Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Wrongful Termi(Gay)Tion: A Comparative Analysis Of Employment Non-Discrimination Laws And The Lgbtq+ Workplace Protections In South Africa And The United States, Jared Ham

Cornell Law Review

Although the United States has made great strides toward equality for its LGBTQ+ citizens in recent years, South Africa has demonstrated far greater progress concerning equal protection and employment non-discrimination of its LGBTQ+ citizens. The South African Constitution, South African Constitutional Court cases, and laws passed by the South African Parliament all mandate that LGBTQ+ South Africans be treated equally to their heterosexual counterparts. Discrimination against LGBTQ+ South Africans is expressly forbidden— including in the employment context. The United States still lacks comprehensive federal employment non-discrimination laws or workplace protections for LGBTQ+ individuals. Extending Title VII—either via court decision or …

Religion, Discrimination, And Government Funding: Enforcing Civil Rights Law After Masterpiece Cakeshop And Trinity Lutheran, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

A memorandum published by the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School (formerly the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project) that clarifies the responsibility of state and local human rights agencies and commissions to robustly enforce civil rights laws — particularly in the context of government-funded social services — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer

Are Rights A Reality? Evaluating Federal Civil Rights Enforcement, International Association Of Official Human Rights Agencies (Iaohra), Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

This comment draws upon prior submissions to UN human rights experts, and past resources and scholarship, as well as independent research conducted by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, in partnership with state and local actors, including a 2018 survey of IAOHRA member agencies.

Nomzamo: Teaching Complexity Through The Life Of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Meghan Healy-Clancy

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Let Them Eat Cake: Why Public Proprietors Of Wedding Goods And Services Must Equally Serve All People, Labdhi Sheth, Molly Christ

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

The People's Lawyer: The Role Of Attorney General In The Twenty-First Century, Mark J. Herring

University of Richmond Law Review

For the last five years, it has been my privilege to serve the people as their attorney general. The origin of the position of attorney general can be traced back centuries, but in a world that has become more interconnected, complex, and fast-paced, what does the role of a state attorney general entail in the twenty-first century and beyond? Is the proper role as a diligent but reactive defender of statutes and state agencies, or is there a deeper responsibility that calls for a more proactive and engaged use of its tools and authority? I have found that the job …

The Right To Counsel In Criminal Cases: Still A National Crisis?, Mary Sue Backus, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

In 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright dramatically changed the landscape of criminal justice with its mandate that poor criminal defendants be entitled to legal representation funded by the government. As scholars and practitioners have noted repeatedly over more than fifty years, states have generally failed to provide the equal access Gideon promised. This Article revisits the questions raised by the authors over a decade ago when they asserted that a genuine national crisis exists regarding the right to counsel in criminal cases for poor people. Sadly, despite a few isolated instances where litigation has sparked some progress, the issues remain the …

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse: Origins And Goals, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (http://clearinghouse.net) solves a significant information deficit related to civil rights litigation by posting information about thousands of ongoing and closed large-scale civil rights cases. Documents are OCR’d and searchable; cases are searchable by metadata tags as well as full-text searching. Each case has a litigation summary by a law student. We live in a civil rights era—a time when people are using the courts, among other strategies, to fight for civil rights. The Clearinghouse posts the records of those fights, the stories of civil rights cases—across topics, across regions, across organizations—and makes them searchable, usable, …

Law & Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, And The Origins Of Muller V. Oregon, Emily Prifogle

Articles

This article uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours, the article argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place — the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon — the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. The article investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely …

Property, Persons, And Institutionalized Police Interdiction In Byrd V. United States, Eric J. Miller

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

During a fairly routine traffic stop of a motorist driving a rental car, two State Troopers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, discovered that the driver, Terrence Byrd, was not the listed renter. The Court ruled that Byrd nonetheless retained a Fourth Amendment right to object to the search. The Court did not address, however, why the Troopers stopped Byrd in the first place. A close examination of the case filings reveal suggests that Byrd was stopped on the basis of his race. The racial feature ofthe stop is obscured by the Court’s current property-basedinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy.

Although …

A Genealogy Of Programmatic Stop And Frisk: The Discourse-To-Practice-Circuit, Frank Rudy Cooper

University of Miami Law Review

President Trump has called for increased use of the recently predominant policing methodology known as programmatic stop and frisk. This Article contributes to the field by identifying, defining, and discussing five key components of the practice: (1) administratively dictated (2) pervasive Terry v. Ohio stops and frisks (3) aimed at crime prevention by means of (4) data-enhanced profiles of suspects that (5) target young racial minority men.

