Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Using Lonergan’S Method To Instruct For The Scholar: St. Mary’S Law Review On Race And Social Justice, Mike Martinez Jr

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

The Scholar began in the 2000s to bring light to the social justice issues of the day: Hopwood, Proposition 187 in California, Amendment 2 in Colorado, and the aggressive assault on civil rights laws, immigrants’ rights, and bilingual education. The origins of this publication began as a grassroots effort of six law students working to make a difference and contribute to the legal conversation by advocating for traditionally marginalized groups. The vision of the founding editors provided a voice for ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, immigrants, racial minorities, women, and other disenfranchised groups often silenced in our legal discourse. The concept and …

Twenty-Five Years After September 11, 2001: Display Boards, Natasha Nandlal Varyani

Institute for Race and the Law

These slides are quotes by the contributors to the book “Twenty-Five Years After September 11, 2001: A Collection of Personal Narratives from the Day and What Followed, edited by Professor Natasha Nandlal Varyani, Director of the Institute for Race and the Law. The slides were displayed at the program “September 11th: 25 Years After, Remembrance, Reflection & Community,” held at the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse on Friday, September 11, 2026. The Roger Williams University Institute for Race and the Law, the Boston Bar Association, and the South Asian Bar Association of Greater Boston co-sponsored this program. The book …

Twenty-Five Years After September 11, 2001: A Collection Of Personal Narratives From The Day And What Followed, Natasha Nandlal Varyani

Institute for Race and the Law

This book is a collection of personal reflections on 9/11, edited by Professor Natasha Nandlal Varyani, Director of the Institute for Race and the Law, printed and distributed at the program “September 11th: 25 Years After, Remembrance, Reflection & Community,” held at the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse on Friday, September 11, 2026. The Roger Williams University Institute for Race and the Law, the Boston Bar Association, and the South Asian Bar Association of Greater Boston co-sponsored this program. A collection of quotes from the contributors is also available in the collection.

The Eviction Caste System, Allison Freedman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is facing a dire housing crisis, and most Americans agree that housing is a universal necessity. Yet under current Supreme Court jurisprudence, housing is not a fundamental right, and individuals facing housing insecurity from an eviction are generally not members of a suspect class. This is because eviction is often viewed as an individual problem and a symptom of poverty, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed is not a suspect classification. This Article disrupts the superficial narrative that eviction is an individualistic symptom of poverty, and instead views evictions from a systemic and historical perspective. It …

Civil Rights V The First Amendment, And The Erosion Of The Belief–Action Dichotomy, Elena Lacorte

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

303 Creative, Exclusive Private Enforcement, And Blue-State Revenge, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes, Howard W. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Red states have made exclusive private enforcement schemes targeting locally unpopular but constitutionally protected conduct a cornerstone of culture-war legal strategy. Laws such the Texas Heartbeat Act (“S.B. 8”) in 2021 and anti-“WOKE” laws forego public enforcement in favor of private enforcement; this precludes federal rights-holders from vindicating their rights through pre-enforcement offensive litigation in federal court against the government or government officials responsible for enforcing the law. This threatens rights-holders with defending a state-court wave of costly and burdensome litigation to adjudicate the law’s constitutional validity.

Blue states and liberal scholars and advocates have sought a progressive counterpart targeting …

When Is Discrimination Harmful?, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Publications

In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the Supreme Court held that Title VII does not require a plaintiff to establish material harm to prove employment discrimination. Instead, any action that is negative and affects a term, condition or privilege of employment is sufficient, if the employer took the action because of a protected trait.

At first glance, Muldrow appears to be a middling case focused on a technical aspect of discrimination law. This Article argues that Muldrow has the potential to be one of the most important modern discrimination cases. If taken to its natural conclusion it will …

303 Creative, Exclusive Private Enforcement, And Blue-State Revenge, Howard M. Wasserman, Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes

Journal of Legislation

Red states have made exclusive private enforcement schemes targeting locally unpopular but constitutionally protected conduct a cornerstone of culture-war legal strategy. Laws such the Texas Heartbeat Act (“S.B. 8”) in 2021 and anti-“WOKE” laws forego public enforcement in favor of private enforcement; this forces targeted federal rights-holders to vindicate their rights by raising the law’s constitutional invalidity as a defense to liability rather than through pre-enforcement offensive litigation against the government or government officials responsible for enforcing the law. This threatens rights-holders with a wave of costly and burdensome litigation and liability.

