Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Beyond Bakke: Grutter-Gratz And The Promise Of Brown, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s long-awaited decisions this past summer in the Michigan affirmative action cases provided yet another landmark in the continuing controversy regarding race and education. A quarter century, almost to the day, after the Court handed down its badly splintered decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,[1] the Court again concluded that universities may sometimes, but not always, give some preference to racial and ethnic minorities in deciding whom to admit. The Court, in a 5-4 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, upheld the constitutionality of the University of Michigan Law School’s admission policy that considered race …

Introduction, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

Brown v. Board of Education [1] is the seminal case of the Twentieth Century. Mere mention of the case can start discussion on any number of topics, all important and all that relate to, or were importantly affected by, Brown. Some of those discussions relate to the immediate subject of Brown: Was state-imposed racially segregated public education a violation of the Equal Protection Clause? What is the nature of race relations in America? How close are we to achieving a racially just society? How fair is our system of public education? Others might focus on Brown for its impact on …

Under The Empirical Radar: An Initial Expressive Law Analysis Of The Ada, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a sympathetic interpretation of reparations claims made on behalf of African Americans and suggests how they could properly be honored. It reviews the federal government’s role in supporting racial subordination and its continuing failure to address the inequitable consequences, which public policy now largely ignores. It sketches a national rectification project, comprising a comprehensive set of public programs that would attack the persisting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The programs can be justified by the government’s duty to insure equal opportunity for our society’s children and, most urgently, by corrective justice, because the inequities are attributable …

Difficult Decisions During Wartime: A Letter From A Non–Alien In An Internment Camp To A Friend Back Home, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What Is An Employer's Liability For Constructive Discharge Under Title Vii? An Analysis Of Pennsylvania State Police V. Suders, Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Pennsylvania State Police v. Suders, 542 U.S. 129 (2004). In this case involving Title VII, the author expected the Court to analyze whether whether a constructive discharge caused by supervisory harassment is a tangible employment action for purposes of imposing striet liability.

Different But Equal: The Human Rights Of Persons With Intellectual Disabilities, Harold Hongju Koh

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Precursors Of Rosa Parks: Maryland Transportation Cases Between The Civil War And The Beginning Of World War I, David S. Bogen

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Meade V. Dennistone: The Naacp's Test Case To "...Sue Jim Crow Out Of Maryland With The Fourteenth Amendment", Garrett Power

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Virulence Of Blackthink™ And How Its Threat Of Ostracism Shackles Those Deemed Not Black Enough, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article explores a non-traditional form of discrimination based on color. In the United States we are accustomed to hearing about discrimination in the context of historic injustices the black community has faced for no other reason but that they were born black or African-American. This Article deals with another form of discrimination against black people based on skin color: discrimination based on not being black enough. Blacks who do not fit a particular expectation about what it means to be black are often marginalized or even ostracized from their communities. They are vilified as Sells-Outs, Oreos and Uncle Toms. …

The Political Delinquent: Crime, Deviance, And Resistance In Black America, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article is largely an argument that the pervasive sense of cultural resistance in the African American community must be considered by criminal theorists as, at least, a partial explanation of “criminality” within the African American community. Woven into the fabric of African American culture is a vital oppositional element. This element, spoken of in many circles as “oppositional culture” constitutes a bold and calculated rejection of destructive mainstream values that have perpetuated social inequalities and power imbalances. African American resistance culture is captured by novelist John Edgar Wideman in his account of his brother ’s criminal lifestyle and the …

In Defense Of Deference, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Cases Of The 2002 Term (Symposium: The Fifteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Processing Civil Rights Summary Judgment And Consumer Discrimination Claims, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Legally Queer Child, Bruce Macdougall

All Faculty Publications

This article explores the various presumptions and arguments of Canadian courts in largely denying queer children a legal presence. An analysis of the intersection of homosexuality and children is explored with a view to arguing that legally, queer children deserve a voice. The author begins by outlining the development of the legal conceptualization of the "child". This conceptualization led to the notion of the child as innocent, and thus in need of protection. In comparison, homosexuals came to be characterized as "aberrant" and "predatory". Protecting children from homosexuals then became a simple step of logic, which ultimately led to the …

The Hypothetical Opinion In Grutter V. Bollinger From The Perspective Of The Road Not Taken In Brown V. Board Of Education, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Racial Gap In Ability: From The Fifteenth Century To Grutter And Gratz, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Justice O'Connor’s opinion for the United States Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan. Beneficiaries of affirmative action clearly meet the necessary qualifications for admissions to selective colleges, universities, and graduate programs. But, the justifications for affirmative action articulated by Justice O'Connor implicitly recognized that underrepresented minorities with a history of discrimination are not as academically qualified as their non-Hispanic white (and Asian counterparts). Their inclusion in affirmative action plans is based on the belief that they provide enough educational and non-educational benefits to offset their academic shortcomings.

