Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under The Trump Administration, Eunice Hyunhye Cho, Tara Tidwell Cullen, Clara Long

United States Department of Homeland Security

In the last three years, the Trump administration has grown the immigration detention system in the United States to an unprecedented size, at times holding more than 56,000 people per day. Since 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has anchored this growth in places where immigrants are most likely to be isolated from legal counsel, remain in detention without real opportunity for release, and are more likely to lose their cases. These new detention centers also exhibit patterns of mistreatment and abuse, including medical and mental health care neglect, that have been present since the inception of ICE’s detention system …

Leviathan Goes To Washington: How To Assert The Separation Of Powers In Defense Of Future Generations

Florida A & M University Law Review

The separation of powers was originally drawn from the common law of England, vindicated during the American Revolution as a fundamental bulwark against tyranny, and constitutionalized in the first three articles of the U.S. Constitution. It was adopted as an assurance that the present generation would not assert dead-hand control over the future of American society for mere efficiency, vanity, or greed. The separation of powers, therefore, exists to empower future generations to contend for their rights of life, liberty, and property. Both the long history of the separation of powers and the recent, controversial practices of multinational government contractors …

Civil Rights In Living Color, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

This Article will examine how American civil rights law has treated “color” discrimination and differentiated it from “race” discrimination. It is a comprehensive analysis of the changing legal meaning of “color” discrimination throughout American history. The Article will cover views of “color” in the antebellum era, Reconstruction laws, early equal protection cases, the U.S. Census, modern civil rights statutes, and in People v. Bridgeforth—a landmark 2016 ruling by the New York Court of Appeals. First, the Article will lay out the complex relationship between race and color and discuss the phenomenon of colorism—oppression based on skin color—as differentiated from …

The Summer Of 2015, Sean Mangan

Freedom Center Journal

College of Law Professor Sean Mangan reflects on a series of dramatic events that occurred in Cincinnati during a few short weeks in the summer of 2015 and their implications for his own self-understanding as an individual, as a member of the local community, and as an American. Those events included weddings in Fountain Square that followed the Supreme Court’s vindication of the right to same-sex marriage as well as the tragic shooting deaths of Sonny Kim, Trepierre Hummons, and Samuel DuBose in acts involving police use of force.

Development In Over The Rhine: Can Otr Defeat The Pitfalls Of Gentrification And Create An Economically Diverse Community?, Madeline High

Freedom Center Journal

This paper focuses on the emergence of gentrification, the negative consequences it creates, and the ways in which these consequences can be alleviated. These topics are addressed both through a broad national lens and through a more narrow focus on Over-the-Rhine (OTR), a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. This paper specifically focuses on displacement in the realm of housing, culture, and economics as well as the potential creation of long-term segregation, and on how such displacement has led to a loss of autonomy of existing residents. The rise of gentrification and its impact is explored through an examination of literature, personal …

Florida's Late Entrance To The Ongoing Trend: Sexual Orientation In The Workplace, Ernesto Rivero

St. Thomas Law Review

John Doe is an exceptional firefighter who also happens to be a homosexual. John performs his duties every day to the utmost of his ability; however, in response to his sexual orientation, John is verbally harassed daily, underpaid for his line of work, and subsequently discharged from his position. This is a consequence of practicing his protected constitutional right of same sex marriage at his workplace. Every individual ought to have a fair and inclusive workplace free from discrimination; that is not the case in today’s America. Although employees are protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 …

Today’S Crusades: A Therapeutic Jurisprudential Critique Of Faith-Based Civil Rights In Health Care, Kathy Cerminara

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Red Card On Wage Discrimination: Us Soccer Pay Disparity Highlights Inadequacy Of The Equal Pay Act, Hannah L.E. Masters

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In the months leading up to its latest World Cup win, the US Women's National Team sued its parent organization over income inequality in US soccer. Statements from high-profile players, like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, contributed to a national conversation about the gender pay gap that exists not just in soccer but across many professions. The claims of the Women's Team should make for a perfect Equal Pay Act claim, but all signs point to a loss. Instead, the women are far more likely to succeed on their claim arising under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, despite …

#Livingwhileblack: Blackness As Nuisance, Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Jamila Jefferson-Jones

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Recalibrating Suspicion In An Era Of Hazy Legality, Deborah Ahrens

