Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Religious Freedom And (Other) Civil Liberties: Is There A Middle Ground?, Abner S. Greene

Faculty Scholarship

There appears to be an intractable debate between those who favor religious accommodations and those who favor civil liberties such as abortion rights and equality rights for same-sex couples. Many take firm positions of truth about one matter or the other. Here, I sketch a middle ground, continuing my endorsement of a robust normative or value pluralism. I canvass some arguments for this position, while also describing and critiquing some works of intellectual history that seem too wedded to one teleological posture or another. Despite my support for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, I critique the Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, …

Legal Discourse And Racial Justice: The Urge To Cry ‘Bias!, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

One who is convinced that a judge wrongly decided a case may sometimes be tempted to accuse the judge of bias, referring to unconscious social-group stereotypes and/or cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of “implicit biases.” The rhetoric is problematic, however, for various reasons. One is that the term “bias” in this context may be misunderstood to mean something different and unintended – either a disqualifying bias under judicial conduct rules or a conscious prejudice. Another is that, even if the intended meaning is clear, a judge’s implicit biases cannot fairly be inferred from a single wrong decision. To …

Data Privacy As A Civil Right: The Eu Gets It?, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Pluralism And Its Perils: Navigating The Tension Between Gay Rights And Religious Expression, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The conflict between gay equality claims and religious liberty claims permeates debates over marriage equality and LGBT civil rights. Using as its centerpiece a decision that forced Georgetown University to provide benefits for a gay student organization, this article examines both the doctrinal underpinnings of how courts resolve the tension between gay rights and religion and the principles of pluralism that are at stake.

The Georgetown case is rightly understood as an exemplar of judicial minimalism. This article argues that the values of learning things undecided, while real, may be outweighed by lost opportunities for advancing principles that also foster …

Freedom Of The Church And Our Endangered Civil Rights: Exiting The Social Contract, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this comment I suggest that the “Freedom of the Church” to ignore the dictates of our various Civil Rights Acts, whether in the ministerial context or more broadly, created or at least newly discovered by the Court in Hosanna-Tabor, is a vivid example of a newly emerging and deeply troubling family of rights, which I have called elsewhere “exit rights” and which collectively constitute a new paradigm of both institutional and individual rights in constitutional law quite generally. The Church’s right to the ministerial exception might be understood as one of this new generation of rights, including some …

Particularized Social Groups And Categorical Imperatives In Refugee Law: State Failures To Recognize Gender And The Legal Reception Of Gender Persecution Claims In Canada, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Melanie Randall

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Disparate Impact And Pregnancy: Title Vii's Other Accommodation Requirement, Camille Hébert

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Immigrant Labor In Fish Processing In The Pacific Northwest And British Columbia And Current Undocumented Labor, Adi D. Salinas Ferreira

Pomona Senior Theses

The beginning of industrialized fish processing plants reveals themes of labor exploitation, racial and gender segregation, and antagonistic legislation that have continued well into the present. Today in the Pacific North West, the majority of workers are Latino and many among them are undocumented or DACAmented. Many aspects of the work conditions in salmon canneries back in the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s and the work conditions in present day fish processing plants have not changed. Many jobs in a fish processing plant remain gendered, and when there is more than one race working in a single plant racial …

Diversity As A Law School Survival Strategy, Aaron N. Taylor

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past few years, law schools have been dealing with a drastic and, so far, unyielding decline in student interest. Between 2010 and 2013, student enrollments fell almost 25%, to levels not seen in 40 years. This trend has prompted many to wonder what schools have done, and what they can do, to ensure their survivalin this new climate. This article explores the extent to which law schools have used students of color, particularly black and Hispanic students, to bolster enrollments and lessen the effects of the downturn. The results of this analysis suggest that a school’s median LSAT …

Let’S Pretend That Federal Courts Aren’T Hostile To Discrimination Claims, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Sandra Sperino’s article, Let’s Pretend Discrimination Is a Tort,[1] makes a valuable contribution to the debate about the proper interpretation of Title VII and other employment discrimination laws in light of Supreme Court trends. Professor Sperino ably describes the way that the Supreme Court has used tort concepts increasingly in recent cases,[2] even having gone so far as to have called employment discrimination statutes federal torts.[3] This development has created significant concern among scholars,[4] including Professor Sperino herself.[5]

