Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Politically Correct Eugenics, Seema Mohapatra

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Stories Of Teaching Race, Gender, And Class: A Narrative, Brenda V. Smith

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Essay transcribes and discusses Smith's keynote speech at the New England Clinical Conference at Harvard Law School in November, 2015. Smith's speech discusses the intersection between race, gender, and class, highlighting them as sites of vulnerability through a personal storytelling lens. By sharing her individual experiences, Smith hopes to draw attention to insecurities and threats faced by many individuals who refuse to speak out.

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook Iii

Brooklyn Law Review

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …

Race, Restructurings, And Equal Protection Doctrine Through The Lens Of Schuette V. Bamn, Steve Sanders

Brooklyn Law Review

In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that Michigan voters had violated principles of the fair lawmaking process when they amended their state constitution to prohibit race-conscious affirmative action in public university admissions, reasoning that the amendment, known as “Proposal 2,” constituted a political restructuring that had violated the Equal Protection Clause by disadvantaging African Americans from being able to equally access political change. However, the Sixth Circuit was careful to avoid saying that Proposal 2 created a racial classification or was motivated by a purpose of discriminating on the basis of race. Instead, consistent …

Post-Ferguson Social Engineering: Problem-Solving Justice Or Just Posturing, Mae C. Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Jim Crow Effect: Denial, Dignity, Human Rights, And Racialized Mass Incarceration, 29 J. Civ. Rts. & Econ. Dev 15 (2016), Cecil J. Hunt Ii

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The overarching theme of this paper is that the racialization of mass incarceration in America, which has been taking place since the latter part of the last century, and continues to this very day, is characterized by what I term, the “Jim Crow effect".

Keynote Remarks, Vanita Gupta

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In communities across America today, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Flint, Michigan, too many people—especially young people and people of color—live trapped by the weight of poverty and injustice. They suffer the disparate impact of policies driven by, at best, benign neglect, and at worst, deliberate indifference. And they see how discrimination stacks the deck against them. So today, as we discuss the inequality that pervades our criminal justice system—a defining civil rights challenge of the 21st century—we must also acknowledge the broader inequalities we face in other segments of society. Because discrimination in so many areas—from the classroom, to the …

Dismantling The School-To-Prison Pipeline: Tools For Change, Jason P. Nance

UF Law Faculty Publications

The school-to-prison pipeline is one of our nation’s most formidable challenges. It refers to the trend of directly referring students to law enforcement for committing certain offenses at school or creating conditions under which students are more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system, such as excluding them from school. This article analyzes the school-to-prison pipeline’s devastating consequences on students, its causes, and its disproportionate impact on students of color. But most importantly, this article comprehensively identifies and describes specific, evidence-based tools to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline that lawmakers, school administrators, and teachers in all areas can immediately …

Black Boys Matter: Developmental Equality, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

The life course of Black boys is a stark reminder of the realities of inequality. While recent attention to policing and high profile deaths of Black youth and adults has raised consciousness of life-threatening situations, this focus exposes the most visceral and deadly aspect of a much larger set of issues. Those issues begin at birth, and are powerfully framed before adulthood, creating inequality particularly when the individual is most vulnerable, in childhood. This Article confronts the inequalities of Black boys and their subordination, as a vehicle to expose inequalities more generally based on children’s identities.

The life course of …

"Lord Forgive Me, But He Tried To Kill Me": Proposing Solutions To The United States’ Most Vexing Racial Challenges, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Law Faculty Scholarship

While great progress has been made in the United States in the past fifty years in connection with race relations, three critical issues continue to vex our nation. The United States, despite its progress, continues to struggle mightily with (a) the police killing of unarmed black men; (b) racially disproportionate mass incarceration; and (c) violent homicides of black men and boys. Nightly newscasts detail seemingly weekly killings of unarmed African American men by law enforcement officers. Mass incarceration, while plateauing in the last several years, continues to see millions of United States citizens incarcerated at rates unmatched by any other …