Seattle University Law Review

After a century of employing varying levels of prohibition enforced by criminal law, the United States has entered an era where individual states are rethinking marijuana policy, and the majority of states have in some way decided to make cannabis legally available. This symposium Article will offer a description of what has happened in the past few years, as well as ideas for how jurisdictions can use the changing legal status of cannabis to reshape criminal procedure more broadly. This Article will recommend that law enforcement no longer be permitted use the smell of marijuana as a reason to search …

Cve And Constitutionality In The Twin Cities: How Countering Violent Extremism Threatens The Equal Protection Rights Of American Muslims In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Sarah Chaney Reichenbach

American University Law Review

In 2011, President Barack Obama announced a national strategy for countering violent extremism (CVE) to attempt to prevent the “radicalization” of potential violent extremists. The Obama Administration intended the strategy to employ a community-based approach, bringing together the government, law enforcement, and local communities for CVE efforts. Despite claiming to target extremism in all forms, government-funded CVE programs in the United States have almost exclusively focused on Islamic extremism. One pilot program focused on the Twin Cities in Minnesota—Minneapolis and St. Paul—home to the largest Somali community in the United States, most of whom are Muslim. The Trump Administration has …

Preponderance, Plus: The Procedure Due To Professional Licensees In State Revocation Hearings, Allaina M. Murphy

Connecticut Law Review

A licensee who is subjected to professional discipline often experiences harsh and stigmatizing consequences as a result: humiliation; disgrace; loss of reputation, livelihood, and client base. Unfortunately, this, at times, happens on the basis of an unsubstantiated complaint. Procedural due process protections apply to professional license revocation actions to help prevent such error, but states vary widely in the combination and strength of the procedural safeguards they require in such hearings. It is far more likely that an undeserving professional will be unfairly and permanently harmed in a state with minimal procedural safeguards. This Note focuses on procedural due process …

(Un)Common Law And The Female Body, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A dissonance frequently exists between explicit feminist approaches to law and the realities of a common law system that has often ignored and even at times exacerbated women’s legal disabilities. In The Common Law Inside the Female Body, Anita Bernstein mounts a challenge to this story of division. There is, and has long been, she asserts, a substantial interrelation between the common law and feminist jurisprudential approaches to law. But Bernstein’s central argument, far from disrupting broad understandings of the common law, is in keeping with a claim that other legal scholars have long asserted: decisions according to precedent, …

Lgbt Equality, Religious Liberty, And Masterpiece Cakeshop, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Statutory Proximate Cause Doctrine, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Publications

The year 2011 marked the birth of a new idea. The United States decided Staub v. Proctor Hospital and for the first time invoked common law proximate cause in the context of federal employment discrimination law. It is rare in jurisprudence to be present at the birth of an idea and then see that idea develop over its first decade. This Article charts the emerging proximate cause doctrine from its early days as a baby doctrine. Now, the doctrine is pre-adolescent, with all of the changes and turmoil that phrase entails.

Dehumanization 'Because Of Sex': The Multiaxial Approach To The Title Vii Rights Of Sexual Minorities, Shirley Lin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Although Title VII prohibits discrimination against any employee “because of such individual’s . . . sex,” legal commentators have not yet accurately appraised Title VII’s trait and causation requirements embodied in that phrase. Since 2015, most courts assessing the sex discrimination claims of LGBT employees began to intentionally analyze “sex” as a trait using social-construction evidence, and evaluated separately whether the discriminatory motive caused the workplace harm. Responding to what this Article terms a “doctrinal correction” to causation within this groundswell of decisions, the Supreme Court recently issued an “expansive” and “sweeping” reformulation of but-for causation in Bostock v. Clayton …

Accommodation In The Academy: Working With Episodic Disabilities And Living In Between, Roxanne Mykitiuk

Articles & Book Chapters

This chapter steps away from the institutions of mental health facilities, the extended care home and the prison, to enter another institutional setting within which disability as a concept is constructed and materialises, but where, until recently, its lived experience has generally been excluded: the university. Unlike the institutional settings from which people with disabilities have conventionally wished to flee, the university is one into which many people, including those with disabilities, have sought entry. Historically, and even now, universities are regarded as elite institutions that restrict entry based on achievement and performance. As both an educational setting and a …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Civil Rights Law In Living Color, Vinay Harpalani

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Blues And The Rule Of Law: Musical Expressions Of The Failure Of Justice, David Pimentel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Prescription Restriction: Why Birth Control Must Be Over-The-Counter In The United States, Susannah Iles

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Note argues that it is harmful and unnecessary to require women to obtain prescriptions for access to hormonal birth control. Requiring a prescription is necessarily a barrier to access which hurts women and hamstrings the ability to dictate their own reproductive plans. It is also an irrational regulation in light of the relative safety of hormonal birth control pills, particularly progestin-only formulations, compared to other drugs readily available on the shelves.

