Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Tumbling Towers As Turning Points: Will 9/11 Usher In A New Civil Rights Era For Gay Men And Lesbians In The United States?, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article examines the events of 9/11, and the potential resultant shifts in attitude, policies, and laws in the United States, through the lens of civil rights extended to gay and lesbian citizens. It seeks, but does not purport to definitively discover, the true meaning of the phrase "life will never be the same." It asks, but does not purport to fully answer, whether historians a century or two hence will look back on 9/11 as the turning point when the United States began to fulfill its promise of liberty to all people, or whether this date will be earmarked …

Emotional Segregation: Huckleberry Finn In The Modern Classroom, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper explores the harm of teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in public school classrooms. Such harm can be broadly described as emotional segregation, which occurs when society sanctions disrespect. To illustrate the effects of emotional segregation, this article explores the reaction Black students and parents have to the novel to that of White students and parents. White students eagerly imagine being Huck and going on his adventures. Black students, however, cannot and should not even be asked to try to imagine being Huck and betraying their racial identity. But then who are the Black students supposed to identify …

Symposium: Title Ix: Women, Athletics And The Law - Foreword, Paula A. Monopoli

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Secretary's Commission On Opportunity In Athletics Squandered Its Opportunity To Understand Commercial Collegiate Sports: Why They Eliminate Minor Men's Sports And Prevent Title Ix From Achieving Full Gender Equality, Suzanne Sangree

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Mobilizing Immigrants, Jayanth K. Krishnan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Percentage Plans: An Inadequate Substitute For Affirmative Action In Higher Education Admissions, Jennifer L. Shea

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Proxies For Loyalty In Constitutional Immigration Law: Citizenship And Race After September 11, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to share some thoughts about using citizenship and race as proxies for loyalty in constitutional immigration discourse within two contexts: one historical and one current. The current context is the profiling of Muslim and Arab immigrants post-September 11, and the historical context is the distinction the Constitution draws between birthright and naturalized citizens in the Presidential Eligibility Clause.

Thinking About Feminism, Social Justice, And The Place Of Feminist Law Journals: A Letter To The Editor, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Dear Editors:

You, like the editors who came before you, have staked a place in an invigorating and challenging conversation about the transformative potential of feminist approaches to social justice.1 As you envision and edit your journal, fundamental questions about the purpose of feminist scholarship and the value of retaining an autonomous space for feminist jurisprudence loom large.

Not surprisingly, The Bluebook will provide little guidance on these topics. Instead, consistent with the feminist enterprise,2 you will need to search out sources, both within and outside of the law school library, to spark your critical thinking. Ideally these will ensure …

Emotional Harm In Housing Discrimination Cases: A New Look At A Lingering Problem, Victor M. Goode, Conrad Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

With the United States Supreme Court's condemnation of legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and a vigorous civil rights movement that led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the nation entered the beginning of a new era in race relations. This, and future civil rights legislation, would be characterized by the development of a national agenda for ending discrimination and promoting equality. One area that was not included in this initial congressional effort, but later found its way into the legislative agenda, was the subject of housing discrimination. Despite the relatively few debates …

The Shaping Of Chance: Actuarial Models And Criminal Profiling At The Turn Of The Twenty-First Century, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The turn of the twentieth century marked a new era of individualization in the field of criminal law. Drawing on the new science of positivist criminology, legal scholars called for diagnosis of the causes of delinquence and for imposition of individualized courses of remedial treatment specifically adapted to these individual diagnoses. "[M]odern science recognizes that penal or remedial treatment cannot possibly be indiscriminate and machine-like, but must be adapted to the causes, and to the man as affected by those causes," leading criminal law scholars declared. "Thus the great truth of the present and the future, for criminal science, is …

African-Americans Within The Context Of International Oppression, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Fragile Promise Of Provisionality, James S. Liebman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

It is a pleasure to address such well-informed, insightful and well-intentioned responses to our Article. Intellectual predispositions and differing assessments of the prospects of reform aside, it is striking that so many participants have firsthand experience of the new model school, the new politics in all their mystery, and even non-court-centric judicial review. It is clear that something is afoot, and not just in academic circles, when observers as different as Diane Ravitch, the critic of Deweyan latitudinarianism, and Gordon Whitman, the community organizer, are both surprised to discover that standardized testing can go hand in hand with individualized education …