Rethinking Employment Discrimination Harms, Jessica Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

Establishing harm is essential to many legal claims. This Article urges the law to adopt a more expansive notion of the harms of employment discrimination to better reflect the cognitive functions of individuals who face discrimination. While the effect of implicit bias on the mental state of potential discriminators is well-worn territory in antidiscrimination scholarship, little has been written about a sister theory: stereotype threat. More than a decade’s worth of social psychology research indicates that when a person is conscious of her membership in a particular group and the group is the subject of a widely recognized stereotype, that …

Procedural Justice And Policing: Four New Directions, Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff

Washington University Journal of Law & Policy

This Article, by Professor Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, analyzes the concept of procedural justice within the frame of contemporary policing. Using the shooting of Michael Brown as a catalyst, Hollander-Blumoff advocates for four potential areas of future development in procedural justice: (1) the interaction between the research on self-control and procedural justice; (2) research on the tools most effective in creating positive perceptions of fairness by police; (3) the implications of treating procedural justice not as a dynamic interchange; and (4) the role of reactive devaluation as it might affect reaction to procedural …

Parents Involved And The Struggle For Historical Memory­, Mark Tushnet

Indiana Law Journal

In his Jerome Hall Lecture, Professor Tushnet addresses the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education in the more recent case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (PICS), which struck down the voluntary school integration programs used in Seattle and Louisville. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, an important “debate” in the PICS case was over “which side is more faithful to the heritage” of Brown v. Board of Education. That debate is part of what historians have called the struggle for historical memory. The politics of memory in PICS is not simply a struggle …

Frontlines: Policing At The Lexus Of Race And Mental Health, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

he last several years have rendered issues at the intersection of race, mental health, and policing more acute. The frequency and violent, often lethal, nature of these incidents is forcing a national conversation about matters which many people would rather cast aside as volatile, controversial, or as simply irrelevant to conversations about the justice system. It seems that neither civil rights activists engaged in the work of advancing racial equality nor disability rights activists recognize the potent combination of negative racialization and mental illness at this nexus that bring policing practices into sharp focus. As such, the compounding dynamics and …

Is Gay The New Asian?: Marriage Equality And The Dawn Of A New Model Minority, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

In this Article, Professor Chang analyzes the historic role of family in the politics of exclusion in the United States, evaluates the ways in which the stereotyping of Asian Americans as a model minority has perpetuated these politics, and warns against the possibility of a similar fate for gay and lesbian Americans. As a model minority, Asian Americans have been set as a standard against which other minority groups, particularly African Americans, are measured. Around the same time Asians were being extolled for their hard work and family values, Congress released the Moynihan report on the problem of broken families …

Economic Inequality And College Admissions Policies, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

As economic inequality in the United States has reached unprecedented heights, reformers have focused considerable attention on changes in the law that would provide for greater equality in wealth among Americans. No doubt, much benefit would result from more equitable tax policies, fairer workplace regulation, and more generous spending policies.

But there may be even more to gain by revising college admissions policies. Admissions policies at the Ivy League and other elite American colleges do much to exacerbate the problem of economic inequality. Accordingly, reforming those policies may represent the most effective strategy for restoring a reasonable degree of economic …

Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …

Diversity Without Integration, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

The de facto racial segregation pervasive at colleges and universities across the country undermines a necessary precondition for the diversity benefits embraced by the Court in Grutter — the requirement that students partake in high-quality interracial interactions and social relationships with one another. This disjuncture between Grutter’s vision of universities as sites of robust cross-racial exchange and the reality of racial separation should be of great concern, not just because of its potential constitutional implications for affirmative action but also because it reifies racial hierarchy and reinforces inequality. Drawing from an extensive body of social science research, this article explains …

Rationed Justice, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

In the United States, "equal justice under law" is at the very forefront of our American justice system. "Equal justice" is meant to guarantee equal access to the justice system. "Equal access to the judicial process is the sin qua non of a just society." Many Americans, however, do not have any access to the justice system, never mind that of equal access. "Equal justice" has not reached the nation's indigent, or even many of our moderate-income citizens.

