Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Abolition, And A Mule: Guest Lecturer In Race And The Foundations Of American Law Course 09-28-2022, Paul Butler, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The Power Of International Nationality Courts When Settling Foreign Investment Disputes, Dr. Ibrahim Refaat El Beherry

مجلة جامعة الإمارات للبحوث القانونية UAEU LAW JOURNAL

States shall be sovereign in determining their nationality in accordance with their economic and social policies and circumstances. However, when international courts decide matters relating to their personal competence in international disputes, they may be called upon to rule on preliminary matters such as nationality. However, when these tribunals confer jurisdiction on themselves by this mission, they enjoy a broad discretion based on the general principles of people’s law, treaty law, case law, doctrine and the principle of jurisdiction-jurisdiction in arbitral matters. However, the scope of this recognized power is limited and its authorized investiture must not exceed the primary …

Weekly Pop-Up Class: Understanding The Lgbtq+ Civil Rights Movement And Why It Matters: Professor Edward Stein, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

2022 Event Invitations

The first class will cover the evolution of LGBTQ+ family law in the United States and will be presented by LGBTQ+ legal expert and Cardozo Professor and former Vice Dean Edward Stein, author of The Mismeasure of Desire, The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation and other scholarly works on sexual identity and the law.

'To Empower And Amplify Lgbtq+ Voices' 09-16-2022, Michelle Choate

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

White Picket Fences & Suburban Gatekeeping: How Long Island’S Land Use Laws Cement Its Status As One Of The Most Segregated Places In America, Jessica Mingrino

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The average wealth of Black families is one-seventh that of white families in the United States today. Homeownership—the primary avenue through which Americans accumulate personal and generational wealth—is the leading driver of the wealth disparity between white and Black American families, known as the “racial wealth gap.” The systematic and intentional exclusion of Black people from developing communities during the twentieth century largely excluded people of color from the housing boom and denied them the opportunity afforded to white people to multiply their assets. Contrary to widespread belief, however, legislation-backed oppression of Black Americans did not end in the …

Separate And Unequal: Promoting Racial Equity In Public Schools In The United States And South Africa, Paige Sferrazza

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

On January 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it will hear two cases, against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, which “rais[e] serious doubts about the future of affirmative action in higher education.” The plaintiff in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (“SFFA”), is a non-profit organization devoted to eradicating affirmative action programs nationwide. Described as the “culmination of a years-long strategy by conservative activists,” these cases represent the first affirmative action challenges to be argued before the Court’s new conservative majority, where they “pose the gravest threats yet” to over …

Death By Dehumanization: Prosecutorial Narratives Of Death-Sentenced Women And Lgbtq Prisoners, Jessica Sutton, John Mills, Jennifer Merrigan, Kristin Swain

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

At the core of every capital sentencing proceeding is a guarantee that before condemning a person to die, the sentencer must consider the humanity and dignity of the individual facing the ultimate sanction. This principle—that “death is . . . different” and, therefore, requires consideration of the “diverse frailties of humankind”—echoes throughout the United States Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. And yet courts are reluctant to remedy the devastating impact of prosecutorial arguments that dehumanize marginalized persons facing the death penalty, condemning these arguments while nevertheless “affirm[ing] resulting convictions based on procedural doctrines such as harmless error.”

These dehumanizing …

Falling Away Into Disease: Disability-Deviance Narratives In American Crime Control, Matt Saleh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Who in society is predisposed to crime? Many of us are familiar with cultural narratives that trace criminal behavior to some cognitive defect in the perpetrator. For instance, we might recall the persistent media allusions to Adam Lanza’s Asperger Syndrome after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, despite evidence that individuals on the autism spectrum are, on average, not more likely, and are quite possibly less likely, to commit serious crime in their lifetime. Similarly, popular narratives about the relationship between “mental illness” and violence are pervasive, despite the broad meaning of the terminology and a deeply-misunderstood …

Race, Class, And Second Chances: The Impact Of Multiple Identities On Reentry And Reintegration, S. David Mitchell

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Race, class, and other identities directly impact the process of reentry and the successful reintegration back into society for individuals who have had prior involvement in the criminal justice system. Collectively, persons convicted of a crime face numerous legal barriers that interfere with or prevent successful reentry and reintegration back into society, such as being prevented from securing housing and obtaining employment among other collateral consequences. For many, the process of reentry and reintegration is made even more difficult because of prior discriminatory policies and practices that were based solely on demographic factors, some of which are innate or …