Blue states and liberal scholars and advocates have …

Exploring The Intersectionality Of Antisemitism And The Law: A Case Study Of The Crown Heights Riots And Aftermath, Stephen Sussman, Carole Huberman

FIU Law Review

Antisemitism does not exist in isolation; it often intersects with other forms of discrimination and prejudice. Examining these intersections is crucial to understanding the broader dynamics of discrimination and developing effective strategies. Antisemitism and racism often intersect in complex ways. Historical examples include the portrayal of Jews as racially inferior or “other” during periods of heightened racial tension. This intersection has implications for policies related to hate crimes, racial profiling, and equal protection under the law. This research examines the complex interplay between antisemitism and the legal system, using the Crown Heights Riots of 1991 as a focal point. The …

The Obvious Violation Exception To Qualified Immunity: An Empirical Study, Bailey D. Barnes

Washington Law Review

Qualified immunity shields government officials from civil suits for discretionary actions, as long as the violated right is not clearly established. A right is deemed established when every reasonable official would understand it based on precedent, placing it beyond debate, such that only the plainly incompetent may be held liable. Consequently, even when an act infringes on one’s civil rights, a court may deny relief owing to a lack of factually comparable precedent. However, in 2020, the Supreme Court indicated its distrust for overreliance on precedent in certain contexts. In Taylor v. Riojas, the Court held that prison officials …

Transportation Racism And State-Created Danger: A Civil Rights Litigation Strategy For Pedestrians Harmed By Traffic Violence, Riley Freedman

Washington Law Review

Pedestrian fatality rates in the United States are markedly high compared to peer nations and are on the rise. The distribution of these deaths shows an alarming racial gap: Black pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed compared to white pedestrians. One significant factor that explains the disparity is the greater presence of wide, high-speed roads—built to move traffic quickly at the expense of pedestrian safety—in Black neighborhoods. In some cases, there is evidence that governments intentionally placed roads through and around Black neighborhoods for racially discriminatory reasons.

This Comment argues that a pedestrian harmed or killed by a …

Radical Visions For The Law Of Peace: How W.E.B. Du Bois And The Black Antiwar Movement Reimagined Civil Rights And The Laws Of War And Peace, Andrew J. Lanham

Washington Law Review

This Article reconstructs the history of Black antiwar activism in the twentieth-century United States and argues that Black antiwar activists played a significant but largely forgotten role in the development of both modern civil rights law and the international law of war and peace. The Article focuses on the career of W.E.B. Du Bois, tracing how he built coalitions between civil rights and antiwar organizations to pursue a series of shared legal campaigns. Du Bois’s antiwar work was also representative of a larger tradition, and his career illuminates how a range of Black activists and civil rights lawyers like Pauli …

American Law In The New Global Conflict, Mark Jia

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article surveys how a growing rivalry between the United States and China is changing the American legal system. It argues that U.S.-China conflict is reproducing, in attenuated form, the same politics of threat that has driven wartime legal development for much of our history. The result is that American law is reprising familiar patterns and pathologies. There has been a diminishment in rights among groups with imputed ties to a geopolitical adversary. But there has also been a modest expansion in rights where advocates have linked desired reforms with geopolitical goals. Institutionally, the new global conflict has at times …

Whither Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing In New York? The Affh Mandate In An Era Of Land Use Reform, Timothy Gentles

Cardozo Law Review

New York is experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis. This crisis is driven by a housing supply shortfall decades in the making. The state’s housing shortage exacerbates economic, racial, and regional inequalities, and harms the economy by limiting growth. New York’s struggles with housing affordability reflect a national surge in housing costs since the pandemic that has disproportionally impacted communities of color. Yet, in many respects, the crisis in New York is worse than that in other states with comparably robust housing demand. The extent of New York’s housing affordability crisis has led to growing momentum behind legislative action in …

