Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Reading The Pink Locker Room On Football Culture And Title Ix, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the public controversy that erupted after local media reported on a comment the Author made about the University of Iowa's decision to renovate the football stadium's visiting team locker room entirely in pink. The Author submitted a statement in response to the University Steering Committee on NCAA Certification's request for feedback on a draft report and suggested that the "joke" behind the pink decor traded in sexist and homophobic values. As such, the Author concluded that it belonged in the comprehensive analysis of gender equity that the committee was preparing. The Author immediately received hundreds of hateful …

A Reader's Companion To Against Prediction: A Reply To Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, And Yoav Sapir On Economic Modeling, Selective Incapacitation, Governmentality, And Race, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

From parole prediction instruments and violent sexual predator scores to racial profiling on the highways, instruments to predict future dangerousness, drug-courier profiles, and IRS computer algorithms to detect tax evaders, the rise of actuarial methods in the field of crime and punishment presents a number of challenging issues at the intersection of economic theory, sociology, history, race studies, criminology, social theory, and law. The three review essays of "Against Prediction" by Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir, raise these challenges in their very best light. Ranging from the heights of poststructuralist and critical race theory to the intricate details …

The Architecture Of Inclusion: Interdisciplinary Insights On Pursuing Institutional Citizenship, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Structural inequality has captured the attention of academics, policymakers, and activists. This structural reorientation is occurring at a time of judicial retrenchment and political backlash against affirmative action. These developments have placed in sharp relief the mismatch between structural diagnoses and the dominant legal frameworks for addressing inequality. Scholars, policymakers, and activists are faced with the pressing question of what to do now. They share a need for new frameworks and strategies, growing out of a better understanding of institutional and cultural change.

I am honored that the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender has used the publication of The …

New Frameworks For Racial Equality In The Criminal Law, Jeffery Fagan, Mukul Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium, " Pursuing Racial Fairness in the Administration of Justice: Twenty Years After McClesky v. Kemp," was conceived and inspired by Theodore Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Ted Shaw and his staff worked with Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan to recruit an outstanding group of scholars and activists who met on March 2-3, 2007 to hear and comment on the articles appearing in this Symposium. In addition to the authors whose work appears in this issue, many others made important contributions to the Symposium through their commentaries and presentations. These …

Disparity Rules, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992, Congress required states receiving federal juvenile justice funds to reduce racial disparities in the confinement rates of minority juveniles. This provision, now known as the disproportionate minority contact standard (DMC), is potentially more far-reaching than traditional disparate impact standards: It requires the reduction of racial disparities regardless of whether those disparities were motivated by intentional discrimination orjustified by "legitimate" agency interests. Instead, the statute encourages states to address how their practices exacerbate racial disadvantage.

This Article casts the DMC standard as a partial response to the failure of constitutional and statutory standards to discourage actions that produce racial …

Shape Stops Story, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Storytelling and resistance are powerful tools of both lawyering and individual identity, as I argue in this brief essay published in Narrative as part of a dialogue on disability, narrative, and law with Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Ellen Barton. Garland-Thompson's work shows us the life-affirming potential of storytelling, its role in shaping disability identity, and its role in communicating that identity to the outside world. By contrast, Barton powerfully shows how those same life-affirming narratives can force a certain kind of storytelling, can create a mandate to tell one story and not another. In short, Barton reminds us of the need …

Police Interrogation During Traffic Stops: More Questions Than Answers, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This short paper focuses on whether the Fourth Amendment permits police, during a routine traffic stop, to arbitrarily question motorists about subjects unrelated to the purpose of the traffic stop. The paper was prompted by a recent Ninth Circuit ruling, United States v. Mendez, 476 F.3d 1077 (9th Cir. 2007), which was authored by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

Prior to Mendez, the Ninth Circuit had taken the position that the Fourth Amendment barred police from questioning motorists about subjects unrelated to the purpose of a traffic stop, unless there was independent suspicion for such questioning. This rule was based on the …