Whereas some scholars see programmatic stop and frisk as solely the product of individual police officer bias, this Article argues for understanding how we arrived at specific police practices by analyzing three levels …

After Life: Governmental Interests And The New Antiabortion Incrementalism, Mary Ziegler

University of Miami Law Review

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, commentators have focused on the effect of antiabortion restrictions. But as this Article shows, Whole Woman’s Health is part of the story of an equally important tactic used by those chipping away at abortion rights: the recognition of new governmental interests justifying abortion regulations. Using original archival research, this Article traces the rise of this strategy and documents its influence on Supreme Court doctrine, making sense of what seem to be contradictory rulings on abortion.

How should courts deal with novel legislative purposes or broader …

Elizabeth Warren’S New Housing Proposal Is Actually A Brilliant Plan To Close The Racial Wealth Gap, Mehrsa Baradaran, Darrick Hamilton

Popular Media

Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a $450 billion housing plan called the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act. The proposal is a comprehensive and bold step toward providing affordable housing for the most vulnerable Americans. The bill is the first since the Fair Housing Act with the explicit intent of redressing the iterative effects of our nation’s sordid history of housing discrimination. Critically, it has the potential to make a substantive dent in closing our enormous and persistent racial wealth gap.

We Are All Farkhunda: An Examination Of The Treatment Of Women Within Afghanistan's Formal Legal System, Ashley Lenderman

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In this paper, I will examine three cases of violence against women that went through the Afghan formal legal system: the case of Farkhunda, the Paghman district gang rape case, and the case of Sahar Gul. In the first Part, I will discuss the formal legal system framework on which the cases are based. In the second Part, I will discuss the cases in detail. In the third Part, I will describe neo-liberal, reformist, and neo-fundamentalist approaches to interpretation of Islamic law, and I will then draw out pieces of the decisions from the three cases that closely match these …

The New Jim Crow’S Equal Protection Potential, Katherine Macfarlane

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education opinion relied on social science research to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine. Since Brown, social science research has been considered by the Court in cases involving equal protection challenges to grand jury selection, death penalty sentences, and affirmative action. In 2016, Justice Sotomayor cited an influential piece of social science research, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in her powerful Utah v. Strieff dissent. Sotomayor contended that the Court’s holding overlooked the unequal racial impact of suspicionless …

Much Ado About Nothing?: Local Resistance And The Significance Of Sanctuary Laws, Alyssa Garcia

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment explores the current constitutional discourse of sanctuary laws and compares their various components. Part I provides background on the basic policy components of sanctuary laws and modern policies. Part II explores and compares the substantive legal and political value of sanctuary laws. This section will first assess the impact of sanctuary policies on existing immigration and constitutional law. In doing so, specific sanctuary jurisdictions involved in litigation, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, and their likelihood of withstanding preemption under existing doctrine will be compared. The impact sanctuary laws may have on the Tenth Amendment will next be discussed. …

The Criminalization Of Vehicle Residency And The Case For Judicial Intervention Via The Washington State Homestead Act, T. Ray Ivey

Seattle University Law Review

In 2014, a nationwide survey by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found that the number of cities with ordinances that effectively criminalized vehicle habitation increased by 119% between 2011 and 2014. These ordinances take the form of metered street parking zones, permit-only parking zones, time restrictions, restrictions on vehicle operability, restrictions regarding licensing and registration, and even prohibitions directed specifically at vehicle habitation. Violations of these policies typically result in noncriminal citations imposing fees, requiring attendance at hearings, or inflicting other financial burdens, which nevertheless can have devastating impacts on someone with already limited resources. Additionally, the …

Rwu First Amendment Blog: Jenna Wims Hashway's Blog: First Amendment Lets Officials Mute But Not Block Twitter Critics 10/09/2018, Jenna Wims Hashway

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Appeals Court Hears Labor Arguments At Roger Williams University School Of Law 10-2-2018, Katie Mulvaney, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Torch (October 2018), Crtp

Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter

Civic and Community Engagement | Civil Rights and Discrimination | Education | Gender and Sexuality | Inequality and Stratification | Politics and Social Change | Public Policy | Race and Ethnicity

Recommended Citation

Baldwin, Brandon and Civil Rights Team Project, "Torch (August 2013)" (2013). Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter. 58. http://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/torch/58

Access To Justice, Rationality, And Personal Jurisdiction, Adam N. Steinman

Vanderbilt Law Review

After more than twenty years of silence, the Supreme Court has addressed personal jurisdiction six times over the last six Terms. This Article examines the Court's recent decisions in terms of their effect on access to justice and the enforcement of substantive law. The Court's new case law has unquestionably made it harder to establish general jurisdiction-that is, the kind of jurisdiction that requires no affiliation at all between the forum state and the litigation. Although this shift has been justifiably criticized, meaningful access and enforcement can be preserved through other aspects of the jurisdictional framework, namely (1) the basic …

