Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Foreword: A Tribute To Margaret Montoya, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Dean Moran provides opening remarks to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, "Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."

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 …

Implicit Bias Deserves Our Explicit Attention, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

What are implicit biases? In brief, we all walk around with two sets of attitudes and beliefs: our conscious (explicit) attitudes and our unconscious (implicit) attitudes. Scientists believe that human consciousness takes up approximately 10 percent of our brain activity. That means that for most things, our unconscious mind is doing the work. Implicit biases exist within our unconscious mind. Our brains are bombarded with millions of bits of information every second. To avoid overload, our brains automatically categorize information into schemas that we use to guide us in our everyday living.

Race Inequity Fifty Years Later: Language Rights Under The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

As Latinos have become the largest racialized minority in the United States, we should ask whether the civil rights laws of yesterday are equipped to address the race problems of today. Half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial discrimination still exists, but it manifests itself differently. Rather than explicitly barring someone from employment, education, public accommodations, or civic participation on the basis of his or her race, racially discriminatory exclusion is often couched in seemingly race-neutral terms. English language requirements are one example of this. A sign outside a restaurant stating, “No Mexicans, …

Review Of Prigg V. Pennsylvania: Slavery, The Supreme Court, And The Ambivalent Constitution, Susan David Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In 1842, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, resolving a dispute about fugitive slave rendition that had raged between the states for decades. H. Robert Baker’s analysis of the decision and the events that led up to it is the first book-length work to investigate Prigg and its place in American history. Baker traces the development of fugitive slave laws and recounts the heart-wrenching story that lies behind Prigg to shed light on the Supreme Court’s decision and the gradual clarification of American federalism.

Categorically Black, White, Or Wrong: 'Misperception Discrimination' And The State Of Title Vii Protection, D. Wendy Greene

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article exposes an inconspicuous, categorically wrong movement within antidiscrimination law. A band of federal courts have denied Title VII protection to individuals who allege “categorical discrimination”: invidious, differential treatment on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, or sex. Per these courts, a plaintiff who self-identifies as Christian but is misperceived as Muslim cannot assert an actionable claim under Title VII if she suffers an adverse employment action as a result of this misperception and related animus. Though Title VII expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, courts have held that such a plaintiff’s claim of “misperception …

The "Nixon Sabotage": The Political Origins Of The Equal Protection Challenge To The Voting Rights Act, Danieli Evans

Articles

Critics of the Voting Rights Act argue that the anti-discrimination law requires states to engage in unconstitutional discrimination, as state decisionmakers must be conscious of race in order to ensure that voting policies do not weaken minority representation. This argument relies on the idea that subjective racial motivation is the essence of unconstitutional discrimination (even if benevolent, or to promote racial inclusion). The conventional understanding among constitutional scholars is that this “search for the bigoted decisionmaker” developed in employment and housing discrimination decisions between 1976 and 1979. Previous accounts have not recognized the role that the 1971 school desegregation decision …

Lining Up: Ensuring Equal Access To Vote, Gilda R. Daniels

All Faculty Scholarship

This booklet ( a joint project of the Advancement Project and the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law) provides an extensive overview of restrictive voting laws, especially concerning minority voters. Daniels begins with a summary of voter obstructions and intimidation in the 2012 election, and then places that within the context of the history of voting and race in America.

Most recently, the Section 5 protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were effectively removed by the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision. Daniels then explains what this means practically and legally for minority voters and how …

Masthead

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter And Table Of Contents

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racial Capitalism, Nancy Leong

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Racial capitalism — the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity — is a longstanding, common, and deeply problematic practice. This Article is the first to identify racial capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and to undertake a close examination of its causes and consequences.

The Article focuses on instances of racial capitalism in which white individuals and predominantly white institutions use nonwhite people to acquire social and economic value. Affirmative action doctrine and policies provide much of the impetus for this form of racial capitalism. These doctrines and policies have fueled an intense legal and social preoccupation …

Segregation In The Chicago Metropolitan Area: Some Immediate Measures To Reverse This Impediment To Fair Housing (2013), John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center, F. Willis Caruso

Faculty White Papers

No abstract provided.

Pimping Brown V. Board Of Education: The Destruction Of African-American Schools And The Mis-Education Of African-American Students, Irving Joyner

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Change Requires Civic Infrastructure, Harold A. Mcdougall Iii

School of Law Faculty Publications

Article explores how civil society might become sufficiently organized to hold business accountable beyond consumer choice, and government beyond merely voting.

Law And Local Activism: Uncovering The Civil Rights History Of Chambers V. Mississippi, Emily Prifogle

Articles

Countless academics have examined and discussed the importance of Chambers v. Mississippi in a multitude of areas including compulsory due process, admission of hearsay, third party guilt evidence, false confessions, racial evaluations of hearsay and witnesses, and morally reasonable verdicts. In contrast, this article attempts to excavate the account of a rural Mississippi community’s struggle for rights that underlies the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chambers. On its face, the case has no link or reference to the civil rights movement. However, this paper reveals that local civil rights activists took armed, direct economic action for equal rights Woodville, Mississippi, …

Checking Out Of The Exception To 3-104: Why Parties Should Be Able To Negotiate Whether Checks Should Be Payable On Demand, 3 Colum. J. Race & L. 73 (2013), Linda R. Crane

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Many aspects of American society, including its legal system, operate to the disadvantage of minorities. Obvious examples include inequities in our criminal/justice system and in school funding. Much has been written on those and other topics. This article focuses on another example, specifically on how a sweeping change to an obscure banking rule regulating the check collection process has negatively affected consumers in general, and minority groups in particular.