The Child Citizenship Act And The Family Reunification Act: Valuing The Citizen Child As Well As The Citizen Parent, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

Leading civil rights advocates today lament the degree to which current immigration law fails to maintain family unity. The recent passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 is a rare bipartisan step in the right direction because it grants automatic citizenship to foreign-born children of U.S. citizens upon receipt of their permanent resident status and finalization of their adoption. Congress now has before it the Family Reunification Act of 2001, which aims to restore certain procedural safeguards relaxed in 1996 to ensure that foreign-born parents are not summarily separated from their children, many of whom may be U.S. citizens. …

Devolution And Discrimination, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the issue of whether discrimination against two historically disadvantaged groups - racial minorities, on the one hand, and gays and lesbians, on the other - might increase or decrease should the federal immigration power devolve to the individual states. I conclude that while the lack of uniformity that accompanies immigration law devolution might lead to undesirable results in welfare reform and criminal law enforcement, and would likely not stem the tide of racism, it might lead to the opening of opportunities for gay Americans to petition their binational partners for immigration benefits. Such a development would turn …

Se Battre Our Ses Droits Écritures, Litiges Et Discrimination Raciale En Louisiane (1888-1899), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Title in English: Fighting for public rights: writing, lawsuits and racial segregation in Louisiana (1888-1889).

This article explores the links between the fight against compulsory racial segregation and the day–to–day operation of the law in nineteenth century Louisiana. Using the figure of Louis A. Martinet, one of the organizers of the test case that yielded the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the essay argues that Martinet’s role as notary reflects the central importance to the community of color of questions of public standing and written records. The article also identifies the concepts of "public rights" and "public liberties" …

Barred From The Vote: Public Attitudes Toward The Disenfranchisement Of Felons, Brian Pinaire, Milton Heumann, Laura Bilotta

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article explores public attitudes toward the disenfranchisement of felons. Using survey research methods -- Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing of 503 randomly selected adults -- the authors posed questions related to the purpose of the criminal justice system, public attitudes about treatment and punishment of felons, and public support for the disenfranchisement of felons. The data is aggregated and sorted based on ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, and education. The data demonstrates that the American public does not support permanent disenfranchisement of convicted felons but that it does support some limitations. The authors first review state laws and legal/political issues implicated, …

Equal Protection And Disparate Impact: Round Three, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Prior inquiries into the relationship between equal protection and disparate impact have focused on whether equal protection entails a disparate impact standard and whether laws prohibiting disparate impacts can qualify as legislation enforcing equal rotection. In this Article, Professor Primus focuses on a third question: whether equal protection affirmatively forbids the use of statutory disparate impact standards. Like affirmative action, a statute restricting racially disparate impacts is a race-conscious mechanism designed to reallocate opportunities from some racial groups to others. Accordingly, the same individualist view of equal protection that has constrained the operation of affirmative action might also raise questions …

A Public Laboratory Dewey Barely Imagined: The Emerging Model Of School Governance And Legal Reform, James S. Liebman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

The American public school system is in the midst of a vast and promising reform. The core architectural principle of the emergent system is the grant by higher-level authorities – federal government, states, and school districts – to lower level ones of autonomy to pursue the broad goal of improving education. In return, the local entities – schools, districts, and states – provide the higher ones with detailed information about their goals, how they intend to pursue them, and how their performance measures against their expectations. The core substantive commitment of the emergent system is the provision to all students, …

From The Ne'er-Do-Well To The Criminal History Category: The Refinement Of The Actuarial Model In Criminal Law, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal law in the United States experienced radical change during the course of the twentieth century. The dawn of the century ushered in an era of individualization of punishment. Drawing on the new science of positive criminology, legal scholars called for diagnosis of the causes of delinquency and for imposition of individualized courses of remedial treatment specifically adapted to these diagnoses. States gradually developed indeterminate sentencing schemes that gave corrections administrators and parole boards wide discretion over treatment and release decisions, and by 1970 every state in the country and the federal government had adopted a system of indeterminate sentencing. …

Proyecto - Transformación De La Condición Legal De La Mujer: Integrando Temas De Género En La Doctrina Y Enseñanza Del Derecho, Macarena Saez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