Backdating #Metoo, Jessica K. Fink

Cardozo Law Review

The #MeToo movement radically altered the way that people think about workplace sexual harassment. For decades, women were expected to tolerate a broad range of sexualized conduct at work. However, the revelation of Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds in late 2017, followed by the exposure of countless other bad actors, dramatically shifted the social narrative regarding appropriate workplace behavior. Conduct that employees once ignored or overlooked suddenly became the basis for vociferous objection; the perfunctory responses to harassment that many employers once adopted suddenly stood out as glaringly deficient.

While society has undergone great shifts in its understanding of and response to …

Procedural Innovation, The Rule Of Law, And Civil Rights Justice, Elizabeth Lee Thompson

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Among the most inscrutable and plaguing roadblocks to implementing the Rule of Law in the United States and abroad has been delay—both postponement required by legal substance and procedure and delaying tactics offensively employed by parties and jurists who oppose clearly established law. The results include denial of justice and destabilization of our democratic legal system. This Article proposes the key of courts employing innovative and courageous procedural mechanisms to thwart delay and breakthrough the logjam of resistance to the Rule of Law. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals governing six Southern states— Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—during …

Piercing The Procedural Veil Of Qualified Immunity: From The Guardians Of Civil Rights To The Guardians Of States’ Rights, Leo Yu

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Scholars have found that despite a split on the burden of proof for qualified immunity, courts agreed that defendants must bear the burden of pleading to raise qualified immunity as a defense. This article is the first to find that over the past decade, this established consensus has been disrupted, culminating in a fresh circuit split.

This article investigates twelve Federal Courts of Appeals’ qualified immunity rulings on 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and finds that six have required plaintiffs to anticipate defendants’ qualified immunity arguments at the pleading stage, essentially treating the negating of qualified immunity as an element of …

Cumming V. Richmond County Board Of Education: The Great Dissenter’S Great Betrayal,, Mark Dorosin

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

Harnessing Hypocrisy: A Crack In The Supreme Court’S Colorblindness Mask, Zamir Ben-Dan

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

This Essay contends that the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Harness v. Watson stands as a testament to its hypocrisy. The day after the Court professed an allegiance to promoting racial equality in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, it refused to even consider invalidating a clear barrier to racial equality. The day after the Court struck down a remedy designed to address a long, sad, and painful history of racism, the Court left undisturbed an obvious symbol of this long, sad, and painful history of racism. When juxtaposed against both the denial …

The Tragic Costs Of ‘Protecting’ Trans Youth, Kimberly Jade Norwood, Jaimie Hileman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the past few decades, our nation has made substantial progress on the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The legalization of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 was transformative for our nation. Just five years later, another huge victory was scored in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected gay and transgender people.

With every gain, backlash often follows. Three years after Bostock, a tsunami of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, and more specifically, anti-Trans bills, littered the nation. Hundreds of bills have been filed since Bostock, …

Less Discriminatory Algorithms, Pauline Kim, Emily Black, John Logan Koepke, Solon Barocas, Mingwei Hsu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Entities that use algorithmic systems in traditional civil rights domains like housing, employment, and credit should have a duty to search for and implement less discriminatory algorithms (LDAs). Why? Work in computer science has established that, contrary to conventional wisdom, for a given prediction problem there are almost always multiple possible models with equivalent performance—a phenomenon termed model multiplicity. Critically for our purposes, different models of equivalent performance can produce different predictions for the same individual, and, in aggregate, exhibit different levels of impacts across demographic groups. As a result, when an algorithmic system displays a disparate impact, model multiplicity …

What’S Going On? Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Dispute Resolution Initiatives In The U.S., Robyn Weinstein