The Politics Of Preclearance, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines recent charges of political motivation against the Department of Justice and its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. These accusations appear well-deserved, on the strength of the Department's recent handling of the Texas redistricting submission and Georgia's voting identification requirement. This Essay reaches two conclusions. First, it is clear that Congress wished to secure its understanding of the Act into the future through its preclearance requirement. Many critics of the voting rights bill worried about the degree of discretion that the legislation accorded the Attorney General. Supporters worried as well, for this degree of discretion might lead …

Race-Conscious Student Assignment Plans: Balkanization, Integration, And Individualized Consideration, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In deciding Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court of the United States will likely confront a critical issue to emerge from the lower court opinions on voluntary integration plans: whether school districts that use race as a factor in student assignment must comply with a legal requirement of individualized consideration. The Court has imposed such a requirement in other contexts, but it has not clearly explained what the concept of individualized consideration means and why particular forms of it matter.

This Article clarifies the …

Sidestepping Lassiter On The Path To Civil Gideon: Civil Douglas, Steven D. Schwinn

Faculty Scholarship

Civil Gideon advocates have at each turn faced the scourge of Lassiter v. Department of Social Services, which established (apparently out of whole cloth) a presumption that indigent litigants are entitled to appointed counsel only when physical liberty is at stake. This article proposes side-stepping that presumption by seeking a right to counsel on appeal via Douglas v. California, not a right to counsel at trial via Gideon v. Wainwright. Once established, a civil right to counsel on appeal would presage the inevitable downfall of Lassiter and the establishment of Civil Gideon. This article poses the argument …

Rethinking Rational Discrimination Against Ex-Offenders, Jocelyn Simonson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Silent Criminal Defendant And The Presumption Of Innocence: In The Hands Of Real Jurors, Is Either Of Them Safe, Mitchell J. Frank, Dawn Broschard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Integrated Perspective On The Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Convictions And Reentry Issues Faced By Formerly Incarcerated Individuals, Michael Pinard

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the emergent focus on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions and the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals. Specifically, the article details the ways in which legal scholars, policy analysts, elected officials, legal services organizations and community based organizations have begun to address these components of the criminal justice system. The article argues that these various groups have compartmentalized collateral consequences and reentry by focusing almost exclusively on one component to the exclusion of the other. In doing so, they have narrowed the lens through which to view these components, and have therefore missed opportunities to develop integrated …

The Evolution-Or End-Of Marriage?: Reflections On The Impasse Over Same-Sex Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

The debate over legalization of same-sex marriage implicates the question of whether doing so would signal the end - or destruction - of the institution of marriage, or instead would be an appropriate evolution of marriage laws that is in keeping with the ends of marriage and with relevant public values. This essay comments on an earlier published debate on that question: Special Issue: The Evolution of Marriage, 44 Family Court Review 33-105 (2006). The essay contends that the appeal to preserving a millennia-old tradition of marriage against destruction fails to reckon with the evolution of the institution of civil …

Invisible Settlements, Invisible Discrimination, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Poisoning The Well: Law & Economics And Racial Inequality, Robert E. Suggs

Faculty Scholarship

The standard Law & Economics analysis of racial discrimination has stunted our thinking about race. Its early conclusion, that laws prohibiting racial discrimination were unnecessary and wasteful, discredited economic analysis of racial phenomena within the civil rights community. As a consequence we know little about the impact of racial discrimination on commercial transactions between business firms. Laws do not prohibit racial discrimination in transactions between business firms, and the disparity in business revenues between racial minorities and the white mainstream dwarfs disparities in income by orders of magnitude. This disparity in business revenues is a major factor in the persistence …

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962): Lawyering In An Unjust Society, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal, Strategic Or Legal Strategy: Deciding To Decide During The Civil War And Reconstruction, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address: Want Gender Equality? Die Childless At Thirty, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Family Responsibilities Discrimination: What Plaintiffs' Attorneys, Management Attorneys And Employees Need To Know, Joan C. Williams, Cynthia Thomas Calvert

