Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

In Defense Of Mcdonnell Douglas: The Domination Of Title Vii By The At-Will Employment Doctrine, Chuck Henson

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The purpose of this Article is to describe the actual relationship between the Doctrine and Title VII as implemented in the Court’s disparate treatment decisions. Title VII and the Doctrine are not separate forces warring with each other. The at-will employment doctrine guided the Court’s Title VII disparate treatment jurisprudence, giving the maximum possible latitude to employers because that was the Eighty-eighth Congress’s intent.

Nela Touro Conference 1999 Selected Second Circuit Cases Of Interest, Lawrence Solotoff

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Courts In Creating Racial Identity In Early New Orleans, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York University Press 2014).

/="/">The racial history of New Orleans is unique among American cities, as is Louisiana's among the history of American states. In the antebellum period, there were more free people of color in New Orleans than in any other city in the South, and free people of color lived, and often prospered, throughout Louisiana. The presence of so many free people of color in New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, arose from many factors, including the …

At Fifty, Title Vii Needs A Facelift: Two Reforms That Would Ensure Title Vii Works To Prohibit All Racial Discrimination In Employment, Joshua P. Thompson, Ralph W. Kasarda

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

No abstract provided.

"Race-Conscious" School Finance Litigation: Is A Fourth Wave Emerging?, David G. Hinojosa

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Reeves Urges: 'Be Citizen Soldiers', Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Lorraine Lalli's Post: Judge Reeves On Racial Violence, Same-Sex Marriage, 01/12/2016, Lorraine Lalli

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Donald G. Gifford, Brian Jones

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents an empirical analysis of how race, income inequality, the regional history of the South, and state politics affect the development of tort law. Beginning in the mid-1960s, most state appellate courts rejected doctrines such as contributory negligence that traditionally prevented plaintiffs’ cases from reaching the jury. We examine why some, mostly Southern states did not join this trend.

To enable cross-state comparisons, we design an innovative Jury Access Denial Index (JADI) that quantifies the extent to which each state’s tort doctrines enable judges to dismiss cases before they reach the jury. We then conduct a multivariate analysis …

The Patriarchy Prescription: Cure Or Containment Strategy?, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Professor Williams discusses the 1965 Moynihan Report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," its effect on societal and legal views of blacks in the ensuing half-century, and offers an alternative paradigm, "social justice feminism," for examining challenges confronting African American families.

Black Boys Matter: Developmental Equality, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

The life course of Black boys is a stark reminder of the realities of inequality. While recent attention to policing and high profile deaths of Black youth and adults has raised consciousness of life-threatening situations, this focus exposes the most visceral and deadly aspect of a much larger set of issues. Those issues begin at birth, and are powerfully framed before adulthood, creating inequality particularly when the individual is most vulnerable, in childhood. This Article confronts the inequalities of Black boys and their subordination, as a vehicle to expose inequalities more generally based on children’s identities.

The life course of …

Cross-Sectional Challenges: Gender, Race, And Six-Person Juries, Jeannine Bell, Mona Lynch

Articles by Maurer Faculty

After two grand juries failed to indict the police officers that killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, our nation has engaged in polarizing discussions about how juries reach their decision. The very legitimacy of our justice system has come into question. Increasingly, deep concerns have been raised concerning the role of race and gender in jury decision-making in such controversial cases. Tracing the roots of juror decision-making is especially complicated when jurors’ race and gender are factored in as considerations. This Article relies on social science research to explore the many cross-sectional challenges involved in the jurors’ decision …

Economic Inequality And College Admissions Policies, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

As economic inequality in the United States has reached unprecedented heights, reformers have focused considerable attention on changes in the law that would provide for greater equality in wealth among Americans. No doubt, much benefit would result from more equitable tax policies, fairer workplace regulation, and more generous spending policies.