There are measurable …

After Grutter V. Bollinger-- Revisiting The Desegregation Era From The Perspective Of The Post-Desegregation Era, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Causation In Antidiscrimination Law: Beyond Intent Versus Impact , Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

Antidiscrimination law and scholarship have long been engaged in the debate over whether a discriminatory intent or disparate impact test best captures the type of discrimination the law should, or can, prohibit. This Article suggests that we move beyond this dichotomous debate and focus instead on how courts reason about discrimination cases brought under both the intent and impact doctrines. This Article identifies a distinct pattern, or framework, in the way courts reason about discrimination in both types of cases that defies neat doctrinal labels. reasoning process, which I shorthandedly refer to as "causation," is at the heart of evidentiary …

Lawrence & The Road From Liberation To Equality, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

To think about the future of lesbian and gay rights in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas, we inevitably need to look to the past. After all, the movement that first sparked efforts to challenge statutes like the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law was not a rights movement at all. Instead, when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals began organizing in 1969, their rallying cry was for liberation. To gauge what Lawrence means, then, we need to think in terms of both liberation, as the movement's early aim, and legal equality, which is the dominant demand of today's activists and advocates. …

Equality Without Tiers, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The immediate impact of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger is nothing short of momentous. Not only do the Supreme Court's most recent affirmative action decisions settle the deeply contested question of whether race may be considered in higher education admissions, but they also, more broadly, envision permissible and impermissible uses of racial classifications in that context, and surface new, challenging questions about the official use of affirmative action.

Yet Grutter and Gratz are also momentous for what they tell us about the long-term struggle over the structure of equal protection doctrine. This struggle, which has been under way …

Solving Problems Vs. Claiming Rights: The Pragmatist Challenge To Legal Liberalism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Recent developments in both theory and practice have inspired a new understanding of public interest lawyering. The theoretical development is an intensified interest in Pragmatism. The practical development is the emergence of a style of social reform that seeks to institutionalize the Pragmatist vision of democratic governance as learning and experimentation. This style is reflected in a variety of innovative responses to social problems, including drug courts, ecosystem management, and "new accountability" educational reform. The new understanding represents a significant challenge to an influential view of law among politically liberal lawyers over the past fifty years. That view, Legal Liberalism, …

Reading Clarence Thomas, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Several years ago, a special issue of The New Yorker entitled "Black in America" included an extraordinary profile of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Authored by Jeffrey Rosen, the article begins with an account of Justice Thomas's interventions in two of the most important cases decided during the Court's previous term. In the first of these cases, Missouri v. Jenkins, the Court was called upon to define the constitutional scope and limits of the federal judicial power to address racial concentration in Kansas City's public schools through salary increases and the creation of magnet programs. In the second …

Affirmative Action In The Workplace: The Signficance Of Grutter?, Rebecca H. White

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court's decision last term in Grutter v. Bollinger answered important questions about the affirmative use of race in the educational context. I have been asked by the editors of the Kentucky Law Journal to explore the impact the decision is like to have on affirmative action in a different context--employment. Simply put, to what extent does Grutter affect a public or private employer's ability to voluntarily adopt an affirmative action plan in order to diversify its workplace? The short answer, of course, is that the Grutter decision does not directly apply to the affirmative use of race or …

Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.

"You Are Entering A Gay And Lesbian Free Zone": On The Radical Dissents Of Justice Scalia And Other (Post-) Queers – [Raising Questions About Lawrence, Sex Wars, And The Criminal Law], Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The Court's ruling is the coup de grâce to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal …

Marriage, Cohabitation, And Collective Responsibility For Dependency, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Marriage has fallen on hard times. Although most Americans say that a lasting marriage is an important part of their life plans, the institution no longer enjoys its former exclusive status as the core family form. This is so largely because social norms that regulate family life and women's social roles have changed. A century (or even a couple of generations) ago, marriage was a stable economic and social union that, for the most part, lasted for the joint lives of the spouses. It was the only option for a socially sanctioned intimate relationship and was the setting in which …

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …

You Can't Ask (Or Say) That: The First Amendment And Civil Rights Restrictions On Decisionmaker Speech, Helen L. Norton

Faculty Scholarship

Many antidiscrimination statutes limit speech by employers, landlords, lenders, and other decisionmakers in one or both of two ways: (1) by prohibiting queries soliciting information about an applicant's disability, sexual orientation, marital status, or other protected characteristic; and (2) by proscribing discriminatory advertisements or other expressions of discriminatory preference for applicants based on race, sex, age, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics.

This Article explores how we might think about these laws for First Amendment purposes. Part I outlines the range of civil rights restrictions on decisionmaker speech, while Part II identifies the antidiscrimination and privacy concerns that drive their …

Injustice Casts Shadow On History Of State Executions, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, published in the StarTribune of Minneapolis, discusses the history of lynchings and executions in the State of Minnesota. It specifically discusses miscarriages of justice that have taken place in Minnesota, along with highlighting other problems associated with capital punishment.