You Have The Right To Remain Powerless: Deprivation Of Agency By Law Enforcement And The Legal And Carceral Systems, Marco Maldonado, Michael Onah, Jennifer Merrigan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The charges against Philadelphia Police Officer Phillip Nordo read like an episode of The Shield. The grand jury presentment, should you have the stomach for it, is closer to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. For over twenty years, Officer Nordo groomed, sexually assaulted, and used crime reward funds to pay off vulnerable men in Philadelphia. Whether in his transport van, prison visiting rooms, or police interrogation rooms, he regularly exploited his unfettered access to and absolute control over vulnerable individuals. Though he was not convicted until 2022, the communities he stalked and preyed upon knew exactly …

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Donna Coker, Thalia González

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The persistent criminalization and pathologizing of Black youth in the U.S. educational system is a fundamental driver for their entry into the criminal legal system. Despite decades of evidence of the far-reaching harms of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and, more recently, demands from Black Lives Matter activists to defund school police, the role of schools in criminalizing Black girls has been left out of mainstream academic discourse. This occurs even though Black girls experience some of the most subjective and discriminatory practices in schools and evidence of an upward trend in discipline disparities since the mid-2000s. For Black girls with …

#Includetheirstories: Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education, Leslie Culver, Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The entire world was shaken by the events of 2020—a year that the historians will pen with infamy. Along with a global health pandemic that tested both human frailties and social infrastructures, the world witnessed the devastation of George Floyd, an African American man, dying under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a White male police officer. The nation erupted. As 2020 ended, many organizations and institutions clamored both to process ethnic divides and injustices, and to gain tools and skills to create meaningful change and lasting impact. Legal education was one such institution. During the summer and fall of 2020, …

Parading The Horribles: The Risks Of Expanding Religious Exemptions, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

People of faith now have a constitutional right to practice their religion—even when doing so conflicts with a government law or policy — that is more rigorously protected than nearly any other right. Some states have passed bills that provide an even broader right to such “religious exemptions” from the law than provided under the U.S. Constitution. Other religious exemption bills have been introduced and await consideration.

Liability For Toxic Workplace Cultures, Dana Florczak

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Title VII is meant to protect employees from discrimination and has historically been a crucial tool for creating social change in the workplace. But when considering modern-day workplace discrimination wrought by “toxic workplace cultures” defined herein, Title VII’s frameworks for confronting systemic discrimination prove outdated and ineffective. This Note proposes the codification of a new theory of discrimination under Title VII targeting toxic workplace cultures, with substantive and procedural elements working in tandem to better enable plaintiffs to collectively bring actions to hold employers accountable for fostering discriminatory environments. Part I defines toxic workplace cultures and walks through case studies …

Wrong Line: Proposing A New Test For Discrimination Under The National Labor Relations Act, Joshua D. Rosenberg Daneri, Paul A. Thomas

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

There has long been a consensus among scholars and union-side practitioners that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is under-enforced. As a result, employers often treat violations of the NLRA as a cost of doing business rather than a serious violation of a federal statute. Calls for reform have historically tended to propose legislative amendments to the NLRA to constrain employer conduct and impose greater consequences for discrimination violations. However, little attention has been given to improving the flawed legal test by which such discrimination is analyzed, Wright Line, 251 N.L.R.B. 1083 (1980), enforced 662 F.2d 899 (1st Cir. 1981), …

Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, And Homelessness Post-Bostock, Alaina Richert

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a critical problem facing LGBTQ+ people in the United States. In addition, LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, disproportionately suffer from homelessness and face discrimination by homeless shelters on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This homelessness and discrimination both disproportionately affect transgender people of color. This Note makes two contributions that would enable courts to grant meaningful relief in these contexts. First, it argues that “sex” in the Fair Housing Act includes sexual orientation and gender identity after the holding in Bostock v. Clayton County. Second, …

#Includetheirstories: Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education, Leslie P. Culver, Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner

Utah Law Review

This symposium gathered scholars and practitioners who have been deeply engaged in the work to examine historical roots of the legal profession and discuss best practices for exploring ethnic, gender, and related inequities alongside our law students. It is well established that the legal profession and legal education neither reflect the community they serve nor swiftly respond to the social shifts within the broader society.3 As 2020 grossly revealed, ethnic partiality and division are aches we have yet to really confront and bear. For example, the casebook method format of legal education continues to model Christopher Langdell’s Gilded Age curriculum, …

Antiracist Lawyering In Practice Begins With The Practice Of Teaching And Learning Antiracism In Law School, Danielle M. Conway

Utah Law Review

I was honored by the invitation to deliver the 2021 Lee E. Teitelbaum keynote address. Dean Teitelbaum was a gentleman and a titan for justice. I am confident the antiracism work ongoing at the S.J. Quinney College of Law would have deeply resonated with him, especially knowing the challenges we are currently facing within and outside of legal education, the legal academy, and the legal profession. I am fortified in this work by Dean Elizabeth Kronk Warner’s commitment to antiracism and associated diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Finally, I applaud the students who serve on the Utah Law Review for …

Teaching Cultural Competence In Law School Curricula: An Essential Step To Facilitate Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion In The Legal Profession, Phyllis Taite, Nicola "Nicky" Boothe

Utah Law Review

Law schools must recognize and seek to remove the barriers to teaching cultural competence and DEI and provide appropriate training and workshops for law professors. Providing law professors with the tools to integrate cultural competency into existing curricula is a first and crucial step to ensure that law professors are well-versed in both their own cultural competency, and in the ability to provide cultural competency training to their students. The culturally competent student will become a culturally competent lawyer with the skillset to make impactful contributions towards DEI in and beyond the practice of law.

