Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Fixing Forty Years Of Failure: Objective Solutions To Batson’S Subjective Shortfalls, Katherine E. Donoghue

Cardozo Law Review

It is a sunny afternoon in rural Georgia. A young Black man goes for a jog. On his route, he crosses the train tracks and heads into a predominantly White neighborhood. As his sneakers rhythmically hit the pavement, he hears the rev of a pickup truck behind him. Shortly after, he hears a second truck. The young jogger picks up his pace, but so do the trucks. The trucks chase him and eventually surround him. Two White men get out with shotguns. One stands ready, barrel raised. The other approaches the jogger and fires a bullet into his chest.

That …

Necessity Or Preference? Navigating The Role Of Physical Presence In The Post-Pandemic Workplace, Shelby Wray

Cardozo Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how society conceptualizes the spatial boundaries of the workplace, proving that businesses can operate effectively without requiring employees’ physical presence. As remote work gained legitimacy during the pandemic, longstanding assumptions about where jobs can be performed—and where legal protections apply—have come into question. In particular, the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has become increasingly hazy, especially regarding when the ADA is triggered outside of the physical workplace.

Currently, there is a circuit split as to whether employees with disabilities are entitled to ADA protections for their commute to work. This Note addresses …

The Permanent Bar(S): The Unprincipled Cage Of Retribution For Immigrant Youth, Dianara Ramirez Ibarra

Cardozo Law Review

This Note argues that a minor’s diminished decisional capacity should be recognized as an affirmative defense when a permanent bar that is triggered during minority strips away a noncitizen’s opportunity to gain lawful status in the United States. Dreamers and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, individuals who arrived in the United States as children, are victims of punitive immigration laws that have extinguished any possibility of securing lawful residency in the United States. Even more egregiously, Dreamers and DACA recipients are subject to these permanent bars despite lacking the intent and capacity to fully understand the long-term consequences …

Putting Police Body-Worn Camera Footage To Work: A Civil Liberties Evaluation Of Truleo’S Ai Analytics Platform, Farhang Heydari, Max Isaacs, Katie Kinsey, Barry Friedman, Christopher Slobogin, Alissa Marque Heydari

Cardozo Law Review

This Article summarizes findings from a civil liberties evaluation of Truleo, an AI-powered analytics platform designed to automate the review of police body-worn camera (BWC) footage. It includes a summary of how Truleo’s platform works, policy choices made by the company, and our assessment of safeguards and risks of the platform from a civil liberties perspective. This Article also offers a series of recommendations for policymakers considering the adoption of Truleo or similar technologies. These include the necessity for independent testing of claimed benefits, democratic authorization for deployment, and ongoing transparency and public input around the platform’s design and operation. …

“Split My Award With Whom?” A Case For Plaintiff Incentive Awards And Plaintiff-Attorney Fee Splitting In Class Action Lawsuits, Ilana Kruchenetskaya

Cardozo Law Review

Named plaintiffs are the heart of class action lawsuits—without them, there is no class action. To motivate these individuals to be the face of the class and compensate them for their role in the litigation process, courts typically approve named plaintiff incentive awards when such awards are included in settlement offers. Recently, however, the Eleventh Circuit held that these awards are prohibited under purported Supreme Court precedent from the late 1800s. This decision undermines the future of class actions by removing any incentive individuals may have in taking on the extra work and scrutiny of bringing a class action lawsuit. …

Women On Death Row In The United States, Sandra Babcock, Nathalie Greenfield, Kathryn Adamson

Cardozo Law Review

This Article presents a comprehensive study of forty-eight persons sentenced to death between 1990 and 2022 who were legally recognized as women at the time of their trials. Our research is the first of its kind to conduct a holistic and intersectional analysis of the factors driving women’s death sentences. It reveals commonalities across women’s cases, delving into their experiences of motherhood, gender-based violence (“GBV”), and prior involvement with the criminal legal system. We also explore the nature of the women’s crimes of conviction, including the role of male codefendants and the state’s use of aggravating factors. Finally, we reveal …

Is Grammar Religious Exercise? Addressing Transgender Students And The Limits Of The Complicity Doctrine, Saul R. Thorkelson

Cardozo Law Review

May teachers reject transgender students’ names and pronouns on religious grounds? Across the United States, many schools and universities have adopted policies calling on staff to use all students’ designated first names and gender-congruent pronouns. A number of conservative Christian teachers have claimed that they cannot address transgender students in this way without violating their religious beliefs. In several cases, after unsuccessful attempts by administrators to accommodate these objections, teachers who were subject to employment consequences have brought lawsuits alleging violation of their religious liberty and free speech rights.