Articles

Over the course of my career, I have worked for and managed community dispute resolution centers, overseen a court-annexed dispute resolution program, and run a law school mediation clinic (my current position). In each post, I have been in a position of power over a different "gateway" or entry point into the field of dispute resolution. In these roles, and especially in my work overseeing a court-annexed ADR program, I became increasingly aware of who applied (and did not apply); who was appointed (and was not appointed); and who was selected (and not selected) for work as a mediator and …

Aequitas: Seeking Equilibrium In Title Ix, Raymond Trent Cromartie

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the scope of Title IX has expanded drastically and now includes the investigation and adjudication of sexual misconduct cases through campus tribunals. Beginning in 2011, the Obama Administration, through a “Dear Colleague Letter” and subsequent guidance, initiated this process by establishing guidelines that required schools to develop and implement policies and procedures for the handling of sexual misconduct cases. Following the publication of the Obama-era guidance, schools scrambled to ensure compliance with the federal guidance, which led to a myriad of applications by universities. Unfortunately, the fallout from the 2011 guidance was widespread litigation initiated …

Bolstering New York’S Tenant Protection Law: Ensuring Retroactive Application Under The Heightened Regina Standard, Abigail Strange

Cardozo Law Review

Rent regulation laws have long been a cornerstone of the New York City and New York State housing markets, enacted to combat excessive rent increases that risked pricing out low- and middle-income tenants. On June 14, 2019, the New York State Legislature enacted the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which brought sweeping changes to New York’s rental laws, including regulated and unregulated buildings. The HSTPA significantly expanded tenant protections across New York State, and specifically in New York City, which currently has one of the highest monthly rent medians in the country. The passage of the HSTPA was …

Harm Egalitarianism, Michael E. Herz

Articles

In the last few years, law schools and law professors have given new attention to how questions of race can be interwoven into courses that are not explicitly about race. Much has been written about how to do so in both first-year and upper-level courses, and, from all reports, the law school classroom has meaningfully changed. My sense, though it is completely impressionistic and unscientific, is that the typical Administrative Law course may have changed less than many others. It seems fair to say, at least, that there has not developed a standard suite of topics that a professor wanting …

The Charter School Network (Almost) No One Wants: Mobilizing Regulation And Litigation To Serve The Public Interest, Joni Hersch, Colton Cronin

Cardozo Law Review

Publicly funded, independently operated charter schools entered the public sector three decades ago with the promise of innovating public education to better serve students in underperforming schools. Despite limited evidence of improved educational outcomes, charter schools are now an established part of the education system, with around 7,800 charter schools serving more than seven percent of public, school students.

Although charter schools have long been associated with the controversial school choice movement, a recent entrant into the charter school arena has created new and urgent concerns. Hillsdale College, through its affiliate Barney Charter School Initiative, has been making escalating inroads …

How Private Enforcement Exacerbates Climate Change, Anna A. Mance

Cardozo Law Review

Private enforcement-the practice of allowing private actors to directly enforce statutes or regulations-has been a fixture of environmental law for the last fifty years. In the absence of comprehensive climate legislation, climate change has been brought under the fold of the environmental regime and its emphasis on private enforcement. Yet climate change presents a distinct global challenge from those harms that the 1970s environmental regime was designed to address. This Article investigates how private enforcement is limiting our ability to respond to the crisis of climate change. The central claim is that private enforcers are using the mantle of environmental …

Judicial Process And Vigilante Federalism, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Jon Michaels’ and David Noll’s "Vigilante Federalism" (Cornell Law Review) decries the explosion of state laws that target certain people (women seeking abortions, trans students seeking to use bathrooms, schools trying to teach about race) and rely on private civil litigation by random "any persons" as the exclusive or primary enforcement mechanism. These laws "deputize private actors to wage and win the culture wars," while subordinating marginalized groups.

But Michaels and Noll conflate well-taken substantive constitutional objections to these laws with procedural issues surrounding the private enforcement mechanism, which is neither unique nor constitutionally problematic. States have long authorized private …

Foreword: Expanding The Boundaries Of Knowledge About Slavery And Its Legacy, Lolita Buckner Inniss

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Preliminary Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.