U.S. check collections require a complex system comprised of a variety of institutions including commercial banks, savings and loans, savings banks, and credit unions, as well as the customers who rely …

A Thought Experiment: Brown V. Board Of Education Of Topeka, Kansas, Louis Michael Seidman

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Trial Jurors And Variables Influencing Why They Return The Verdicts They Do - A Guide For Practicing And Future Trial Attorneys, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Give Us Free": Addressing Racial Disparities In Bail Determinations, Cynthia E. Jones

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article considers racial disparities that occur nationally in the bail determination process, due in large part to the lack of uniformity, resources, and information provided to officials in bail proceedings. It argues that the almost unbridled decision making power afforded to bail officials is often influenced by improper considerations such as the defendant's financial resources or the race of the defendant. As a result of these failures, the bail determination process has resulted not only in racial inequalities in bail and pretrial detention decisions, but also in the over-incarceration of pretrial defendants and the overcrowding of jails nationwide. The …

"He Is The Darkey With The Glasses On": Race Trials Revisited, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of Skin Color In Asian And Asian-American Communities: Initial Reflections, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dignité/Dignidade: Organizing Against Threats To Dignity In Societies After Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

This chapter is not an attempt to join the fractious debate over philosophical first principles or juridical first usages of the term 'dignity'. Instead, it explores the tight connection between the institution of slavery and the giving of specific meanings to the concept of dignity, in particular times and particular places. To explore the dynamics of the intertwined process of creating and drawing upon meaning for the terms 'dignity' and 'slavery', I examine two historical movements that emerged after formal abolition.

Affirmative Action, Justice Kennedy, And The Virtues Of The Middle Ground, Allen K. Rostron

Faculty Works

When the Supreme Court hears arguments this fall about the constitutionality of affirmative action policies at the University of Texas, attention will be focused once again on Justice Anthony Kennedy. With the rest of the Court split between a bloc of four reliably liberal jurists and an equally solid cadre of four conservatives, the spotlight regularly falls on Kennedy, the swing voter that each side in every closely divided and ideologically charged case desperately hopes to attract. Critics condemn Kennedy for having an unprincipled, capricious, and self-aggrandizing style of decision-making. Though he is often decisive in the sense of casting …

Invisible Histories & The Failure Of Protected Classes, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

Our legal history suggests that the evolution of our discrimination law has been and likely should be the continuing enumeration of protected classes. There is, however, a counter-intuitive problem: protecting specific groups suggests to the public that everyone else is fair game, providing implicit legitimacy to other harmful stereotypes. To illustrate this problem this article constructs the legal history of stereotypes and prejudicial acts against Appalachians, a marginalized group that does not fit neatly in the protected categories. Considering then how our courts have treated the relationship between stereotypes and discrimination, along with recent sociological evidence, this article suggests that …

How I Rode The Bus To Become A Professor At The University Of Denver Sturm College Of Law; Reflections On Keyes's Legacy For The Metropolitan, Post-Racial, And Multiracial Twenty-First Century, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Democratic Inclusion: Asian Americans And The Voting Rights Act, Ming Hsu Chen, Taeku Lee

Publications

The current legal framework for protecting voting rights in the United States has been dramatically destabilized by Supreme Court decisions re-interpreting the protections against minority vote dilution and requires rethinking to survive modern challenges. At the same time, the nation has itself undergone dramatic changes in the racial composition of its polity and in the complexity and salience of race as a factor in political life. In this paper, we focus on a relatively unexamined constituent of this complex reality of modern racial diversity that illustrates some of the core features that all minority groups face in continuing VRA challenges: …

Federal Preemption And Immigrants' Rights, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recently, immigration scholars have focused on the relationship between federal, state, and local governments in regulating immigration to the exclusion of civil rights issues. States and localities assert that they should be able to use their Tenth Amendment police powers to regulate unauthorized immigrants within their borders, while the federal government claims exclusivity in the area of immigration law and policy. In the middle of this debate, there is the question of whether states abrogate individual civil rights and civil liberties when exercising their police powers to regulate immigration. This article takes a detailed look at these complex issues of …

The Court's Denial Of Racial Societal Debt, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In this year of civil rights anniversaries, the narrative of racial progress has been tempered by the Supreme Court’s game-changing decisions this past summer. The notion that “we’ve come a long way and we have much more work to do” sounds ever more like wishful thinking in the face of a Supreme Court that is no longer an active contributor to the cause. Having abandoned its unprecedented insistence that white supremacy be upended root and branch, the current Court’s boldness is measured by its audacious efforts to reverse engineer the transformative mechanisms these anniversaries celebrate.

Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger

Articles

For this Introduction, I undertake to look a bit more broadly at recent data. The best sources of demographic information about prisoners are the various surveys and censuses conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). While no BJS publication directly addresses the issue, and no BJS dataset allows its full analysis, it is possible to glean something from the most recent BJS prison census, the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities.

Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Precedent from the Roberts Court shows the Justices taking three distinct approaches to precedent they dislike. Each provides a template for the Court to criticize race-based affirmative action in higher education, as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is widely expected to do. Most narrowly, the Court might use Fisher to issue a warning, much like it did in 2009 when it sidestepped a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act; under this approach, the opinion would spell out why the Justices think the diversity celebrated in Grutter v. Bollinger no longer provides sufficient justification for the use of …