Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Racial Targets, Atinuke O. Adediran

Northwestern University Law Review

It is common scholarly and popular wisdom that racial quotas are illegal. However, the reality is that since 2020’s racial reckoning, many of the largest companies have been touting specific, albeit voluntary, goals to hire or promote people of color, which this Article refers to as “racial targets.” The Article addresses this phenomenon and shows that companies can defend racial targets as distinct from racial quotas, which involve a rigid number or proportion of opportunities reserved exclusively for minority groups. The political implications of the legal defensibility of racial targets are significant in this moment in American history, where race …

The Work-Rule Doctrine Doesn't Work After Reeves V. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Grafton Bragg

MC Law Review

This Note is about an existing plague on employment-law jurisprudence in the Fifth Circuit. Small and big companies alike can terminate an employee for no discriminatory reason but then be tagged with a lawsuit that has a fair chance of success, just because the disgruntled former employee is willing to lie or the parties disagree over the facts. This is true even though no evidence of actual discrimination exists. The work-rule doctrine changes at-will employment to good-will employment under the guise of federal employment discrimination statutes. Whatever your position is on the longstanding at-will employment regimes, there can be no …

The Misguided Use Of The Harvard/Unc Ruling To Thwart Law Firm And Other Private Employer Dei Efforts, Ronald A. Norwood

SLU Law Journal Online

This article explores the Harvard/UNC ruling and what, in the author’s view, is the misguided efforts by certain political and well-financed private actors to use that ruling to justify the eradication of private employers and law firm DEI efforts. It is the author’s firm belief that because the Supreme Court’s holding is limited to an analysis of the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause (limited to state actors) and Title VI (covering private actions receiving federal funding), that ruling should not be used by courts to quash DEI programs designed to level the employment playing field for minorities, women and other protected …

Colorblind And Color Mute: Words Unspoken In U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Chris Chambers Goodman

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The U.S. Supreme Court holds oral arguments on 70 to 80 cases each year, with fewer than a dozen most years involving issues around race or ethnicity. When the salience of race is clear, Supreme Court observers would expect to hear racial terms used in the arguments by counsel, as well as in the Justice’s questions.

Surprisingly, this research study demonstrates that is not the case. These racial terms - such as color, discriminate, minority, race, and its various related terms like racial, racially, racist, as well as combinations like race-neutral, and race-blind - only sparsely appear in oral argument …

When Public Meets Private: Private School Enrollment And Segregation In Virginia, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ash Taylor-Beierl, Erica Frankenberg, April Hewko, Andrene Castro

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Recognizing Virginia’s central role in the expansion of segregated southern private schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, we review law and policy related to private school segregation. We also conduct an empirical analysis of Virginia private school enrollment and segregation since the turn of the twenty-first century, finding uneven enrollment even as the number of private schools has grown. Segregation in the sector is deepening. As public funding for private schools rises, we make the case that the increasingly blurred lines between public and private education in Virginia are rooted in adaptive discrimination.

Battle Of The Lands: The Creation Of Land Grant Institutions And Hbcus – Fostering A Still Separate And Still Unequal Higher Education System, Jasmine Cooper

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In HBCU culture, the Battle of the Bands is a competition between school marching bands to determine the “best of the best”. It is a cultural celebration that symbolizes friendly competition and showcases students’ pride in their school. Unfortunately, since their inception, Historically Black Colleges, and Universities (“HBCUs”) have been battling for legitimacy in America’s higher education system. From the beginning, HBCUs were often the only place African Americans could receive an education. Today, HBCUs are known for creating some of the most successful Black graduates and serve as a safe haven for Black students seeking an education in an …

Political Affirmative Action, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the Supreme Court’s most recent affirmative action decision—Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College—the Court wrongly continued to believe that it has a role to play in determining the constitutionality of affirmative action. Where the Constitution lacks a legal standard that is sufficiently precise to provide meaningful constraint on the exercise of judicial discretion, questions concerning proper interpretation of that standard are what Marbury v. Madison deemed to be “in their nature political” and therefore “only politically examinable.” In such cases, the Constitution simply means what the political branches of government …

Amdip Annual Meeting Of Law School Diversity Professionals: Hosted By Roger Williams University School Of Law: April 23-25, 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law Alumni Newsletter April 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Removing Statistical Discrimination In Personal Injury And Wrongful Death Compensation In Rhode Island Wrongful Death Compensation In Rhode, Colleen P. Murphy

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Right To Violence, Sean Hill

Utah Law Review

Scholars have long contended that the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. This monopoly is considered essential for the state to assure the safety and security of its citizens. Whereas public officers have the broadest authority to deploy violence, in order to make arrests or to inflict punishment, private citizens allegedly have severe restrictions on their use of force. Specifically, the state is said to only authorize private violence when civilians face an imminent threat of unlawful force or when civilians are attempting to prevent a crime.