Property Law And Inequality: Lessons From Racially Restrictive Covenants, Carol M. Rose

Northwestern University Law Review

A long-standing justification for the institution of property is that it encourages effort and planning, enabling not only individual wealth creation but, indirectly, wealth creation for an entire society. Equal opportunity is a precondition for this happy outcome, but some have argued that past inequalities of opportunity have distorted wealth distribution in contemporary America. This article explores the possible role of property law in such a distortion, using the historical example of racially restrictive covenants in the first half of the twentieth century. I will argue that the increasing professionalization and standardization of real estate practices in that era included …

Debt Governance, Wealth Management, And The Uneven Burdens Of Child Support, Allison Tait

Northwestern University Law Review

Child support is a ubiquitous kind of debt, common to all income and wealth levels, with data showing that approximately 30% of the U.S. adult population has either been subject to paying child support or has received it. Across this field of child support debt, however, unpaid obligations look different for everyone, and in particular the experiences around child support debt diverge radically for low-income populations and high-wealth ones. On the low-income end of the spectrum, child support debt is a sophisticated and adaptive governance technology that disciplines and penalizes those living in or near poverty. Being in child support …

Family | Home | School, Latoya Baldwin Clark

Northwestern University Law Review

The state grants residents who live within a school district’s border an ownership interest in that district’s schools. This interest includes the power to exclude nonresidents. To attend school in a school district, a child must prove that she lives at an in-district address and is a bona fide resident. But in highly-sought-after districts and schools, establishing a child’s bona fide residence may be highly contested.

In this Essay, I show that education law, policies, and practices fail to recognize a child’s residence when the child’s family and living situation do not comport with a particular ideal of family life. …

Is Age Just A Number: The Intersection Of The Fair Labor Standards Act And Professional Sports, Kacey Mccann

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

Brian Flores's Employment Discrimination Lawsuit Against The Nfl: A Game Changer Or Business As Usual?, Michael Conklin, Jennifer Barger-Johnson, Marty Ludlum

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

The Watercooler Is Safer Than The Schoolyard: Lower Courts Dismissal Of Peer Sexual Harassment Under Title Ix Is Especially Failing Our Students In The “#Metoo” World, Christine Tamer

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

While the term #MeToo was first coined in 2006, the movement came to the forefront of American life in October 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Since then, the #MeToo movement has exposed the fact that sexual harassment remains all too common and has pushed for change in the legal procedures that have failed victims. In the #MeToo world, sexual harassment is “finally getting the public attention it has long deserved” and the public has come together to deem it—in one word—unacceptable.

While …

Hidden Figures: Wage Inequity And Economic Insecurity For Black Women And Other Women Of Color, Cassandra Jones Havard

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

One hundred years after women secured the right to vote, wage inequality remains prevalent in the United States. The gender wage gap, or pay inequity based solely on sex, arguably, is a measure of the current failure of full and equal participation by women in American society. The gender wage gap exists despite federal legislation designed to further wage equality. In fact, a difference as small as two cents over a lifetime costs a woman approximately $80,000. Currently, it is predicted that for a majority of white women, the pay parity will be attained between 2059–2069. However, Black women …

The Gospel Of Freedom, Alicestyne Turley

Civil Rights

Wilbur H. Siebert published his landmark study of the Underground Railroad in 1898, revealing a secret system of assisted slave escapes. A product of his time, Siebert based his research on the accounts of northern white male abolitionists. While useful in understanding the northern boundaries of the slaves' journey, Siebert's account leaves out the complicated narrative of assistance below the Mason-Dixon Line. In The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad, author Alicestyne Turley positions Kentucky as a crucial "pass through" territory for escaping slaves and addresses the important contributions of white and black antislavery southerners who united …

The Papers Of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume Vi : The Struggle To Pass The 1960 Civil Rights Act, 1959–1960, Clarence Mitchell Jr., Denton L. Watson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers …

The Papers Of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V : The Struggle To Pass The 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1958, Clarence Mitchell Jr., Denton L. Watson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated …

Columbia Law Experts Submit Two Briefs To Supreme Court In Free Speech/Lgb Rights Case, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Columbia Law School faculty and policy teams submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on Friday in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case the Court will decide next term.