Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Toward A Definitive History Of Griggs V. Duke Power Co., David J. Garrow

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Griggs v. Duke Power Co. was unanimously handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on March 8, 1971, the decision did not draw prominent headlines. The New York Times accorded the ruling only a two-sentence summary on page twenty-one, and the Wall Street Journal gave it modest attention on page four. The Washington Post did give the decision front-page coverage, but Gillette v. United States, a Selective Service Act case, was awarded a prominent, top-of-the-page, two-column headline while Griggs received secondary attention. Notwithstanding how modest the contemporaneous news coverage was, knowledgeable judges, scholars, and litigators quickly acknowledged how Griggs …

$1.6 Million Employment Bias Award Upheld By Manhattan Appeals Court, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Towards A Universal Framework For Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz

Articles

Discrimination in insurance is principally regulated at the state level. Surprisingly, there is a great deal of variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics in how and the extent to which risk classification by insurers is limited. Some statutes expressly permit insurers to consider certain characteristics, while other characteristics are forbidden or limited in various ways. What explains this variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics? Drawing on a unique, hand-collected data-set consisting of the laws regulating insurer risk classification in fifty-one U.S. jurisdictions, this Article argues that much of the variation in state-level regulation of risk classification can in …

Gay Rights, Equal Protection, And The Classification-Framing Quandary, Peter Nicolas

Articles

Commentators and lower courts will speculate for some time on the actual holding and potential sweep of the Supreme Court's decision in Windsor v. United States [699 F.3d 169, 175 (2d Cir. 2012), aff'd, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013)], as well as how the Court might have resolved Perry v. Brown [671 F.3d 1052, 1063 (9th Cir. 2012), vacated and remanded sub nom. Hollingsworth v. Perry, 133 S. Ct. 2652 (2013)] on the merits.

Of at least equal and perhaps greater importance, however, is a subtle yet critical unresolved threshold question lurking in the background of these two decisions, …

Racial Profiling As Collective Definition, Trevor G. Gardner

Articles

Economists and other interested academics have committed significant time and effort to developing a set of circumstances under which an intelligent and circumspect form of racial profiling can serve as an effective tool in crime finding–the specific objective of finding criminal activity afoot. In turn, anti-profiling advocates tend to focus on the immediate efficacy of the practice, the morality of the practice, and/or the legality of the practice.

However, the tenor of this opposition invites racial profiling proponents to develop more surgical profiling techniques to employ in crime finding. In this article, I review the literature on group distinction to …

Unions And Democracy: When Do Nonmembers Have Voting Rights?, Melanie Stallings Williams, Dennis A. Halcoussis

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Post-Racial Lending?, Cassandra Jones Havard

All Faculty Scholarship

Should lenders have absolute discretion when setting mortgage loan prices regardless of the borrower's creditworthiness? How should a regulatory framework evaluate lending decisions for racial bias to determine if demographic or other variables are used as proxies for race? Congress enacted the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in order to acquire data on mortgage lending patterns and to discourage geographical disinvestment. Basic HMDA data indicates that mortgage loan applications from black and Hispanic households are more likely to be denied than are applications from whites. Loan denial rates for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are higher than white applicants at all income …

Resolving The Original Sin Of Bolling V. Sharpe, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that for the first time categorically held that racial segregation in public schools was per se unlawful – Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe. Ostensibly, both cases dealt with a same question; however, in Brown the entity accused of discrimination was a creature of the State of Kansas, while in Bolling the discrimination was practiced by the federal government. The problem that the Supreme Court faced was the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, by its own terms, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” only vis-à-vis …

Federal Equal Protection, Taylor Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

The Author explores the use of due process and equal protection guarantees from the U.S. Constitution as a means to challenge workplace discrimination faced by LGBT government employees. The Author also discusses how private employees must rely on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to assert similar claims. Because sex discrimination is prohibited under both the Constitution and Title VII, federal courts have relied on reasoning in the former context when analyzing the latter, and vice versa. This means that a watershed case regarding one law can contain reasoning for the other. The Author goes on to the discuss …

Pregnant Pause: The Exclusion Of Pregnant Women From Clinical Research As Sex Discrimination, Richard M. Weinmeyer

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that the exclusion of pregnant women from clinical research constitutes sex discrimination. This exclusion, rooted in historical and regulatory factors, has led to a significant lack of data on how medications affect pregnant women, putting their health at risk. The author advocates for legislative action to shift the research culture from exclusion to inclusion, ensuring that pregnant women receive necessary medical treatments with proper research backing.