Rather than simply reiterate those concerns, however, in her article Professor Sperino adopts a novel approach: she takes the Court at …

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …

Race, Dignity, And The Right To Marry, Robin A. Lenhardt

Fordham Law Review

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges asserts legal marriage’s capacity to afford same-sex couples a measure of “equal dignity” and belonging too long denied. In this Essay, I ask whether there is any reason to believe that marriage could do the same for African Americans. Could broader entrance into marriage, as some conservatives suggest, provide Blacks—gay and straight—a measure of belonging that has been frustratingly elusive, even as the nation prepares to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification?

Moving Forward, Looking Back: A Retrospective On Sexual Harassment Law, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The fiftieth anniversary of Title VII provides an appropriate occasion to look back to an era when women suffered sexual abuse in the workplace (and many other places) with no possible recourse. Once feminist writers and litigators connected the dots, judges came to understand that a broad mandate to end sex discrimination had to include a mandate to eliminate sexual harassment at work. The decades that followed saw the step-by-step construction of a doctrine that ostensibly protects employees from unwanted sexual behavior at work.

In this symposium issue the author examines the impact of sexual harassment law citing several court …

Backsliding: The United States Supreme Court, Shelby County V. Holder And The Dismantling Of The Voting Rights Act Of 1965, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court, having found that certain states received unequal treatment under the Voting Rights Act, struck down the Act’s preclearance provision in its Shelby v. Holder holding. The Author, in an effort to critique the conclusion reached by the Court, argues that these states, historically responsible for obstructing the ability of African-Americans to vote, continue to engage in practices that result in voting irregularities and acts of discrimination in the electoral process. Today, this strategic disenfranchisement rears its head in the form of legislation making voting difficult or impossible for many minority voters, a criminal justice system that targets …

Preferential Judicial Activism, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

The Author examines the Supreme Court’s use of “preferential judicial activism”—whereby justices decide whether to formalistically dismiss cases or instead choose to engage judicial activism based on their policy preferences—through contrasting the Court’s reasoning in Shelby v. Holder with its decisions in cases concerning national security. In Shelby, the majority characterized the Court’s review of the Voting Rights Act of 2006 as necessary given the fundamental rights at stake and the unusually broad reach of the Act in mandating federal jurisdiction over voting matters. However, in national security-related cases in which plaintiffs have alleged violations of fundamental rights, the …

Religion And Marriage Equality Statutes, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

To date, every state statute that has extended marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples has included accommodations for actors who oppose such marriages on religious grounds. Debate over those accommodations has occurred mostly between, on the one hand, people who urge broader religion protections and, on the other hand, those who support the types of accommodations that typically have appeared in existing statutes. This article argues that the debate should be widened to include arguments that the existing accommodations are normatively and constitutionally problematic. Even states that presumptively are most friendly to LGBT citizens, as measured by their demonstrated …

The Americans With Disabilities Act At 25: The Highest Expression Of American Values, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Enacted in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a watershed piece of legislation which enshrines in law a social promise of equality and inclusion into all facets of life, while offering an inspiring model that much of the world has come to embrace. This editorial launches JAMA’s theme issue on the 25th anniversary of the ADA by detailing the Act’s history, main provisions, and far-reaching impacts on health, providing a context for the three Original Investigations and six scholarly Viewpoints that make up the theme issue. The editorial begins with a discussion of the ADA’s history, highlighting …

The Triumph Of Gay Marriage And The Failure Of Constitutional Law, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's much anticipated invalidation of gay marriage bans improved the personal lives of millions of ordinary Americans. It made the country a more decent place. Even Chief Justice Roberts, at the conclusion of his otherwise scathing dissent, acknowledged that the decision was a cause for many Americans to celebrate.

But although the Chief Justice thought that advocates of gay marriage should "by all means celebrate today's decision," he admonished them "not [to] celebrate the Constitution." The Constitution, he said, "had nothing to do with it".

