Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Judges Need To Exercise Their Responsibility To Require That Eligible Defendants Have Lawyers, Robert C. Boruchowitz

Faculty Articles

There are many courts in the United States, particularly misdemeanor courts, in which accused persons appear and often plead guilty without ever receiving the advice of counsel, even when they are eligible for a public defender. In various states, between twenty-five and sixty-eight percent of the defendants in misdemeanor cases do not have lawyers. In many courts in South Carolina, there is no public defender ever available. The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has filed a class action lawsuit against two South Carolina cities, alleging that they are unconstitutionally denying counsel to eligible accused persons.

There is no question that …

Effective Litigation Strategies To Improve State Education And Social Service Systems, Albert H. Kauffman

Faculty Articles

Texas border area Latino plaintiffs brought state court litigation, the Lulac case, to improve higher education opportunities in the Texas- Mexico borderlands. Plaintiffs successfully parlayed their trial court judgment into a massive influx of resources and permanent improvement in higher education in the Texas border. The Article describes the history of the Lulac case and includes an original analysis of the improvement of higher education in the Texas border area. The Article then develops a model for the successful integration of litigation, legislation, public advocacy and community involvement, and applies this model to the Lulac case and the Texas school …

The Development Of Legal Rights In The American Legal System, Roberto Rosas

Faculty Articles

This article takes a snapshot of some of the most controversial topics in American society today and the juridical response to these topics by individual states, the United States Congress, and the United States Supreme Court. Although there are numerous legal topics that deserve mention and analysis, this article is limited to the discussion of nine fairly new rights created by state and federal laws. The rights discussed in this article include the following: 1) The right to open carry a firearm; 2) The right to consume marijuana; 3) The right to marry or to civil unions between same-sex couples; …

Redskins: The Property Right To Racism, M. Alexander Pearl

Faculty Articles

Everyone has an opinion, from President Obama to Matthew McConaughey, about the Washington football team name. This Article comprehensively analyzes the legal and social issues surrounding the mascot controversy. I focus my inquiry on the interaction of trademark law and Indian law. I offer three primary contributions in this Article. First, the current mainstream conception of harm caused by the team name is subjective, and I argue that the harm caused by the team name and logo is objective, testable, and demonstrable. Psychological research shows that these images harm Native people. Second, the remedies offered by the Lanham Act are …

Regulating Drones Under The First And Fourth Amendments, Marc Blitz, James Grimsley, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai

Faculty Articles

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 requires the Federal Aviation Administration to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into the national airspace system by September of this year. Yet perhaps because of their chilling accuracy in targeted killings abroad, perhaps because of an increasing consciousness of diminishing privacy more generally, and perhaps simply because of a fear of the unknown, divergent UAV-restrictive legislation has been proposed in Congress and enacted in a number of states. Ultimately, given UAV utility and cost effectiveness over a vast range of tasks, widespread commercial use seems certain. So it is imperative …

Welcome To The Village: An Analysis Of How St. Louis County Occupancy Permit Schemes Perpetuate Segregation And Violate The Constitution, Zachary Schmook, Lauren Verseman

Faculty Articles

In the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014 and the events that followed in Ferguson, national attention turned to the several ways St. Louis County’s balkanized municipal governments create policies and conditions that target poor residents and perpetuate racial segregation in the region. One such set of municipal policies involves occupancy permits: many municipalities in St. Louis County require both tenants and owners of residential properties to obtain new occupancy permits upon each change in the individuals occupying the residence. Even as the State of Missouri takes action to address some of the abuses by limiting …

Will Neuroscience Redefine Mental Injury?: Disability Benefit Law, Mental Health Parity Law, And Disability Discrimination Law, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Following Fisher: Narrowly Tailoring Affirmative Action, Eang Ngov