Voting Rights Law And Policy In Transition, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Single And Childfree! Reassessing Parental And Marital Status Discrimination, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy? An Empirical Study With Implications For The Debates Over Implicit Bias And Intersectionality,, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: The Constitutionality Of Georgia's Burden Of Proof In Executing The Mentally Retarded, Veronica M. O'Grady

Georgia Law Review

In 2002, the Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia announced that executing mentally retarded defendants violates the Constitution. Georgia's standard for determining whether a criminal defendant is mentally retarded-and therefore ineligible for the death penalty- is the highest in the nation, requiring defendants to prove mental retardation to a jury, during the guilt and innocence phase, beyond a reasonable doubt. As in the case of Warren Lee Hill, Jr., this high burden necessarily results in Georgia executing defendants who are almost certainly mentally retarded,arguably violating the Atkins directive. Though once the first state to create a ban on executing the …

State’S Rights, Last Rights, And Voting Rights, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

There are two ways to read the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County Alabama v. Holder: as a minimalist decision or as a decision that undermines the basic infrastructure of voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. In this Article, we present the case for reading Shelby County as deeply destabilizing. We argue that Shelby County has undermined three assumptions that are foundational to voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. First, the Court has generally granted primacy of the federal government over the states. Second, the Court has deferred to Congress particularly where Congress is regulating at the intersection of race …

Lawyering That Has No Name: Title Vi And The Meaning Of Private Enforcement, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Essay examines the problem of private enforcement of Title VI. The Essay reviews the unduly constrained approach to private enforcement taken by courts in prominent decisions such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Alexander v. Sandoval. Yet the Essay argues that to focus primarily on private court enforcement of Title VI will continue to relegate the provision to the margins of civil rights discourse, to make the provision appear largely as the "sleeping giant" of civil rights law. The practice …

The Agency Roots Of Disparate Impact, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The disparate impact strand of antidiscrimination law provides the possibility of challenging harmful employment, education, housing, and other public and private policies and practices without the often-difficult burden of proving intentional discrimination. And yet the disparate impact standard seems to be facing its own burdens. Rulings by the Supreme Court in recent years have shaken the disparate impact standard's footing. In Ricci v. De- Stefano, the Court rejected a frontal assault to the disparate impact standard under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but cast the standard as at odds with Title VII's true core – …

Gender Politics And Child Custody: The Puzzling Persistence Of The Best-Interest Standard Child Custody Decisionmaking, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Emery

Faculty Scholarship

The best-interests-of-the-child standard has been the prevailing legal rule for resolving child-custody disputes between parents for nearly forty years. Almost from the beginning, it has been the target of academic criticism. As Robert Mnookin famously argued in a 1976 article, "best interests" are vastly indeterminate – more a statement of an aspiration than a legal rule to guide custody decisionmaking. The vagueness and indeterminacy of the standard make outcomes uncertain and gives judges broad discretion to consider almost any factor thought to be relevant to the custody decision. This encourages litigation in which parents are motivated to produce hurtful evidence …

Reframing The Civil Rights Narrative: From Compliance To Collective Impact, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter first analyzes the limits of the civil rights/compliance framework as an overarching change theory for transforming institutions and systems, and then sketches out the features of a full participation framework grounded in a collective-impact approach to reducing structural inequality. Full participation is a framework that nests antidiscrimination within an affirmative vision connected to a theory of action, and a methodology aimed at systems change. It resonates with a wide range of emerging scholarship and activism aimed at advancing equality under conditions of complexity, changing demographics, decentered governance, privatization, and technological change. The framework draws on insights from extensive …

Risky Arguments In Social-Justice Litigation: The Case Of Sex Discrimination And Marriage Equality, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay takes up the puzzle of the risky argument or, more precisely, the puzzle of why certain arguments do not get much traction in advocacy and adjudication even when some judges find them to be utterly convincing. Through a close examination of the sex discrimination argument's evanescence in contemporary marriage litigation, this Essay draws lessons about how and why arguments become risky in social-justice cases and whether they should be made nonetheless. The marriage context is particularly fruitful because some judges, advocates, and scholars find it "obviously correct" that laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage discriminate facially based on …

