouri, Allison P. Harris, Elliott Ash, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides evidence of racial variation in traffic enforcement responses to local government budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri from 2001 through 2012. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates; we also find an increase in traffic-stop arrest rates. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among White (rather than Black or Latino) drivers. The results are robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates and a variety of model specifications, including a regression discontinuity examining bare budget shortfalls. Considering potential mechanisms, we …

Excavating Race-Based Disadvantage Among Class-Privileged People Of Color, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this article is to begin to theorize the fraught space within which class-privileged racial minorities exist — the disadvantage within their privilege. The article posits that the invisibility of the racial subordination of wealthier people of color (that is, their marginalization on account of their race) is fertile soil for the germination of post-racialism — the sense that we, as a nation, have overcome our racial problems. The dramatic visibility of the minority poor’s suffering, combined with the relative invisibility of the suffering of those minorities who are not poor, breeds the belief that class is now …

Gender Sidelining And The Problem Of Unactionable Discrimination, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Gender dynamics suffuse virtually every workplace. Indeed, the way that employees interact with one another turns not only on their individual backgrounds, skills and personalities, but also frequently on their gender. While many employees embrace gender diversity at work and appreciate the benefits of incorporating both male and female perspectives into workplace programs and projects, this ideal does not translate into every work environment. In many workplaces, female workers continue to experience unfair (and often unlawful) treatment based upon their gender. The law has done much to outlaw overt gender discrimination at work, providing a legal framework within which female …

Pov: Scotus Should Not Permit “Boycott Of Same-Sex Marriage”, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

On December 5, 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which baker (self-described cake artist) Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, asked the court to decide “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel artists to create expression that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.”

The Bankruptcy Of Refusing To Hire Persons Who Have Filed Bankruptcy, Terrence Cain

Faculty Scholarship

In 1978, Congress made it illegal for government employers to deny employment to, terminate the employment of, or discriminate with respect to employment against a person who has filed bankruptcy. In 1984, Congress extended this prohibition to private employers by making it illegal for such employers to terminate the employment of, or discriminate with respect to employment against a person who has filed bankruptcy. Under the law as it currently exists, private employers can refuse to hire a person who has filed bankruptcy solely because that person has filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, employers have substantially increased their use of credit …

Fighting Fines & Fees: Borrowing From Consumer Law To Combat Criminal Justice Debt Abuses, Neil L. Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Although media and academic sources often describe mass incarceration as the primary challenge facing the American criminal justice system, the imposition of criminal justice debt may be a more pervasive problem. On March 14, 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that state chief justices forward a letter to all judges in their jurisdictions describing the constitutional violations associated with the illegal assessment and enforcement of fines and fees. The DOJ’s concerns include the incarceration of indigent individuals without determining whether the failure to pay is willful and the use of bail practices that result in impoverished defendants remaining in …

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 …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Scholars Of The Constitutional Rights And Interests Of Children In Support Of Respondents In Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd, Et Al V. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Catherine E. Smith, Laura Fontana, Tanya Washington, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Faculty Scholarship

Masterpiece Cakeshop LTD, et al v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is about much more than a wedding cake. It is about the rightful place of LGBT people and their families in the commercial and public sphere. In fact, children are already bearing the brunt of exclusionary practices in the public marketplace because of their relationship to or association with their LGBT parents. In Michigan, a pediatrician refused to treat an infant based solely on the fact that the child had lesbian mothers. In Kentucky, a judge refused to hear adoption cases of children involving LGBT adoptive-parents-to-be. In Tennessee, a nondenominational …

A Different Class Of Care: The Benefits Crisis And Low-Wage Workers, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

When compared to other developed nations, the United States fares poorly with regard to benefits for workers. While the situation is grim for most U.S. workers, it is worse for low-wage workers. Data show a significant benefits gap between low-wage and high-wage in terms of flexible work arrangements (FWAs), paid leave, pensions, and employer-sponsored health-care insurance, among other things. This gap exists notwithstanding the fact that FWAs and employment benefits produce positive returns for employees, employers, and society in general. Despite these returns, this Article contends that employers will be loath to extend FWAs and greater employment benefits to low-wage …

Charging The Poor: Criminal Justice Debt & Modern-Day Debtors' Prisons, Neil L. Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Debtors’ prisons should no longer exist. While imprisonment for debt was common in colonial times in the United States, subsequent constitutional provisions, legislation, and court rulings all called for the abolition of incarcerating individuals to collect debt. Despite these prohibitions, individuals who are unable to pay debts are now regularly incarcerated, and the vast majority of them are indigent. In 2015, at least ten lawsuits were filed against municipalities for incarcerating individuals in modern-day debtors’ prisons. Criminal justice debt is the primary source for this imprisonment.