But there may be even more to gain by revising college admissions policies. Admissions policies at the Ivy League and other elite American colleges do much to exacerbate the problem of economic inequality. Accordingly, reforming those policies may represent the most effective strategy for restoring a reasonable degree of economic …

The Restorative Workplace: An Organizational Learning Approach To Discrimination, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race, Restructurings, And Equal Protection Doctrine Through The Lens Of Schuette V. Bamn, Steve Sanders

Brooklyn Law Review

In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that Michigan voters had violated principles of the fair lawmaking process when they amended their state constitution to prohibit race-conscious affirmative action in public university admissions, reasoning that the amendment, known as “Proposal 2,” constituted a political restructuring that had violated the Equal Protection Clause by disadvantaging African Americans from being able to equally access political change. However, the Sixth Circuit was careful to avoid saying that Proposal 2 created a racial classification or was motivated by a purpose of discriminating on the basis of race. Instead, consistent …

Response To Keeping Cases From Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis Of How Race, Income Inequality, And Regional History Affect Tort Law, Jennifer Wriggins

Faculty Publications

Issues of race and racism in the U.S. torts system continue to deserve much more attention from legal scholarship than they receive, and Keeping Cases from Black Juries is a valuable contribution. Studying racism as it infects the torts system is difficult because explicit de jure exclusions of black jurors are in the past; race is no longer on the surface of tort opinions; and court records do not reveal the race of tort plaintiffs, defendants, or jurors. Yet it is essential to try and understand the workings of race and racism in the torts system. The authors pose a …

Australians' "Right" To Be Bigoted: Protecting Minorities' Rights From The Tyranny Of The Majority, Jillian Rudge

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia’s few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Faculty Scholarship

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the "new policing." This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the "newpolicing"gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political, and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated Whites, even when controlling for local social and …

"Cerd-Ain" Reform: Dismantling The School-To-Prison Pipeline Through More Thorough Coordination Of The Departments Of Justice And Education, Lisa A. Rich

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

In the last year of his presidency, President Barack Obama and his administration have undertaken many initiatives to ensure that formerly incarcerated individuals have more opportunities to successfully reenter society. At the same time, the administration has been working on education policy that closes the achievement gap and slows the endless flow of juveniles into the school-to-prison pipeline. While certainly laudable, there is much more that can be undertaken collaboratively among executive branch agencies to end the school-to-prison pipeline and the endless cycle of people re-entering the criminal justice system.

This paper examines the rise of the school-to-prison pipeline through …

Blinding Prosecutors To Defendants’ Race: A Policy Proposal To Reduce Unconscious Bias In The Criminal Justice System, Sunita Sah, Christopher Robertson, Shima Baughman

Faculty Scholarship

Racial minorities are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States. This disparity is unlikely to be due solely to differences in criminal behavior. Behavioral science research has documented that prosecutors harbor unconscious racial biases. These unconscious biases play a role whenever prosecutors exercise their broad discretion, such as in choosing what crimes to charge and when negotiating plea bargains. To reduce this risk of unconscious racial bias, we propose a policy change: Prosecutors should be blinded to the race of criminal defendants wherever feasible. This could be accomplished by removing information identifying or suggesting the defendant’s race from police dossiers shared …

Defamation: The Play, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Protecting Identity By Ignoring It? A Critical Look At The French And Rwandan Paradoxes, Frédéric Mégret

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article seeks to critically examine political and legal practices of "racial blindness" by comparing two countries that have most enthusiastically embraced it as an official policy and even ideology: France and Rwanda. By highlighting the differences but also the significant commonalities between the two, it seeks to dynamically emphasize their explicit and implicit construction of race and ethnicity The case for racial blindness is first presented in the terms in which it is largely understood in those countries, and taken seriously as an effort to deal with their unique legacies and political circumstances, notably as part of a desire …

Section 5: Race, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

A Demographic Threat? Proposed Reclassification Of Arab Americans On The 2020 Census, Khaled A. Beydoun