Leveraging Antidiscrimination, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns fifty, antidiscrimination law has become unfashionable. Civil rights strategies are posited as not up to the serious task of addressing contemporary problems of inequality such as improving mobility for low-wage workers or providing access into entry-level employment. This Article argues that there is a danger in casting aside the Civil Rights Act as one charts new courses to address inequality. This Article revisits the implementation strategies that emerged in the first decade of the Act to reveal that the Act was not limited to addressing formal discrimination or bias, but rather drew …

Racial Profiling As Collective Definition, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

Economists and other interested academics have committed significant time and effort to developing a set of circumstances under which an intelligent and circumspect form of racial profiling can serve as an effective tool in crime finding–the specific objective of finding criminal activity afoot. In turn, anti-profiling advocates tend to focus on the immediate efficacy of the practice, the morality of the practice, and/or the legality of the practice. However, the tenor of this opposition invites racial profiling proponents to develop more surgical profiling techniques to employ in crime finding. In the article, I review the literature on group distinction to …

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission And Structural Reform Of The American Workplace, Margo Schlanger, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court struck down a class action suit alleging that Wal-Mart stores discriminated against female employees in pay and promotion decisions, making it more difficult to obtain certification of private employment discrimination class actions. As a result, the role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in seeking structural reform of the workplace, always of substantial influence, has gained in comparative importance. Yet there is remarkably little written about the EEOC’s large-scale injunctive cases. This Article addresses this major gap in scholarship. Using both qualitative case studies and a new quantitative data-set, we test existing theories …

The Four Freedoms And The Future Of Religious Liberty, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The First Amendment’s rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly were once “interwoven” but distinct. Together, these freedoms advanced a pluralist skepticism of state orthodoxy that protected religious and other forms of liberty. The connections among these rights were evident at the Framing. They were also prominent during the 1930s and 1940s, when legal and political rhetoric recognized the “preferred position” of the “Four Freedoms.” We have lost sight of the Four Freedoms, supplanting their unified distinctiveness with an undifferentiated free speech framework driven by unsatisfying concepts like content neutrality and public forum analysis. It did not have to be …

Implicit Bias Deserves Our Explicit Attention, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

What are implicit biases? In brief, we all walk around with two sets of attitudes and beliefs: our conscious (explicit) attitudes and our unconscious (implicit) attitudes. Scientists believe that human consciousness takes up approximately 10 percent of our brain activity. That means that for most things, our unconscious mind is doing the work. Implicit biases exist within our unconscious mind. Our brains are bombarded with millions of bits of information every second. To avoid overload, our brains automatically categorize information into schemas that we use to guide us in our everyday living.

(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …

Comment On The Definition Of "Eligible Organization" For Purposes Of Coverage Of Certain Preventive Services Under The Affordable Care Act, Robert P. Bartlett, Richard M. Buxbaum, Stavros Gadinis, Justin Mccrary, Stephen Davidoff Solomon, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This comment letter was submitted by U.C. Berkeley corporate law professors in response to a request for comment by the Health and Human Services Department on the definition of "eligible organization" under the Affordable Care Act in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. "Eligible organizations" will be permitted under the Hobby Lobby decision to assert the religious principles of their shareholders to exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate for employees.

In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court held that the nexus of identity between several closely-held, for-profit corporations and their shareholders holding “a …

Foreword: A Tribute To Margaret Montoya, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Dean Moran provides opening remarks to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, "Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."

Immutability And Innateness Arguments About Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Rights, Edward Stein

Articles

A popular and intuitively plausible argument for the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (LGB people) focuses on the claim that sexual orientations are inborn and/or unchangeable. This argument draws on three sources: ethical, scientific, and legal. The scientific source is the widely held observation that people generally (and LGB people particularly) do not choose their sexual orientation. This observation is buttressed by claims about the causes and character of human sexuality. The ethical source is the general intuition that people should not be punished for something that they did not choose. Together, these ethical and scientific beliefs lead …

Toward A Jurisprudence Of The Civil Rights Acts, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is the nature of the “rights,” jurisprudentially, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act legally prescribed? And, more generally, what is a “civil right”? Today, lawyers tend to think of civil rights and particularly those that originated in the 1964 Act, as antidiscrimination rights: our “civil rights,” on this understanding, are our rights not to be discriminated against, by employers, schools, landlords, property vendors, hoteliers, restaurant owners, and providers of public transportation, no less than by states and state actors, on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality or disability. Contemporary civil rights scholarship overwhelmingly reflects the same conception: …