Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Racial Discrimination In Business Transactions, Robert E. Suggs

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court invalidated a municipal minority business set-aside in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., it failed to recognize the special circumstances confronting the minority entrepreneur. Contrary to the Court’s own erroneous assertion that “[s]tates and their local subdivisions have many legislative weapons at their disposal both to punish and prevent present [business] discrimination ….” – they do not. Nor can they create effective antidiscrimination remedies as a practical matter. As a result that decision leaves minority business owners vulnerable to discrimination from other business firms but without a remedy. Part I identifies the glaring failure …

Operation Rescue: Was The Justice Dept. Right To Intervene In Wichita?, Gary S. Lawson, Celeste Lacy Davis, Eve W. Paul

Faculty Scholarship

Discussion of Operation Rescue attempt to shut down abortion clinic in Wichita, KS in August 1991, and ensuing decision of U.S. District Judge Patrick Kelly, as well as intervention of Justice Department. A debate-style article with "pro" side written by Gary Lawson and "con" side written by C.L. Davis & E.W. Paul.

The Annapolis Poll Books Of 1800 And 1804: African American Voting In The Early Republic, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Toilets As A Feminist Issue: A True Story, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminist Jurisprudence - The 1990 Myra Bradwell Day Panel, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Lucinda Finley, Carin Clauss, Joan Bertin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

To Confront Or Not To Confront: Measuring Claiming Rates In Discrimination Grievances, Neil Vidmar, Herbert M. Kritzer, W. A. Bogart

Faculty Scholarship

This note reexamines the generally accepted belief that persons with discrimination-related grievances are much less likely to complain about their problem than are persons with grievances arising from consumer purchases, torts, or other common kinds of personal problems. We find that previously reported analyses greatly overstate the gap between complaining in discrimination problems and other kinds of problems. Drawing on data from three surveys, each conducted in a different country (the United States, Canada, and Australia), we find that for some types of discrimination problems the level of complaining in fact equals or exceeds complaining in other arenas.

Love Makes A Family--Nothing More, Nothing Less: How The Judicial System Has Refused To Protect Nonlegal Parents In Alternative Families, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this article discusses the legal system's recognition of parental rights and enumerates the possible constitutional, statutory, and equitable theories available for protecting the parental rights of nonlegal parents. Part II considers the cases that have rejected the attempts by members of alternative families to use these theories to obtain this protection. Part III discusses the barriers to political power that will make it extremely difficult and time-consuming to achieve legislative change in these areas, and argues that the courts should use the means available to them currently to protect these nonlegal parents and their children while the …

Race, Gender, And Sexual Harassment, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

I would like to thank Anita Hill and express my deep respect to her for having the courage to shatter the silence on sexual harassment. I am certain that I speak for millions of women in saying that I have been inspired and renewed by her strength and integrity.

I have looked forward to addressing you tonight on a critical issue at this very important juncture in our political history. Sexual harassment has captured our attention over the last several weeks and has of course galvanized women in a way that scarcely could have been imagined only a few short …

Rethinking Minority Business Development Strategies, Robert E. Suggs

Faculty Scholarship

Minority business set-asides were created as a prophylactic measure to redress discrimination against minority owned business firms. Predominantly minority jurisdictions found them especially attractive because they promised to provide minority firms a share of the procurement dollars expended by these jurisdictions. The Croson decision invalidated Richmond’s ordinance and posed substantial barriers to further enactments. This article proposes an alternative to such set-aides. It argues that the proposed alternative, an Equal Opportunity Rating Agency (EORA), provides a superior business development policy tool and does not have the constitutional vulnerabilities of set-asides. An EORA would operate much like a credit rating agency, …

Public Remedies For Private Wrongs: Rethinking The Title Vii Back Pay Remedy, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Women And Aids - Racism, Sexism, And Classism, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Desegregating Politics: "All-Out" School Desegregation Explained, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

School desegregation is not dead. It lives quietly in what used to be the Confederate South. Notwithstanding the Reagan and Bush Administrations' ten-year campaign to limit the legal, remedial, and temporal scope of court-ordered integration plans throughout the nation, desegregation persists in southern rural areas where substantial numbers of black Americans continue to reside and in southern urban areas where school districts were organized in 1970 to encompass not only the inner city but also the suburbs. By many accounts, moreover, desegregation is an effective and accepted – one may even say respected – member of the family of social …

Implementing Brown In The Nineties: Political Reconstruction, Liberal Recollection, And Litigatively Enforced Legislative Reform, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Opposed for a decade by a hostile national administration, faced with the prospect for decades to come of an unsympathetic federal judiciary, and amidst declarations of the Second Reconstruction's demise, civil rights organizations have undertaken recently to rethink their litigation agendas. I have two motivations for offering some thoughts in support of that task. First, the civil rights community has requested the assistance of the academy in reshaping the community's litigation agenda and, in my case, in identifying "new strategies for implementing Brown v. Board of Education." Second, my analysis of the principal "old" strategy for implementing Brown, …

A Critical Approach To Section 1983 With Special Attention To Sources Of Law, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The Civil Rights Act of 1871¹ ("§ 1983") establishes a tort-like remedy for persons deprived of federally protected rights "under color of law."'² While the statute's broad language provides a remedy for violations of federal constitutional and statutory rights, the statute itself provides little or no guidance regarding important subjects such as the measure of damages, the availability of punitive damages, the requirements for equitable relief, the statute of limitations, survival of claims, proper parties, and immunities from suit.³...