Eroding Immigration Exceptionalism: Administrative Law In The Supreme Court's Immigration Jurisprudence, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Essay: Injustice In Black And White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes In Interracial Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Hatoum

Brooklyn Law Review

This essay advocates that prosecutors’ peremptory strikes should be eliminated in interracial capital cases. The application of the death penalty has a race problem, especially for interracial cases. A conviction is far more likely if the defendant is black and the victim is white. This is due to the fact that in interracial cases, prosecutors utilize peremptory strikes to prevent black jurors from serving on cases in which the defendant is black and the victim is white. This essay is the first to argue that such a system stacks the deck against defendants in interracial capital cases in an unconstitutional …

Where Breaking Glass Ceilings Leads To Glass Walls: Gender-Disparate Managerial Decision-Making Power And Authority, Bina Nayee

Fordham Law Review

Today, litigation over plainly discriminatory employment practices is much less common than it was in the two decades following Title VII’s enactment as employers have largely reformed practices that most obviously violate employment discrimination law. But many less obvious employment practices, particularly those embedded in implicit bias or unconscious sex stereotyping, remain. One example is employers’ distribution of managerial decision-making power and authority based on assumptions about sex. Although this particular employment practice has not yet been litigated, there is a strong argument that a legal challenge to this practice could succeed. This Note argues that female managers can and …

Whiteness At Work, Lihi Yona

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

How do courts understand Whiteness in Title VII litigation? This Article argues that one fruitful site for such examination is same-race discrimination cases between Whites. Such cases offer a peek into what enables regimes of Whiteness and White supremacy in the workplace, and the way in which Whiteness is theorized within Title VII adjudication. Intra-White discrimination cases may range from associational discrimination cases to cases involving discrimination against poor rural Whites, often referred to as “White trash.” While intragroup discrimination is acknowledged in sex-discrimination cases and race-discrimination cases within racial minority groups, same-race discrimination between Whites is currently an under-theorized …

Columbia Law School Lecturer Noah Smith-Drelich And Professor Bernard E. Harcourt Challenge Standing Rock Civil Rights Violations, Columbia Center For Contemporary Critical Thought

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

New York, October 26, 2018—Cissy Thunderhawk, Wašté Win Young, and the Reverend John Floberg filed a class action lawsuit on Oct. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota challenging a number of civil rights violations that arose during the Standing Rock movement to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). They are represented by Columbia Law School Lecturer in Law Noah Smith-Drelich and Professor Bernard E. Harcourt, founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.

Fire, Aim, Ready! Militarizing Animus: “Unit Cohesion” And The Transgender Ban, Eric Merriam

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

President Trump’s currently litigated “transgender ban,” which excludes transgender persons from military service, is premised in part upon a claim that transgender persons’ presence in the military adversely affects “unit cohesion.” This use of identity- based “unit cohesion” as a justification for excluding a group from military service is the latest episode in a long history of the government asserting “unit cohesion” to justify excluding people from military service based on their identities. This Article contends that unit cohesion, when premised on identity, is always an impermissible justification for exclusion from military service because it is unconstitutional animus. Though …

Visibly (Un)Just: The Optics Of Grand Jury Secrecy And Police Violence, Nicole Smith Futrell

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Police violence has become more visible to the public through racial justice activism and social justice advocates’ use of technology. Yet, the heightened visibility of policing has had limited impact on transparency and accountability in the legal process, particularly when a grand jury is empaneled to determine whether to issue an indictment in a case of police violence. When a grand jury decides not to indict, the requirement of grand jury secrecy prevents public disclosure of the testimony, witnesses, and evidence presented to the grand jury. Grand jury secrecy leaves those who have seen and experienced the act of police …

Time's Up: Addressing Gender-Based Wage Discrimination In Professional Sports, Nicole Zerunyan

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

Gender-based wage discrimination in professional sports is wide-spread. Female athletes, competing individually or as part of a team, are consistently paid substantially less than their male counterparts. To combat such discrimination and eliminate the gender pay gap, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act (“Act”) in 1963. While born of good intentions, the Act falls drastically short of its intended goal. Its restrictive language—specifically, its “same establishment” requirement—excludes separately owned teams. As most men’s and women’s professional sports teams are separately owned, their players are effectively barred from bringing wage-discrimination claims. This Note proposes two ways of addressing that issue: (1) …

Counter-Revolutionary: Liberalism, Capital Punishment, And The Next Step Forward, Jason G. Tiplitz

Student Scholarship

Capital punishment is anathema to liberal notions of human rights and civil liberties. It is time to finally cast it aside as an anachronistic vestige of bygone times. The death penalty is fundamentally incompatible with a truly liberal state.