Confronting The Carceral State, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

A New Proposal To Address Local Voting Discrimination, Cody Gray

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bakke To The Future: Affirmative Action After Fisher, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Response To Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Jennifer Wriggins

Faculty Publications

Issues of race and racism in the U.S. torts system continue to deserve much more attention from legal scholarship than they receive, and Keeping Cases from Black Juries is a valuable contribution. Studying racism as it infects the torts system is difficult because explicit de jure exclusions of black jurors are in the past; race is no longer on the surface of tort opinions; and court records do not reveal the race of tort plaintiffs, defendants, or jurors. Yet it is essential to try and understand the workings of race and racism in the torts system. The authors pose a …

Australians' "Right" To Be Bigoted: Protecting Minorities' Rights From The Tyranny Of The Majority, Jillian Rudge

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia’s few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of …

Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Disparate Impact And The Role Of Classification And Motivation In Equal Protection Law After Inclusive Communities, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

At least since the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, disparate-impact liability has faced a direct constitutional threat. This Article argues that the Court’s decision last Term in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., which held that disparate-impact liability is available under the Fair Housing Act, has resolved that threat, at least for the time being. In particular, this Article argues, Inclusive Communities is best read to adopt the understanding of equal protection that Justice Kennedy previously articulated in his pivotal concurrence in the 2007 Parents Involved case—which argued that …

Transforming The System, India Thusi, Robert L. Carter

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Our criminal justice system must keep all communities safe, foster prevention and rehabilitation, and ensure fair and equal justice. But in too many places, and in too many ways, our system is falling short of that mandate and with devastating consequences. The United States is saddled with an outdated, unfair, and bloated criminal justice system that drains resources and disrupts communities.

The U.S. prison population has swelled to unprecedented levels and unequal, unjustified treatment based on race and ethnicity is well documented. People of color, particularly Native American, African American, and Latino people, have felt the impact of discrimination within …

Derivative Racial Discrimination, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

This Article introduces the concept of derivative racial discrimination, a process of institutional discrimination in which certain social and cultural dynamics impede the careers of minority workers in predominantly white firms even in the absence of racial biases and stereotypes. Derivative racial discrimination is a manifestation of cultural homophily, the universal tendency of people to gravitate toward others with similar cultural interests and backgrounds. Although not intrinsically racial, cultural homophily disadvantages minority workers in predominantly white work settings due to various race-related social and cultural differences. Seemingly inconsequential in isolation, these differences produce racial disparities in the accrual of valuable …

Human Capital Discrimination, Law Firm Inequality, And The Limits Of Title Vii, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

This Article advances the legal scholarship on workplace inequality through use of evidence derived from interviews of a sample of black attorneys who have worked in large, predominantly white law firms. It does so by calling attention to the manner in which these firms operate as sites of human capital discrimination — patterns of mistreatment that deprive many black associates of access to the substantive work opportunities crucial to their professional development and career advancement. This Article identifies the specific arrangements and practices within these firms that facilitate human capital discrimination and describes the varied, often subtle harms and burdens …

My Hair Is Not Like Yours: Workplace Hair Grooming Policies For African American Women As Racial Stereotyping In Violation Of Title Vii, Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Linda F. Harrison

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

This article argues that workplace discrimination based on hair grooming policies disproportionately impacts African American women. The article seeks to establish that natural hair is an immutable characteristic, as is all hair, made mutable by social policies that impose an "acceptable" standard of beauty that was never meant to include or reflect black women. Often placed under workplace or other institutional grooming policies, the article posits that these policies are no more than a continuation of race-based policies that reflect unlawful stereotyping under Title VII and should be eliminated. Lastly, the article proposes a set of questions that test the …