Yet the state explicitly authorized private violence against enslaved people …

Law School News: Rwu School Of Law Launches Institute For Race And The Law And Celebrates Champions For Justice 3-22-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

A New Private Law Of Policing, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Brooklyn Law Review

American law and American life are asymmetrical. Law divides neatly in two: public and private. But life is lived in three distinct spaces: pure public, pure private, and hybrid middle spaces that are neither state nor home. Which body of law governs the shops, gyms, and workplaces that are formally accessible to all, but functionally hostile to Black, female, poor, and other marginalized Americans? From the liberal midcentury onward, social justice advocates have treated these spaces as fundamentally public and fully remediable via public law equity commands. This article takes a broader view. It urges a tort law revival in …

Deny, Defund, And Divert: The Law And American Miseducation, Janel A. George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Racial inequality in public education is not inevitable, it is constructed. The law has been elemental in crafting racial inequality in public education. In this Article, I posit that lawmakers seeking to entrench racial inequality in and through public education do so by enacting laws designed to deny Black children access to education, defund public schools disproportionately attended by Black children, and divert many Black educators away from the public education system. This Article draws a through-line between laws enacted to prevent desegregation in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling—an era known as massive resistance—and recently …

Expanding The Ban On Forced Arbitration To Race Claims, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (“EFASASHA”) in March 2022, it signaled a major retreat from the Supreme Court’s broad enforcement of agreements to force employees and consumers to arbitrate discrimination claims. But the failure to cover protected discriminatory classes other than sex, especially race, tempers any exuberance attributable to the passage of EFASASHA. This Article prescribes an approach for employees and consumers to rely upon EFASASHA as a tool to prevent both race and sex discrimination claims from being forced into arbitration by employers and companies. This approach relies upon procedural …

Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Fordham Law Review

This colloquium asks us to consider how social change is influencing the legal profession and the legal profession’s response. This Essay applies these questions to organizing around criminal injustice and the response from public defenders. This Essay surfaces the work of four innovative indigent defense organizations that are engaged with and duty-bound to the communities they represent. I call this “community responsive public defense,” which is a distinct model of indigent defense whereby public defenders look to their clients and their clients’ communities to help shape advocacy, strategy, and representation.

Methodologically, this Essay relies primarily on qualitative interviews with leaders …

(How) Can Litigation Advance Multiracial Democracy?, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Fordham Law Review

Can rights litigation meaningfully advance social change in this moment? Many progressive or social justice legal scholars, lawyers, and advocates would argue “no.” Constitutional decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court thwart the aims of progressive social movements. Further, contemporary social movements often decenter courts as a primary domain of social change. In addition, a new wave of legal commentary urges progressives to de-emphasize courts and constitutionalism, not simply tactically but as a matter of democratic survival.

This Essay considers the continuing role of rights litigation, using the litigation over race-conscious affirmative action as an illustration. Courts are a key …

(How) Can Litigation Advance Multiracial Democracy?, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Can rights litigation meaningfully advance social change in this moment? Many progressive or social justice legal scholars, lawyers, and advocates would argue “no.” Constitutional decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court thwart the aims of progressive social movements. Further, contemporary social movements often decenter courts as a primary domain of social change. In addition, a new wave of legal commentary urges progressives to de-emphasize courts and constitutionalism, not simply tactically but as a matter of democratic survival.

This Essay considers the continuing role of rights litigation, using the litigation over race-conscious affirmative action as an illustration. Courts are a key …

If Black Lives Really Matter, We Must End Traffic Stops!, Kenneth Williams

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article will argue that African Americans will continue to be fatally shot and killed by police disproportionately and in many cases unjustifiably as long as police are allowed to stop motorists for minor non-violent traffic infractions. These stops do little to combat crime and are not worth the lives they upend and the continued unconstitutional racial discrimination that motivates many of these stops. Although the standards for police use of force need to be reformed and police culture has to be changed, the other reform that is imperative in order to significantly reduce the disproportionate fatal police shootings of …

Black Lives Matters, Sometimes, Bobby Delgado

Writing Beyond the Prison Living Archive

Critical Essay on Prison life; race/racism; Latinx; gangs; reform; race traitors; US politics; popular culture (film); Texas syndicate; brutality; torture; building tenders; convict guards; Donald J. Trump; Nazism; Hitler