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

“Arab Americans are white?” This question—commonly posed as a demonstration of shock or surprise—highlights the dissonance between how “Arab” and “white” are discursively imagined and understood in the United States today. These four words also encapsulate the dilemma that currently riddles Arab Americans. The population finds itself interlocked between formal classification as white, and de facto recognition as nonwhite. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the government agency that oversees the definition, categorization, and construction of racial categories, currently counts people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as white. The United States Census Bureau (Census Bureau), the …

Protecting Diversity In The Ivory Tower With Liability Rules, Ting Wang

Pace Law Review

The two sides of the debate over race-based affirmative action in higher education tell two distinct stories – one of diversity’s benefits and the other of affirmative action’s burdens. In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), the Supreme Court found the benefits to be so compelling to society that they were deemed to outweigh the burdens. Voters in Michigan and other states found otherwise and the Court in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U.S. — (2014) upheld their right to ban race-conscious admissions. Paradoxically, since the use of race as a “plus factor” by selective universities …

Voter Rights And Civil Rights Era Cold Cases: Section Five And The Five Cities Project, Paula C. Johnson

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

"First Food" Justice: Racial Disparities In Infant Feeding As Food Oppression, Andrea Freeman

Fordham Law Review

    Tabitha Walrond gave birth to Tyler Isaac Walrond on June 27, 1997, when Tabitha, a black woman from the Bronx, was nineteen years old. Four months before the birth, Tabitha, who received New York public assistance, attempted to enroll Tyler in her health insurance plan (HIP), but encountered a mountain of bureaucratic red tape and errors. After several trips to three different offices in the city, Tabitha still could not get a Medicaid card for Tyler. Tabitha’s city caseworker informed her that she would have to wait until after Tyler’s social security card and birth certificate arrived to get the …

Race In The Life Sciences: An Empirical Assessment, 1950-2000, Osagie K. Obasogie, Julie N. Harris-Wai, Katherine Darling, Carolyn Keagy

Fordham Law Review

    The mainstream narrative regarding the evolution of race as an idea in the scientific community is that biological understandings of race dominated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until World War II, after which a social constructionist approach is thought to have taken hold. Many believe that the horrific outcomes of the most notorious applications of biological race—eugenics and the Holocaust—moved scientists away from thinking that race reflects inherent differences and toward an understanding that race is a largely social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This understanding of the evolution of race as a scientific idea informed the way that …

Police Racial Violence: Lessons From Social Psychology, L. Song Richardson

Fordham Law Review

    The recent rash of police killing unarmed black men has brought national attention to the persistent problem of policing and racial violence. These cases include the well-known and highly controversial death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the deaths of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York; John Crawford III in Beavercreek, Ohio; Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, California; Dante Parker in San Bernardino County, California; and Vonderrit D. Myers Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri. Data reported to the FBI indicate that white police officers killed black citizens almost twice a …

"I Do For My Kids": Negotiating Race And Racial Inequality In Family Court, Tonya L. Brito, David J. Pate Jr., Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong

Fordham Law Review

    Socio-legal scholarship examining issues of access to justice is currently experiencing a renaissance. Renewed inquiry into this field is urgently needed. Studies confirm that only 20 percent of the legal needs of low- income communities are met and that the vast majority of unrepresented litigants are low income, creating what some call a “justice gap” that has become even more urgent in recent years. State tribunals that deal with high-stakes issues particularly relevant to low-income residents, such as family courts and housing courts, are seeing an increasing number of litigants, the majority of whom are unrepresented.

Foreword: Critical Race Theory And Empirical Methods Conference, Kimani Paul-Emile

Fordham Law Review

    Everyone seems to be talking about race. From the protests that erupted in cities across the country over the failure of grand juries in Missouri and New York to indict police officers in the killing of two unarmed black men, to the racially charged statements made by the owners of professional sports teams; and the college fraternity members captured on film singing a racist lynching song; race exploded into the nation’s collective consciousness. Even the Starbucks Coffee chain’s recent “Race Together” campaign, intended to promote discussion about race, sparked a controversy and was quickly withdrawn. These and other events have …