Criminal justice debt includes fines, restitution charges, court costs, and fees. Monetary charges exist …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

Pulse: Finding The Meaning In A Massacre Through Gay Latino Intersectional Justice, Judith E. Koons

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Discrimination By Customers, Katharine T. Bartlett, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

Customers discriminate by race and gender, with considerable negative consequences for female and minority workers and business owners. Yet anti-discrimination laws apply only to discrimination by firms, not by customers. We examine efficacy and privacy reasons for why this may be so, as well as changing features of the market that, by blurring the line between firms and customers, make current law increasingly irrelevant. We conclude that, while there are reasons to be cautious about regulating customer behavior, those reasons do not justify acceding to customer discrimination altogether. To open a discussion of the regulatory options that take account of …

Madonnas And Whores In The Workplace, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Much has been written about “lookism” – the preferential treatment given to those who conform to societal standards of beauty. But in a recent case before the Iowa Supreme Court, a gender discrimination plaintiff alleged a sort of “reverse-lookism,” claiming that her male employer terminated her long-term employment because the employee was too physically attractive, thus tempting the employer to think about entering into an extramarital affair. To the great surprise of many who followed this case, the Iowa Supreme Court sided with the employer, declining to find him liable for gender discrimination. As one might expect, uproar ensued, with …

The Local Turn; Innovation And Diffusion In Civil Rights Law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Is the future of civil rights subnational? If one is looking for civil rights innovation, much of this innovation might be happening through legislation, regulatory frameworks, and policies adopted by state and local governments. In recent years, states and cities have adopted legislation banning discrimination in housing based on the source of an individual's income, regulating the consideration of arrest or conviction in employment decisions, and prohibiting discrimination in employment based on an applicant's credit history.

This deployment of subnational power is not new to civil rights. Many of the laws and regulatory frameworks that are now core to the …

Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race.” Unfortunately, abusive collection of criminal justice debt is not limited to Ferguson. This Article, prepared for a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in July 2015, identifies the key findings in the Department of Justice’s report …

From Outsider Status To Insider And Outsider Again: Interest Convergence Theory And Normalization Of Lgbt Identity, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Alexander Nourafshan

Faculty Scholarship

After the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, which declared the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional,and after the granting of certiorari in Obergell v. Hodges, where the Supreme Court will decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to provide a marriage license to same-sex couples, national marriage equality seems like a legal inevitability.However, Windsor and Obergell, along with other state-level advances toward marriage equality, are not equally promising for all members of the lesbian and gay community. Although Windsor and the revolution of cases that have led to Obergell hold significant promise for one privileged subset …

Two Stories About Skin Color And International Human Rights Advocacy, William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

Color is an important but underdeveloped designation in international law. It is identified as a protected category in several human rights documents. Despite its status as a protected category, there is no definition of color in these documents.

In the absence of an established definition, race is often used as a proxy for color. Yet, there is growing skepticism within the human rights community about the legitimacy of using racial categories to distinguish human beings. While race and color are often used interchangeably, it is important to treat color as a distinct category. Race and color do not always match. …

Promoting Innovation While Preventing Discrimination: Policy Goals For The Scored Society, Danielle K. Citron, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

There are several normative theories of jurisprudence supporting our critique of the scored society, which complement the social theory and political economy presented in our 2014 article on that topic in the Washington Law Review. This response to Professor Tal Zarsky clarifies our antidiscrimination argument while showing that is only one of many bases for the critique of scoring practices. The concerns raised by Big Data may exceed the capacity of extant legal doctrines. Addressing the potential injustice may require the hard work of legal reform.

The Demographic Dilemma In Death Qualification Of Capital Jurors, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Challenging Authority: A Symposium Honoring Derrick Bell, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

This is the Introduction to the University of Pittsburgh Law Review’s Challenging Authority: A Symposium Honoring Derrick Bell (L.L.B. 1957). This special symposium issue of the 75th volume of the Law Review celebrates and seeks to continue Bell’s critical inquiry into and fight against racial injustice. It features leading and emerging voices that examine and build upon some of Bell’s most eminent concepts, such as the permanence of racism and Interest Convergence Theory; explore Bell’s impact as a professor and activist; and look ahead to the next wave of critical race study.

Beyond Title Vii: Rethinking Race, Ex-Offender Status, And Employment Discrimination In The Information Age, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

More than sixty-five million people in the United States—more than one in four adults—have had some involvement with the criminal justice system that will appear on a criminal history report. A rapidly expanding, for-profit industry has developed to collect these records and compile them into electronic databases, offering employers an inexpensive and readily accessible means of screening prospective employees. Nine out of ten employers now inquire into the criminal history of job candidates, systematically denying individuals with a criminal record any opportunity to gain work experience or build their job qualifications. This is so despite the fact that many individuals …

Cultivating Inclusion, Patrick S. Shin, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium essay in honor of critical race theory stalwart Mari Matsuda, we discuss two of her essays on affirmative action, "Affirmative Action and Legal Knowledge: Planting Seeds in Plowed-Up Ground" and "Who is Excellent?" We draw on the insights of these essays, one written almost twenty-five years ago and the other over a decade ago, to reflect on currently prevailing justifications for affirmative action, which revolve entirely around debates about diversity. We contrast the production of racial diversity with the more robust concept of affirmative action that Matsuda advocated. We argue that the modern diversity rationale lies at …

Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …

More Hair-Raising Decisions, And How Professor Wendy Greene Combs Through Their Flaws, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

If you are looking for an interesting and timely employment discrimination article to read, please consider Black Women Can’t Have Blonde Hair . . . in the Workplace, by Professor Wendy Greene of Cumberland, Samford University, School of Law. In that article, Professor Greene builds upon the work that she began in her article Title VII: What’s Hair (and Other Race Based Characteristics) Got to Do With It¹ where she argued that characteristics that are commonly associated with a particular racial or ethnic group should fall under Title VII’s current protected categories of race, color, and national origin. …

Next Generation Of Civil Rights Lawyers: Race And Representation In The Age Of Identity Performance, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack’s Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America, and utilizes their insights to both explore the challenges that face the next generation of civil rights lawyers and offer suggestions on how this next generation of civil rights lawyers can overcome these difficulties. Overall, this Book Review highlights one similarity in the roles of black civil rights attorneys past and present: the need for lawyers in both generations to perform their identities in ways …