Teaching Critical Use Of Legal Research Technology, Jennifer E. Chapman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dystopian Dreams, Utopian Nightmares: Ai And The Permanence Of Racism, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay draws connections between Octavia Butler’s Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), HBO’s Westworld, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism to highlight how the reconfiguration and transmutation of race through technological change is facilitated by corresponding shifts in legal doctrine, theory, policy, and practice. It takes the overlapping threads from these three sources, which struggle with the idea of change within larger systems of unavoidable, repetitive destruction, and ties them to the law’s role in helping to shield race through the storms of change …

Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

This Review proceeds in three Parts. First, Part I examines Shielded’s text, highlighting Schwartz’s analysis of the problem of unaccountable police, the many barriers to holding police accountable, and her proposed solutions. Part II then critically examines Schwartz’s work, examining pieces of the problem she left undiscussed and the relative shortcomings of her discussion of possible solutions. Finally, Part III takes an abolitionist approach, delving into potential nonreformist reforms and the solution of full abolition, as well as examining the most significant objection to abolitionist approaches: the problem of violence.

Chief Justice Angela R. Riley And Professor Suzette Malveaux In Conversation At The Eleventh Annual John Paul Stevens Lecture: The Third Sovereign: Tribal Courts And Indian Country Justice, Angela R. Riley, Suzette Malveaux

Scholarly Articles

The Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Law School is a premier research and programming institution aiming to facilitate informed and engaged scholarship and dialogue on constitutional law. As part of this effort, it hosts the annual John Paul Stevens Lecture, named after the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stevens, who delivered the inaugural lecture in September 2011. This fireside chat brings distinguished jurists from around the country (and even world) to Colorado Law to discuss the state of the judiciary, democracy and current constitutional issues. The esteemed lecture attracts students, …

Eviction Abolition, Larisa G. Bowman

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

This Article contends that today’s eviction crisis in the United States is the civil equivalent of mass incarceration. Eviction, like mass incarceration, is a racialized and gendered system of social control heavily supervised by the state. State court judges order evictions, and law enforcement officers execute them. Eviction’s mechanisms of control are to punish, exploit, and surveil. Some tenants are forcibly removed from their homes as punishment for their poverty, while others pay their last dollar to remain housed. In nuisance and lease violation cases, tenants routinely are subjected to onerous “probationary” terms that place them under heightened surveillance. Low-income, …

Crowdsourcing Surveillance, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way for the development of slave patrols and other early iterations of policing where incredible acts of violence against Black bodies were made ordinary and essential. He explains how this legacy continues today with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence not simply failing to protect rights but rather licensing police violence …

Prisons As Laboratories Of Antidemocracy, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Prisons are woefully ineffective as tools to protect society from violence and exploitation, yet America’s prison population exploded in the twentieth century. On the outside, this devastated Black communities, Black opportunities, Black economic power, and Black voting power. Yet a similarly insidious development came from inside prison walls: prison administrators honed antidemocratic techniques for constraining and oppressing incarcerated persons, techniques that would later be deployed against the ostensibly free population. Jeffrey Bellin’s Mass Incarceration Nation provides a robust analysis of the ways state and federal policies have combined to create an explosion in the scope of American prisons in the …

Rpl, Crt, & Latcrit: "Finding The 'Me' In The Legal Academy", Roberto L. Corrada

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The idea of a colorblind society and constitution is a dream, not reality. Importantly, the idea of colorblindness has been used to hijack laws and constitutional provisions specifically created to right societal wrongs against minoritized persons, especially Black persons. Take for example, the recent controversy surrounding affirmative action in higher education.The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both created to secure the rights of Black citizens, have been co-opted to instead deprive them of opportunities. The latest example of this is a Supreme Court case decided this past summer—Students …

Henderson And The Objective Observer Standard: The Future Of Race-Conscious Standards Post-Students For Fair Admissions, Gabriela Dionisio

Seattle University Law Review

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which struck down race-conscious admissions policies. Within just a year after its ruling, Students for Fair Admissions has already had a sweeping impact, reaching beyond higher education. Although the Supreme Court did not indicate whether Students for Fair Admissions applies to sectors beyond higher education, law firms, and other employers have already modified their diversity policies and initiatives, erasing race and company diversity considerations. Given those dramatic changes, there is growing fear that Students for Fair Admissions …

Same Crime, Different Time: Sentencing Disparities In The Deep South & A Path Forward Under The Fourteenth Amendment, Hailey M. Donovan

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The American obsession with crime and punishment can be tracked over the last half-century, as the nation’s incarceration rate has risen astronomically. Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over 2.3 million, outpacing both crime and population growth considerably. While the rise itself is undoubtedly bleak, a more troubling truth lies just below the surface. Not all states contribute equally to American mass incarceration. Rather, states have vastly different incarceration rates. Unlike at the federal level, …