This Note employs two recent cases to examine courts’ reasoning on …

Bound To Misfortune: Protecting Juvenile Abortion Through The Right To Travel, John H.C. Hughes

Cardozo Law Review

On July 1, 2022, the Indianapolis Star reported that a ten-year-old Ohio girl, who had been raped and was six weeks pregnant, had sought an abortion in Indiana. Abortion had been outlawed in Ohio mere hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but it remained legal ˙in neighboring Indiana. The Ohio girl was able to cross the state border, get the abortion, and—presumably—return home safely. But if lawmakers like those in Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, and a handful of other states have their way, pregnant© children in abortion-restrictive states will be unable to avail themselves of neighboring …

Impact Ipsa Loquitur: A Reverse Hand Rule For Consumer Finance, Susan Block-Lieb, Edward J. Janger

Cardozo Law Review

The topic of this symposium—Automating Bias—considers how artificial intelligence can produce, reinforce, and hide racial and other forms of discrimination in consumer finance. The animating intuition is that the complexity and opacity of algorithms and artificial intelligence in consumer lending create a greater need for disparate impact analysis to combat lending discrimination. This view was articulated forcefully by the current Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Rohit Chopra, when he was still a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Faculty Handbook As Contract, Karen Halverson Cross

Cardozo Law Review

Colleges and universities, like other employers, typically have in place policies that govern the employment relationship with their faculty. Many such policies—policies against employee misconduct or policies on accommodations for persons with disabilities—are comparable to what employees might encounter outside of academia. Most higher education institutions also have in place policies that are more unique to academia, such as policies establishing shared governance bodies, affirming academic freedom as a core value, or outlining procedures on the granting and revocation of faculty tenure. These faculty policies may be aggregated in a faculty handbook, published separately on the institution’s web site, or, …

Whither Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing In New York? The Affh Mandate In An Era Of Land Use Reform, Timothy Gentles

Cardozo Law Review

New York is experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis. This crisis is driven by a housing supply shortfall decades in the making. The state’s housing shortage exacerbates economic, racial, and regional inequalities, and harms the economy by limiting growth. New York’s struggles with housing affordability reflect a national surge in housing costs since the pandemic that has disproportionally impacted communities of color. Yet, in many respects, the crisis in New York is worse than that in other states with comparably robust housing demand. The extent of New York’s housing affordability crisis has led to growing momentum behind legislative action in …

Backdating #Metoo, Jessica K. Fink

Cardozo Law Review

The #MeToo movement radically altered the way that people think about workplace sexual harassment. For decades, women were expected to tolerate a broad range of sexualized conduct at work. However, the revelation of Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds in late 2017, followed by the exposure of countless other bad actors, dramatically shifted the social narrative regarding appropriate workplace behavior. Conduct that employees once ignored or overlooked suddenly became the basis for vociferous objection; the perfunctory responses to harassment that many employers once adopted suddenly stood out as glaringly deficient.

While society has undergone great shifts in its understanding of and response to …

In Satan We Trust: The Satanic Temple’S Ongoing Crusade To Protect Abortion Rights, Bradley Koberg

Cardozo Law Review

In the summer of 2022, the Supreme Court overruled the nearly fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. This was one of several decisions in which the newly minted conservative supermajority undermined what could be seen as progressive precedents. At the same time, the Court has been elevating religious liberty claims and strengthening legal protections for religious individuals and organizations (predominantly Christian). For anybody who cares about the “so-called separation of . . . church and state,” this conservative Christian reformation taking place in the nation’s highest court is a cause for concern.

However, …

Bolstering New York’S Tenant Protection Law: Ensuring Retroactive Application Under The Heightened Regina Standard, Abigail Strange

Cardozo Law Review

Rent regulation laws have long been a cornerstone of the New York City and New York State housing markets, enacted to combat excessive rent increases that risked pricing out low- and middle-income tenants. On June 14, 2019, the New York State Legislature enacted the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which brought sweeping changes to New York’s rental laws, including regulated and unregulated buildings. The HSTPA significantly expanded tenant protections across New York State, and specifically in New York City, which currently has one of the highest monthly rent medians in the country. The passage of the HSTPA was …

The Charter School Network (Almost) No One Wants: Mobilizing Regulation And Litigation To Serve The Public Interest, Joni Hersch, Colton Cronin

Cardozo Law Review

Publicly funded, independently operated charter schools entered the public sector three decades ago with the promise of innovating public education to better serve students in underperforming schools. Despite limited evidence of improved educational outcomes, charter schools are now an established part of the education system, with around 7,800 charter schools serving more than seven percent of public, school students.