A Comment On Grutter And Gratz V. Bollinger, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Now that the Supreme Court has definitively resolved (at least for a generation) the issue of the constitutionality of affirmative action in American higher education, thereby continuing without major adjustment what has been the practice in our selective colleges and universities for more or less the last thirty years, it is easy to forget how different the United States would have looked in the years ahead if only one vote had shifted to the dissenting side. Just how precipitous and long-lasting the decline in racial and ethnic diversity would have been is a complicated matter, but that it would have …

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act And The Post-Desegregation Civil Rights Agenda, James S. Liebman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Despite many deficiencies, the No Child Left Behind Act ("NCLB" or "Act") extends to the federal level and diffuses to the states an innovative system of publicly monitored decentralization of school governance known as the "New Accountability." This Article argues that, given background changes in the understanding of effective classroom teaching, accountability systems of the type imposed by the NCLB can enable willing school districts to build the capacity for school-level reform upon which the ultimate improvement of public schooling depends. It claims further that activists can accelerate the reforms and ensure respect for the requirements of racial and economic …

On Discipline And Canon, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

While the title of the panel I participated in was "Why Do We Eat Our Young?", I think I prefer: "On Discipline and Canon," or to rework the title of the panel in the program, "Why Do We Eat Our Girlfriends?"

In my short remarks, I would like to raise a set not of answers, but of questions that over the last year or so a few of us have been discussing outside of our published work. These questions seem apt both for this panel and for this conference. Last November a group of really wonderful women at the University …

The Activist Insecurity And The Demise Of Civil Rights, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

Civil rights law is today moribund. An impressive edifice, built upon the ruins of Jim Crow, with the blood and sweat of the civil rights movement, and intended to both dismantle that system and ensure the civil liberties that Jim Crow illustrated were all too easily lost, civil rights law was to be the lasting monument of the civil rights struggle. Fortified by this legacy, civil rights law retains a symbolic value, implying that there are formidable forces working to protect citizens from abusive state action, to ensure a broad anti-discrimination ethic, and to fix the wrongs of Jim Crow. …

Looking Ahead: The Future Of Affirmative Action, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, race is still a serious issue in this country. Fortunately, we no longer debate whether it is legal for the government to operate segregated schools or to treat blacks as second-class citizens. We finally answered that question correctly—it is unconstitutional for the law to segregate and to treat blacks worse than whites.

Today, we face the more difficult question of ascertaining the constitutionality of “affirmative action” or “benign discrimination” programs. The Supreme Court first addressed this issue in 1978 in the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke …

Protections For Transgender Employees, Jennifer Levi

Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses protections for transgender employee rights and how many transgender employees routinely face demotions, unfavorable conditions of employment, and even discriminatory terminations--due not to job-related problems but to employers' discomfort with and animus against transgender people. The Author points out that although courts historically have found transgender people excluded from coverage under certain laws, developing case law supports the arguments of transgender employees who face workplace discrimination.

Minnesota's Sex Offender Commitment Program: Would An Empirically-Based Prevention Policy By More Effective?, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

Minnesota’s sex offender commitment scheme is not just a bad idea; it likely has bad consequences. It is a huge and disproportionate sink for resources that ight be put to more effective use in the fight against sexual violence. Worse, its demand for resources will continue to grow, thus predetermining to a large extent how prevention and treatment dollars are spent. It is very possible that a more rational allocation of these resources would actually prevent more violence than the allocation that is automatically produced by the sex offender commitment scheme. At the very least, the fight against sexual violence …

The Significance Of Entrenchment Of Equality Rights, Dianne Pothier

Dianne Pothier Collection

Not until April 17, 1985 did Canada's Constitution officially embrace guarantees of equality. The three year delay in the coming into force of section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a clear acknowledgement that equality was not a pre-existing condition at the time of entrenchment of the Charter in 1982. After 17 years of experience with entrenched rights, it can unequivocally be said that entrenchment has brought progress toward equality. Yet it must also be said that significant barriers to the attainment of full legal equality remain. This article will explain the basis upon which I …

Should Klansmen Be Lawyers? Racism As An Ethical Barrier To The Legal Profession, Carla Pratt

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Women Of Color-What Their Voices Teach Us, Jacqueline Mertz

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that white feminists must learn from the experiences of women of color to build a more inclusive and effective feminist movement. It emphasizes the importance of addressing the multiple oppressions faced by women of color, including racism, sexism, and national oppression, and critiques the historical failure of the white feminist movement to support women of color.