Faculty Articles

Affirmative action has been at the forefront of educational policies and to this day continues to enliven debates. For decades, schools have litigated over whether affirmative action can be used to create a diverse student body. Now, the litigation has shifted to whether affirmative action policies are narrowly tailored. The Supreme Court’s most recent affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, requires that schools prove that there are no workable race neutral alternatives in order to demonstrate that their affirmative action programs are narrowly tailored. This article examines the available race neutral alternatives: percentage plans; socioeconomic based …

Not Without Political Power: Gays And Lesbians, Equal Protection And The Suspect Class Doctrine, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court purportedly utilizes the suspect class doctrine in order to balance institutional concerns with the protection of important constitutional rights. The Court, however, inconsistently applies this doctrine, and it has not precisely defined its contours. The political powerlessness factor is especially undertheorized and contradictorily applied. Nevertheless, this factor has become salient in recent equal protection cases brought by gay and lesbian plaintiffs.

A growing body of and federal and state-court precedent addresses the flaws of the Court's suspect class doctrine. This Article discusses the inadequacies of the suspect class doctrine and highlights problems within the emerging scholarship and …

Marriage Equality And One Original Principle Of Religious Liberty, Harry F. Tepker

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Invidious Deliberation: The Problem Of Congressional Bias In Federal Hate Crime Legislation, Sara Rankin

Faculty Articles

The intersection of power and prejudice can control the shape of statutory law, and yet a dearth of legal scholarship investigates it. Invidious Deliberation addresses that deficit. It tackles the problem of prejudice in Congressional deliberations at a particularly critical point: when Congress decides which groups to protect under federal hate crime legislation. The article contends that Congress’s own bias may exclude the most vulnerable groups from hate crime protection. To illustrate the point, this article systematically reviews over two decades of Congressional decisions with respect to expansions of the Hate Crime Statistics Act, a “gateway” for groups seeking protection …

Search Engine Liability For Autocomplete Defamation: Combating The Power Of Suggestion, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

In September 2012, Bettina Wulff, a former first lady of Germany, sued Google for defamation. Mrs. Wulff's complaint arose from Google's autocomplete function: when Mrs. Wulff's name was entered into the search engine, the search engine automatically suggested terms such as "prostitute" and "red light district." Rumors that Mrs. Wulff was a former prostitute dated back to 2006 when she first met Christian Wulff, her eventual husband and president of Germany from 2010 until his resignation in February 2012. Mrs. Wulff denied the truth of these rumors.

Mrs. Wulff contended that these autocomplete results were defamatory and that they caused …

Under The Cover Of Gay Rights, Dean Spade

Faculty Articles

The article presents a U.S. Supreme Court case Perry v. Brown wherein the status of marriage is considered as unique and same sex couples are denied of marriage but granted the same rights and responsibilities as married one. It mentions the views of Stephen Reinhardt, a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, that a granting rights and responsibilities is not sufficient substitute and mystique of marriage is the central issue related LGBT people.

Review Of Colin Dayan’S The Law Is A White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make And Unmake Persons, Dean Spade

Faculty Articles

Professor Dean Spade reviews Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.

The Invention Of Asian Americans, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

The essay begins by examining amicus briefs submitted in Fisher v. Texas by Asian American organizations in support of and in opposition to affirmative action. What does it mean when groups that purportedly protect, advance, and represent the interests of Asian Americans invoke the historical treatment of Asian Americans and present facts about Asian Americans but end up advocating for opposite outcomes? This Essay starts with the competing Asian American perspectives and assertions of authority expressed in these briefs to explore the theme of a Symposium at the UC Irvine School of Law, provocatively entitled, Reigniting Community: Strengthening the APA …

"So Closely Intertwined": Labor Interests And Racial Solidarity, Charlotte Garden, Nancy Leong

Faculty Articles

Conventional wisdom states that labor unions and people of color are adversaries. Commentators, academics, politicians, and employers across a broad range of ideologies view the two groups’ interests as fundamentally opposed and their relationship as rightfully fraught with tension. Like much conventional wisdom, the narrative that unions and people of color are rivals is flawed. In reality, labor unions and civil rights groups work together to advance a wide array of mutual interests; this work ranges from lobbying all levels of government to protesting working conditions across the country. Moreover, unions improve the lives of both members and non-members of …