...The first part of this article examines the narrowly "legal" analysis of § 1983 in the cases …

The First Integration Of The University Of Maryland School Of Law, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Warrior Bards, Kevin Mccarthy, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Racial Reflections: Dialogues In The Direction Of Liberation , Derrick Bell, Tracy Higgins, Sung-Hee Suh

Faculty Scholarship

"New voices" of future lawyers are particularly important in the area of civil rights because racial problems are theirs to confront in the next decades. Teaching techniques developed by Paulo Freire have facilitated the enlistment of students in the racial struggle. By these techniques teachers, as well as students, learn through sharing, and students become active participants, rather than passive observers, in the learning process. The educational process, Freire counsels, ''must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. In the fall of 1988, two …

Bias Crimes: Unconscious Racism In The Prosecution Of Racially Motivated Violence, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Within the past four years, a perceived surge of "bias crimes" has seized the nation's attention. Bias crimes, physical acts of violence used as an outlet for prejudiced hostilities, are usually street crimes spontaneously committed by casual clusters of "normal people on the street" with very little advanced planning. This Note focuses on the physical injuries to persons that result from bias crimes. Such physical injuries represent cog- nizable harms that can be redressed through criminal statutes.'

Choosing One's Family: Can The Legal System Address The Breadth Of Women's Choices Of Intimate Relationships, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

In discussing the legal system's response to alternative families seeking an extension of traditional family benefits, this paper is divided into two main sections. The first section summarizes the Madison experience in trying to pass a comprehensive alternative family rights ordinance. It takes an in-depth look at the entire process from the grassroots pressures on the M.E.O.C. which resulted in formation of the task force to the Common Council's enactment of two minor sections of the proposed ordinance. It will analyze the political and legal process used in an effort to obtain significant reform in the definition of family within …

Charleston Policy: Substance Or Abuse, The , Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

In 1989, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) adopted a policy that, according to subjective criteria, singled out for drug testing, certain women who sought prenatal care and childbirth services would be tested for prohibited substances. Women who tested positive were arrested, incarcerated and prosecuted for crimes ranging from misdemeanor substance possession to felony substance distribution to a minor. In this Article, the Author argues that by intentionally targeting indigent Black women for prosecution, the MUSC Policy continued the United States legacy of their systematic oppression and resulted in the criminalizing of Black Motherhood.

Toward A Constitutional Jurisprudence Of Religious Group Rights, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Stereotypic Alchemy: Transformative Stereotypes And Antidiscrimination Law, Madeline Morris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Race And Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory And Antiracist Politics, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and …

Aids, Astrology, And Arline: Towards A Casual Interpretation Of Section 504, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that "[n]o otherwise qualified individual with handicaps shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under [any federal or federally funded program]."' In School Board v. Arline, the Supreme Court held that a school teacher with a history of infectious tuberculosis was an "individual with handicaps" protected by section 504, and that the determination of whether she was "otherwise qualified" to teach elementary school required a sound medical assessment of the risks of contagion posed by …

Mental Impairments And The Rehabilitation Act Of 1973, David Allen Larson

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the question of whether an asserted mental disorder should be regarded as a statutory impairment. The article begins by outlining the Rehabilitation Act and by discussing the diagnostic difficulties that exist in the mental health field. It then surveys specific cases arising under the Rehabilitation Act. Selected cases reviewing state statutory language are also examined. The article provides a broad discussion of the questions and concerns that must be considered when formulating a nondiscrimination policy protecting mentally impaired persons. It concludes by suggesting an approach for handling cases alleging discrimination due to a mental impairment.

Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Comment is to examine the history of the enactment and early enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from the perspective of the remedies Congress sought to provide to meet the problems that necessitated the legislation. Its main foci are the statute's enforcement provisions and their early implementation, an aspect of the history of the statute that has not been fully considered in relation to section one, the provision that has received the most scholarly attention. The occasion of this study is the Supreme Court's reconsideration of Runyon v. McCrary' in Patterson v. McLean Credit …

Legislative Enforcement Of Equal Protection, Stephen F. Ross

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the legislative role in enforcing the constitutional guarantee to equal protection. Part I describes the underenforcement principle that explains the restrictive judicial exercise of authority in constitutional matters. The Article then focuses on Congress' role in examining issues relating to the constitutional guarantee of equal protection that the courts have chosen to underenforce. Part II analyzes relevant constitutional provisions that may empower or limit congressional actions. Part III considers ways in which Congress can address state violations of equal protection through directives to the judiciary and through the legislative process. Part IV details how both federal and …

Protecting The Parental Rights Of Incarcerated Mothers Whose Children Are In Foster Care: Proposed Changes To New York's Termination Of Parental Rights Law, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the number of female prisoners in New York state and city jails has risen dramatically. Currently, there are 1,890 women incarcerated in New York State prisons, and an additional 1,626 women confined in New York City jails. Approximately seventy- two percent of the women in state prisons are parents, and, according to one informal study, nearly sixty percent of the women in city prisons are single parents with minor children. While some of these women can make formal or informal child care arrangements with relatives or close friends, many others must turn to state-regulated foster care. …

Race, Reform, And Retrenchment: Transformation And Legitimation In Antidiscrimination Law, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasize the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices …

Toward A Race-Conscious Pedagogy In Legal Education, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

It is both an honor and a pleasure to write the Foreword for this issue of the National Black Law Journal. This project represents the culmination of a joint effort involving the NBLJ, Dean Susan Westerberg Prager and me. The project grew out of discussions that began in the Spring of 1987 in which we explored various ways that the law school could support the production of publishable student material for the Journal. I initially considered sponsoring interested students in independent research projects; however, a high level of student interest, an obvious overlap between proposed student topics, and my …