Although charter schools have long been associated with the controversial school choice movement, a recent entrant into the charter school arena has created new and urgent concerns. Hillsdale College, through its affiliate Barney Charter School Initiative, has been making escalating inroads …

How Private Enforcement Exacerbates Climate Change, Anna A. Mance

Cardozo Law Review

Private enforcement-the practice of allowing private actors to directly enforce statutes or regulations-has been a fixture of environmental law for the last fifty years. In the absence of comprehensive climate legislation, climate change has been brought under the fold of the environmental regime and its emphasis on private enforcement. Yet climate change presents a distinct global challenge from those harms that the 1970s environmental regime was designed to address. This Article investigates how private enforcement is limiting our ability to respond to the crisis of climate change. The central claim is that private enforcers are using the mantle of environmental …

The Coming Causation Revolution In Employment Discrimination Litigation, D’Andra Millsap Shu

Cardozo Law Review

For more than a decade, employment discrimination causation law has been a confusing, often overly restrictive quagmire that has contributed substantially to the paltry success rate of plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases. Most of these cases are dismissed pretrial, all too often based on a failure of causation. A key reason traces back to loose and misleading language—centered on a single word—in a 2009 Supreme Court opinion involving the but-for causation standard that applies in most discrimination cases. The Court said that the discriminatory motive must be “the” but-for cause of the employer’s action when it should have said “a” …

Civil Rights Catch-22s, Jonathan P. Feingold

Cardozo Law Review

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

The Prison Litigation Reform Act Exhaustion Requirement: How A Legislative Decision From 1996 Is Controlling Covid-19 Conditions Inside Correctional Facilities, And What Can Be Done To Fix It, Hannah E. Mirzoeff

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Do You Care About My Hair? A Proposal For Remedying Hair Discrimination In The Workplace On A Federal Level, Grayson Moronta

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

War & The Constitution: Chemical Agents And The Rights Of Protestors, Yomidalys GüIchardo Morel

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introductory Essay For The Issue Devoted To The Appointment Of Amy Coney Barrett To The U.S. Supreme Court, David Rudenstine

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Amplified Speech, Erin L. Miller

Cardozo Law Review

This Article introduces the concept of amplification into First Amendment law. Amplification, or the size of the audience reached by speech, lies at the heart of many contemporary free speech struggles. Yet the concept is surprisingly absent as a category of analysis from constitutional doctrine and virtually undiscussed in legal scholarship. Amplification deserves its own set of legal rules and doctrines, because the right to amplify one’s speech serves the two core types of First Amendment interests—those of audiences and those of speakers—differently than the right to choose the content of one’s speech. The higher the degree of amplification, the …

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: An Appreciation, Jonathan L. Entin

Cardozo Law Review

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a unique figure in American history: as Chief Justice Roberts put it, she was “a jurist of historic stature.”1 She was that, of course, but she was so much more. If she had never served on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would still have been a person of historic stature. She was a leading legal scholar who wrote major works about procedure, jurisdiction, comparative law, and constitutional law. And she was the architect of a litigation campaign that resulted in a series of Supreme Court rulings that fundamentally transformed the law of gender discrimination.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: The Implications Of St. Bernard Parish Government V. United States On Flood Takings, Mariel Talmage

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fighting Chance: Conflicts Over Risk In Social Change Litigation, Gwendolyn Leachman

Cardozo Law Review

Drawing on a case study of marriage equality litigation, this Article examines how practice setting affects the construction of risk and the emergence of conflict in social change litigation. Although private law firms often work collaboratively with social movement organizations to pursue common goals, conflicts also emerge when movement groups oppose “risky” private litigation which could imperil the movement’s ongoing impact litigation strategies. How do attorneys in private firms and social movement organizations vary in their framing of risk in social change litigation? Under what conditions does that variation lead to conflict? The findings show that movement-based LGBT rights attorneys …

The Role Of Justice In The Constitution: The Case For Social And Economic Rights In Comparative Perspective, Michel Rosenfeld

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Children's Equality Rights: Every Child's Right To Develop To Their Full Capacity, Nancy E. Dowd

Cardozo Law Review

Children are born equal. Yet as early as eighteen months, hierarchies emerge among children. These hierarchies are not random butfall into patterns by race, gender, and class. They are not caused nor voluntarily chosen by children or their parents. The hierarchies grow, persist, and are made worse by systems and policies created by the state, perpetuating the position of the privileged and continuing the disadvantage of the subordinated. Children's equal right to develop to their capacity is severely undermined by policies and structures that hamper and block the development of some by creating barriers and challenges or failing to support …

Ensuring An Underclass: Stigma In Insurance, Valerie K. Blake

Cardozo Law Review

In our country, access to insurance can be a matter of life and death, as well as financial security. Despite these great stakes, the cost and quality of insurance are often influenced by social factors like sexual orientation, age, gender, and race. Such discrimination, forbidden in other settings like employment, is forgiven in insurance, even seen as fairer, on the grounds of actuarial fairness. That is, insurance classifications are lawful so long as they are based on evidence that some groups are costlier to insure, with the understanding that others shouldn't have to offset those expenses. This Article challenges this …

Federal Criminal Risk Assessment, Brandon L. Garrett

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.