Part I of this article quarrels with the Chief Justice's assertion that the …

Good Faith Discrimination, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's current doctrinal rules governing racial discrimination and affirmative action are unsatisfying. They often seem artificial, internally inconsistent, and even conceptually incoherent. Despite a long and continuing history of racial discrimination in the United States, many of the problems with the Supreme Court's racial jurisprudence stem from the Court's willingness to view the current distribution of societal resources as establishing a colorblind, race-neutral baseline that can be used to make equality determinations. As a result, the current rules are as likely to facilitate racial discrimination as to prevent it, or to remedy the lingering effects of past discrimination.

Revoking Rights, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other …

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

How The Other Half Banks, Daria Roithmayr

Publications

No abstract provided.

More Than A Woman: Insights Into Corporate Governance After The French Sex Quota, Daria Roithmayr

Publications

In 2011, France enacted a Corporate Board Quota to establish a forty percent floor for either sex on corporate boards. Existing literature presumes that women will change the way firms function and that their presence in upper management will improve both governance and financial returns. To assess the potential impact of the quota, we interviewed twenty-four current and former corporate board members. Our analysis of these interviews generates two findings. First, our results indicate that, at least in the view of board members, the sex quota has had an impact on the process of board decision-making, but adding women has …

Has The “Machinery Of Death” Become A Clunker?, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

From the Essay

This symposium essay sounds a cautionary note while ultimately remaining agnostic about what the future holds for the death penalty. There are a variety of reasons to be skeptical about the abolitionists' newfound optimism. The usual reasons for optimism about ending the death penalty-sharp declines in public support for the death penalty and of the ultimate sanction-do not necessarily portend the demise of the death penalty. This essay argues that other factors can account for recent declines in capital punishment and that there are countervailing factors suggesting that the American death penalty is alive and well, despite …

Built For Boyhood?: A Proposal For Reducing The Amount Of Gender Bias In The Advertising Of Children's Toys On Television, Nareissa L. Smith

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

While the last half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the number of US women in the workforce, women remain under represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. For years, researchers and social commentators have tried to explain the persistence of this gender gap. Some have even argued that genetic differences explain women's inability to excel in the hard sciences. This Article asserts that the impact of socialization on children's educational and occupational choices has been greatly underestimated. Specifically, the toys that are marketed to boys teach spatial skills that prepare boys for STEM careers. Conversely, the toys …

Report From The Restorative Justice Process At The Dalhousie University Faculty Of Dentistry, Jennifer Llewellyn, Jacob Mcissac, Melissa Mackay

Reports & Public Policy Documents

In December 2014, female students in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Dentistry filed complaints under the University’s Sexual Harassment Policy after they became aware some of their male colleagues had posted offensive material about them in a private Facebook group. The select materials revealed from the Facebook group reflected misogynistic, sexist and homophobic attitudes. At the complainants’ request, the University began a restorative justice process to investigate the matter, address the harms it caused and examine the climate and culture within the Faculty that may have influenced the offensive nature of the Facebook group’s content. Twenty-nine students from the class of …

An Immovable Object And An Unstoppable Force: Reconciling The First Amendment And Antidiscrimination Laws In The Claybrooks Court, Erin A. Shackelford

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Note broadly addresses the problem of racial stereotyping and racial roles in the media. It is viewed through the lens of Claybrooks v. ABC, Inc., a recent federal district court decision of first impression. In Claybrooks, the court dismissed the plaintiffs discrimination claims, ruling that casting decisions were protected under the First Amendment. This Note will address the problem of racial discrimination by focusing on racial misrepresentations in the media and the role of reality television programs in that landscape. Specifically, this Note will propose a new solution for the Claybrooks court. This analysis will assert that cast members …

The Right To Counsel In Utah: An Assessment Of Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services, The Sixth Amendment Center, The Defender Initiative

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

The Right to Counsel in Utah

An Analysis Of The Economic Costs Of Seeking The Death Penalty In Washington State, Robert C. Boruchowitz, Peter A. Collins, Matthew J. Hickman, Mark A. Larranaga

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

An Analysis Of The Economic Costs Of Seeking The Death Penalty In Washington State

Transitions: From Danielle To Daniel, From Victim To Advocate, Daniel Bryner, Starcia Ague

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.