Transforming Domestic Violence Representation, Jane Stoever

Faculty Articles

The dominant theories used in the law to explain domestic violence, namely, the Power and Control Wheel and the Cycle of Violence, provide only limited insight into intimate partner abuse. Both theories focus exclusively on the abusive partner' wrongful actions, consistent with recent decades' concentration on criminalization, but fail to educate about the survivor's needs and efforts to end violence. The Stages of Change Model, conversely, reveals that domestic abuse survivors seek an end to relationship violence through a five-stage cyclical sequence and identifies the survivor's needs and actions at each stage. This critical information should inform the representation of …

Promoting Language Access In The Legal Academy, Gillian Dutton, Beth Lyon, Jayesh Rathod, Deborah Weissman

Faculty Articles

Since the 1960s, the United States government has paid increasing attention to the rights of language minorities and to the need for greater civic and political integration of these groups. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the issuance of Executive Orders, and intervention by the federal judiciary, progress has been made in the realm of language access. State and local courts have likewise taken steps (albeit imperfectly) to provide interpretation and translation assistance to Limited English Proficient persons. Most recently, responding to both lack of services and inconsistent practices, the American Bar Association has set out …

Cheaper Than A Slave: Indentured Labor, Colonialism And Capitalism, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

The construct of free wage-labor, envisaged as consensual sale of labor-power by an autonomous and unencumbered individual in a market of juridical equals governed strictly by economic laws of supply and demand, is the bedrock of the purportedly universal category of labor under capitalism. However, this conceptual ensemble is an instance, yet again, of a particular masquerading as the universal – Europe’s autobiography passing for world history. It also underscores the divergence between mythologies and historical operations of capitalism. This article takes up the deployment of indentured labor from colonial India in plantation colonies across the globe for over a …

Drug Panics In The Twenty-First Century: Ecstasy, Prescription Drugs, And The Reframing Of The War On Drugs, Deborah Ahrens

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court has failed to clarify this important procedural exception to the clear error standard. More than this, the Court has failed to explain why it refuses to apply independent judgment to all constitutional facts. The results of the differential treatment of these two legal concepts are: 1) Rule 52, and the Supreme Court’s approach to its constitutional fact exception is another type of denial of structural due process, preventing the legal norming of intentional discrimination jurisprudence; 2) institutional interests of doctrinal coherence and decisional accuracy are minimized in favor of reducing direct costs to the judicial system; 3) …

Naim V. Naim, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

Part of a law review symposium on the worst Supreme Court cases, this essay nominates Naim v. Naim, in which the Court declined to review a Virginia antimiscegenation law, postponing action in this area for over a dozen years. This article argues that the Court's reluctance to enter this arena was unfortunate, short-sighted, and cruel; and that we might be a different nation if the Supreme Court had been less concerned about appearances and more about doing the right thing in 1955.

Diversity And The Virtual Workplace: Performance Identity And Shifting Boundaries Of Workplace Engagement, Natasha T. Martin

Faculty Articles

This article explores the meaning of workplace discrimination where reality meets the imaginary world in virtual work settings. Using a more recent development in the realm of virtual work--workplace avatars--the article considers the impact on law of virtual performance identity by workers where appearances can be altered in virtual reality.