Leading medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, advocate for over-the-counter access to hormonal birth control. While acknowledging that not every woman will have positive …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

"Inciting A Riot": Silent Sentinels, Group Protests, And Prisoners' Petition And Associational Rights, Nicole B. Godfrey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article argues for increased legal protections for prisoners who choose to engage in group protest to shed light on the conditions of their incarceration. A companion piece to a similar article that focused on prisoner free speech rights, this Article uses the acts of protest utilized by the Silent Sentinels to examine why prisoners’ rights to petition and association should be strengthened. By strengthening these rights, the Article argues that we will advance the values enshrined by the First Amendment’s Petition Clause while simultaneously advancing the rights of the incarcerated millions with little to no political power.

The Article …

Black Women And Girls And The Twenty-Sixth Amendment: Constitutional Connections, Activist Intersections, And The First Wave Youth Suffrage Movement, Mae C. Quinn

Seattle University Law Review

On this 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment—and on the cusp of the fiftieth anniversary of the Twenty-sixth Amendment—this article seeks to expand the voting rights canon. It complicates our understanding of voting rights history in the United States, adding layers to the history of federal constitutional enfranchisement and encouraging a more intersectional telling of our suffrage story in the days ahead.

Thus, this work not only seeks to acknowledge the Twenty-sixth Amendment as important constitutional content, as was the goal of the article I wrote with my law student colleagues for a conference held at the University of Akron …

Does The Woman Suffrage Amendment Protect The Voting Rights Of Men?, Steve Kolbert

Seattle University Law Review

This Article—part of the Seattle University Law Review’s symposium on the centennial of the ratification of the Woman Suffrage Amendment—examines that open possibility. Concluding that the Nineteenth Amendment does protect men’s voting rights, this Article explores why and how that protection empowers Congress to address felon disenfranchisement and military voting. This Article also examines the advantages of using Nineteenth Amendment enforcement legislation compared to legislation enacted under other constitutional provisions.

Part I discusses the unique barriers to voting faced by voters with criminal convictions (Section I.A) and voters in the armed forces (Section I.B). This Part also explains how existing …

Commentary On Meritor Savings Bank, Fsb V. Vinson, Trina Jones

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Genetic Race? Dna Ancestry Tests, Racial Identity, And The Law, Trina Jones, Jessica L. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

Can genetic tests determine race? Americans are fascinated with DNA ancestry testing services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Indeed, in recent years, some people have changed their racial identity based upon DNA ancestry tests and have sought to use test results in lawsuits and for other strategic purposes. Courts may be similarly tempted to use genetic ancestry in determining race. In this Essay, we examine the ways in which DNA ancestry tests may affect contemporary understandings of racial identity. We argue that these tests are poor proxies for race because they fail to reflect the social, cultural, relational, and experiential norms …

America's Paper Prisons: The Second Chance Gap, Colleen Chien

Michigan Law Review

Over the last decade, dozens of states and the federal government have enacted “second chance” reforms that increase the eligibility of individuals arrested, charged, or convicted of crimes to shorten their sentences, clear their criminal records, and/or regain the right to vote. While much fanfare has accompanied the increasing availability of “second chances,” little attention has been paid to their delivery. This study introduces the concept of the “second chance gap,” which it defines as the difference between eligibility and delivery of second chance relief; explores its causes; and approximates its size in connection with several second chance laws and …

Salary History And The Equal Pay Act: An Argument For The Adoption Of “Reckless Discrimination” As A Theory Of Liability, Kate Vandenberg

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The Equal Pay Act (EPA) purports to prohibit employers from paying female employees less than male employees with similar qualifications; however, the affirmative defenses provided in the EPA are loopholes that perpetuate the gender pay gap. In particular, the fourth affirmative defense allows for wage differentials based on a “factor other than sex.” Many federal circuits have read this defense broadly to include wage differentials based on salary history. That is, an employer can pay a female employee less than her male counterparts because she was paid less by her previous employer. While salary history was once viewed as an …

Stepping Into The Shoes Of The Department Of Justice: The Unusual, Necessary, And Hopeful Path The Illinois Attorney General Took To Require Police Reform In Chicago, Lisa Madigan, Cara Hendrickson, Karyn L. Bass Ehler

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.