Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Brief For Constitutional Law Professors As Amici Curiae Supporting Appellee, Brown Et Al. V. Livingston, Leslie C. Griffin

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Lethal Injection Secrecy And Eighth Amendment Due Process, Eric Berger

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that death row inmates possess an Eighth Amendment right protecting them against execution methods posing a substantial risk of serious harm. Despite the clear existence of this liberty interest, lower federal courts have repeatedly denied inmates’ requests to know important details of the lethal injection procedure the state plans to use. This Article argues that the Eighth Amendment includes an implicit due process right to know such information about the state’s planned method of execution. Without this information, inmates cannot protect their Eighth Amendment right against an excruciating execution, because the state can conceal …

Border Fixation: The Appearance Of Security And Control In Immigration Reform, Katherine L. Vaughns

Faculty Scholarship

Immigration reform is the subject of intense discussion among politicians, policy experts, analysts, and advocacy groups alike; America’s never-ending debate which today has been infected with shameless demagoguery, rendering sound policy choices virtually impossible. And in this political cauldron, the appearance of border security and control through symbolism and political rhetoric substitute for the practical realities that are essential to inform policymakers about the appropriate administration and enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. For Congress has had an ongoing, unsound focus on sealing the border it shares with Mexico, its southwestern neighbor, seemingly without regard to costs especially in the post-9/11 …

Hosanna-Tabor In The Religious Freedom Panopticon, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Still Drowning In Segregation: Limits Of Law In Post-Civil Rights America, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

Approximately 40% of the deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were caused by drowning. Blacks in the New Orleans area accounted for slightly more than one half of all deaths. Some of the drowning deaths were preventable. Too many black Americans do not know how to swim. Up to seventy percent of all black children in the United States have no or low ability to swim. Thus it is unsurprising that black youth between 5 and 19 are more likely to drown than white youths of the same age. The Centers for Disease Control concludes that a major factor …

Promoting Innovation While Preventing Discrimination: Policy Goals For The Scored Society, Frank A. Pasquale, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

There are several normative theories of jurisprudence supporting our critique of the scored society, which complement the social theory and political economy presented in our 2014 article on that topic in the Washington Law Review. This response to Professor Tal Zarsky clarifies our antidiscrimination argument while showing that is only one of many bases for the critique of scoring practices. The concerns raised by Big Data may exceed the capacity of extant legal doctrines. Addressing the potential injustice may require the hard work of legal reform.

Perspectives On Outpatient Commitment, Richard C. Boldt

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Status Gap: Female Faculty In The Legal Academy, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Children As Proto-Citizens: Equal Protection, Citizenship, And Lessons From The Child-Centered Cases, Catherine E. Smith, Susannah W. Pollvogt

Scholarly Articles

The rights of children have recently taken a prominent role in the popular and judicial consciousness. This is largely due to litigation over marriage equality. In authoring the majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013), Justice Kennedy cited tangible and psychic harm to the children of same-sex couples as a basis for invalidating the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Post-Windsor, myriad state and federal courts similarly have recognized the manner in which state-level marriage bans inflict harm on the children of same-sex couples. Yet, while courts have recognized the significance of harm to children …

Fakers And Floodgates, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

There has always been the possibility of judicial skepticism about employment discrimination claims. Recently, the Supreme Court made this skepticism explicit. In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court expressed concern about fake claims and floodgates of litigation. It then used these arguments to tip the substantive law against retaliation claims. This article responds to this explicit skepticism about discrimination claims. First, it shows that the Court created reasons to limit retaliation claims that are not tied to congressional intent. Second, the factual claims that the Court makes are not grounded in evidence, and available information …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …

Let's Pretend Discrimination Is A Tort, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked tort common law to interpret federal discrimination statutes. During this same time period, the Supreme Court increasingly invoked textualism as the appropriate methodology for interpreting these statutes. One immediate effect of these two trends - tortification and textualism - is to restrict discrimination law by tightening causal standards.

This Article explores how interpreting discrimination statutes through the lenses of tort law and textualism can expand, rather than restrict, discrimination law. It assumes that courts will continue to characterize discrimination statutes as torts and as deriving from the common law, despite …

Irresistible As A Matter Of Law: Why Title Vii Jurisprudence Administered The Coup De Grace To The Purposivist Method Of Statutory Interpretation, Robert A. Pellow

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Looking To Torts: Exploring The Risks Of Workplace Discrimination, Catherine E. Smith

Scholarly Articles

Tort law plays a powerful role in defining cognizable harms and allocating responsibility based on concepts of fault, individual and community interests, social values, morality, compensation, deterrence, and notions of fairness. So, the idea that it may serve as a source of guidance in employment discrimination law, and in particular, in one of the most intractable debates within employment discrimination jurisprudence--the requirement of discriminatory intent--is not "unreasonable." To shift from an intentional discrimination mindset to one focused on risks of discrimination will not be easy. Hopefully, this brief inquiry has offered some food for thought.