Current protected-class approaches to antidiscrimination law have not served as the antidote to workplace bias and exclusion. Thus, the article investigates whether avatar technology holds promise for facilitating greater inclusion of marginalized workers in the contemporary workplace. Does this mode of virtual work serve as a platform for diversity or …

Centering The Immigrant In The Inter/National Imagination (Part Iii): Aoki, Rawls, And Immigration, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

Fifteen years ago, Keith Aoki and Professor Robert Chang published "Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination" in an early LatCrit symposium. Fifteen years later Professor Chang uses the occasion of the current Symposium to revisit conversations with Keith about centering the immigrant in political theory, as he addresses the issue of immigration, the rights of immigrants, and what is to be our national self-conception. What follows is a sketch that shows how centering the immigrant exposes the inattention paid to the immigrant and the issue of immigration in social contract theory. It focuses on how the immigrant might be …

An Updated Quantitative Study Of Iqbal's Impact On 12(B)(6) Motions, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

The effect of Ashcroft v. Iqbal on pleading standards and behavior is a source of significant legal debate. This article serves as a follow-up to Professor Moore's 2010 empirical study on Iqbal's effect on courts' rulings on motions to dismiss complaints for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Professor Moore's previous study found a statistically significant increase in the likelihood that a court grants a 12(b)(6) motion with leave to amend following Iqbal. In this article, Professor Moore updates and increases the pool of cases in her database. The updated data …

Reframing Roe: Property Over Privacy, Becca Rausch

Faculty Articles

Roe v. Wade has received much criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. These critiques diverge divisively but for one commonality. Specifically, commentators from both the pro- and anti-choice camps have expressed concern about the absence of an express constitutional right to privacy, upon which the Supreme Court in Roe based its finding of a "fundamental" right to abortion. This lack of express constitutional provision renders the Roe decision, and its resulting reproductive rights, vulnerable. Further, pro-choice advocates find fault with the privacy basis because it yields no positive rights to funding or governmental support for accessing abortion services. …

American Skin: Dispensing With Colorblindness And Critical Mass In Affirmative Action, Deirdre Bowen

Faculty Articles

This exploratory empirical work examines whether students of color enjoy the benefits articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grutter decision that rationalized the continuation of affirmative action based on diversity interests. Specifically, the Court stated that affirmative action was permissible because students of all backgrounds would increase their racial understanding and decrease their racial stereotyping of minorities. Neither side was happy with the decision—both skeptical that such benefits could transpire for minority students. Yet, in the heat of continuing debate, neither group has empirical support for their arguments until now.

Using survey data of over 370 under-represented minority …

En Paz Descanse: Remembering Keith Aoki’S Contributions Toward Latina/O Equality, Steven W. Bender

Faculty Articles

Part of the forthcoming University of Oregon Law Review tribute to the scholarship of the late Professor Keith Aoki (1955-2011), this article situates Keith’s engagement of Latina/o policy issues within his scholarly identity and legacy. Although best remembered for his renowned contributions in the fields of intellectual property, property law, and Asian American jurisprudence, Keith wrote extensively on Latina/o issues in pursuit of equality of treatment. As addressed in the article, Keith’s notable advocacy on behalf of Latinas/os includes the significance of political representation as a strategy for social change and his innovative proposals for regional formulation of immigration policy.

Gringo Alley, Steven W. Bender

Faculty Articles

As a tribute to the late Professor Keith Aoki, this piece engages an uncompleted collaboration with Professor Aoki sketching through art and words a profoundly dystopian immigration nightmare centered in the Southwestern United States. In detailing the plot and themes of the borderlands gauntlet of "Gringo Alley," the article confronts some of the disturbing recent developments in immigration policy that approach or match the horrors imagined in fictional Gringo Alley. Finally, the article draws on science fiction influence and demographic reality to suggest a frightening future for all U.S. residents -- the prospect of economic collapse in a landscape of …

Preliminary Report On Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

For this Report, the Research Working Group reviewed evidence on disproportionality in Washington’s criminal justice system and considered whether crime commission rates accounted for this disproportionality. They found that crime commission rates by race and ethnicity are largely unknown and perhaps unknowable, but that some researchers simply take arrest rates as good proxies for underlying commission rates for all crimes. They found that use of arrest rates likely overstates black crime commission rates for several reasons. But even if arrest rates are used as a proxy for underlying crime commission rates, the extent of racial disproportionality is not explained by …

Keith Aoki’S Theory Of Racial Microclimes, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.