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Caregivers In The Courtroom: The Growing Trend Of Family Responsibilities Discrimination, Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Architecture Of Inclusion: Advancing Workplace Equity In Higher Education, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The path to workplace'equality has become a difficult one to navigate. No one can safely rely upon the strategies developed in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate workplaces. Employers face legal and political challenges both for failing to diversify their workplaces and for diversity efforts to overcome that failure. Civil rights and women's rights advocates battle to hold on to the litigation victories of the past, even as they acknowledge judicial remedies' shrinking availability and limited efficacy in addressing many aspects of current-day equality. Anti-discrimination regulators contend with inadequate resources to carry out their traditional enforcement activities, as well as …

An Other Christian Perspective On Lawrence V. Texas, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The so-called Religious Right's reaction to Lawrence v. Texas has been both powerful and negative, characterizing the case as an assault on the traditional conception of marriage and family life. This essay is an attempt to present a different Christian view. Modeled on the life and teachings of Jesus, this perspective celebrates the Lawrence case as consistent with God's call to social justice for the oppressed. It also outlines a Christian sexual ethic that lifts up genuine, monogamous, committed love between two individuals, whether of the same or opposite sex.

Overruling The Jury: Duncan V. Gmc And Appellate Treatment Of Hostile Work Environment Judgments, Dara Purvis

Faculty Scholarship

In 2002, the Eighth Circuit reversed a one million dollar jury award to the plaintiff in a sexual harassment suit against General Motors Corporation. This reversal demonstrates the danger of appellate review of such verdicts, limiting sexual harassment verdicts to the lowest common denominator in that circuit.

"The Irresistible Force Meets The Immovable Object": When Antidiscrimination Standards And Religious Belief Collide In Aba-Accredited Law Schools, Kristin B. Gerdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Deconstructing The Maternal Wall: Strategies For Vindicating The Civil Rights Of "Carers" In The Workplace, Joan C. Williams, Elisabeth S. Westfall

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Sympathetic Discriminator: Mental Illness, Hedonic Costs, And The Ada, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Social discrimination against people with mental illness is widespread. Treating people differently on the basis of mental illness does not provoke the same moral outrage as that inspired by differential treatment on the basis of race, sex, or even physical disability. Indeed, many people would freely admit preferring someone who does not have a mental illness as a neighbor, dinner party guest, parent, partner, or person in the next seat on the subway. Moreover, more than ten years after the Americans with Disabilities Act (the "ADA" or "Act") expressly prohibited private employers from discriminating on the basis of mental, as …

Constitutional Tipping Points: Civil Rights, Social Change, And Fact-Based Adjudication, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers an account of how courts respond to social change, with a specific focus on the process by which courts "tip" from one understanding of a social group and its constitutional claims to another. Adjudication of equal protection and due process claims, in particular, requires courts to make normative judgments regarding the effect of traits such as race, sex, sexual orientation, or mental retardation on group members' status and capacity. Yet, Professor Goldberg argues, courts commonly approach decisionmaking by focusing only on the 'facts" about a social group, an approach that she terms 'fact-based adjudication." Professor Goldberg critiques …

Aggravating Youth: Roper V Simmons And Age Discrimination, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court confronted a difficult question: Given that being younger than eighteen is merely a proxy for diminished culpability, why not let jurors decide whether youth mitigates the culpability of an individual sixteen- or seventeen-year-old offender? The Court's subtle answer draws on psychological literature about the differences between juveniles and adults, but ultimately depends as much on concerns about the mind of the adult juror as on the distinctive traits of juveniles. Read in its best light, Kennedy's opinion seems to turn on the insight that while age-based classifications are rational – they are a …

Muslim Profiles Post-9/11: Is Racial Profiling An Effective Counterterrorist Measure And Does It Violate The Right To Be Free From Discrimination?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Racial profiling as a defensive counterterrorism measure necessarily implicates a rights trade-off: if effective, racial profiling limits the right of young Muslim men to be free from discrimination in order to promote the security and well-being of others. Proponents of racial profiling argue that it is based on simple statistical fact and represents just smart law enforcement. Opponents of racial profiling, like New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, say that it is dangerous and just nuts.

As a theoretical matter, both sides are partly right. Racial profiling in the context of counterterrorism measures may increase the detection of terrorist …