Chapter 85: Providing Greater Protections For Transgender Students, Lara Awad

McGeorge Law Review

No abstract provided.

Narrowing The Gender Pay Gap By Providing Equal Opportunities: The Need For Tenured Female Professors In Higher Stem Institutions In An Effort To Recast Gender Norms, Claire R. Rollor

Women, Leadership & Equality

No abstract provided.

An Evaluation Of The Prospects For Successful Implementation Of The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities In The Islamic World, Brenton Kinker

Michigan Journal of International Law

This note will examine the CRPD’s aspirations in light of Islamic law, comparing whether the two are—or can be—consistent. Part I will provide background on the CRPD, including the intent of the treaty, the negotiations leading to the final wording, and the solid obligations it contains for state parties. Part II examines the background of Shari’a and its provisions regarding disability. Part III compares the treatment of the disabled under Islamic law with that required by the CRPD in order to gage consistency. Where tensions exist, alternative interpretations of both Islamic law and the CPRD are proposed that might facilitate …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

Rules Of Disengagement: "Low Skill" Migrant Workers, Law And The Social Dimensions Of Exclusionary Inclusion, Brendan Breckman Jowett

LLM Theses

This thesis interrogates social exclusion among migrant workers under the NOC C & D (“low skill”) occupational stream of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, a relatively new, fast-growing, and highly diverse stream which brings migrant workers into industry sectors and social settings where they were never seen before. The author develops a framework for understanding law’s role in producing social exclusion, and applies it to ethnographic data collected through interviews with migrant justice advocates and migrant workers in Brandon, Manitoba. This thesis ultimately establishes that migrant workers need not face spatial separation, discrimination from the community, or a historically gendered …

In Defense Of Idea Due Process, Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

Due Process hearing rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are under attack. A major professional group and several academic commentators charge that the hearings system advantages middle class parents, that it is expensive, that it is futile, and that it is unmanageable. Some critics would abandon individual rights to a hearing and review in favor of bureaucratic enforcement or administrative mechanisms that do not include the right to an individual hearing before a neutral decision maker. This Article defends the right to a due process hearing. It contends that some criticisms of hearing rights are simply erroneous, and …

Transgender Youth In Public Schools: Why Identity Matters In The Restroom, Jennifer Johnson

William Mitchell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mixed Signals On Summary Judgment, Howard Wasserman

Faculty Publications

This essay examines three cases from the Supreme Court’s October Term 2013 addressing the standards for summary judgment. In one case, the Court affirmed summary judgment against a civil-rights plaintiff, in a continued erroneous over-reliance on the certainty of video evidence. In two other cases, the Court rejected the grant of summary judgment against civil-rights plaintiffs, arguably for the first time in quite a while. This essay unpacks the substance and procedure underlying all three decisions and considers the effect of the three cases and what signals they send to lower courts and litigants about the proper approach to summary …

Love And Civil Rights, Ediberto Román

Faculty Publications

Despite western legal scholars' almost universal rejection of the use of emotions in legal analysis, the unquestionable greatest social activist and grassroots legal reformer of our times, and perhaps one of the greatest in the annals of time, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, understood a basic yet profound fact concerning societal change - the transformative power of love. During the era where he achieved the greatest influence, Dr. King knew that societal-wide change could not occur without transforming the American psyche on the basic fairness of the civil rights struggle. This civil rights struggle, which is now so closely associated …

Following Fisher: Narrowly Tailoring Affirmative Action, Eang L. Ngov

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cruel And Invisible Punishment: Redeeming The Counter-Majoritarian Eighth Amendment, Aliza Plener Cover

Articles

No abstract provided.

Will The South Rise Again And, If So, In What Form?: Lessons From Latcrit About Resisting The Fear Of Cultural Understanding, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1211 (2014), Angela Mae Kupenda

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Challenging Discrimination Of Lgbt Youth In Juvenile Justice: Encouraging The Legal Strategy Of Selective Prosecution Motions, Alanna Holt

Criminal Law Practitioner

No abstract provided.

A Perfect Storm -- The Negative Effects Of Felony Voting Laws And The Repeal Of Section 4 Of The Voting Rights Act On Minority Americans, Genevive Saul

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

The Usual Suspects: Judicial Review Of State Laws That Target Undocumented Immigrants, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1127 (2014), Jonathan Svitak

UIC Law Review

This Comment will attempt to balance the interests of Arizona and Alabama in combating the growing problem of undocumented immigration against the interest of the documented and undocumented aliens and U.S. citizens protected by the Equal Protection Clause.

The Trayvon Martin Trial - Two Comments And An Observation, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1371 (2014), Richard Delgado

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.