Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Promoting Social Change In Asia And The Pacific: The Need For A Disability Rights Tribunal To Give Life To The Un Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

There is no question that the existence of regional human rights courts and commissions has been an essential element in the enforcement of international human rights in those regions of the world where such tribunals exist. In the specific area of mental disability law, there is now a remarkably robust body of case law from the European Court on Human Rights, some significant and transformative decisions from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and at least one major case from the African Commission onHuman Rights.

In Asia and the Pacific region, however, there is no such body. Many reasons have …

Superheroes, Bandits, And Cyber-Nerds: Exploring The History And Contemporary Development Of The Vigilante, Stephanie Juliano

Articles & Chapters

This article will first discuss what defines a vigilante, the history of vigilantes, and the contemporary vigilante's effect on the legal system as a whole. Also, this article will focus on those scenarios that bring an ordinary person to react in an illegal way to a perceived injustice. In focusing on these scenarios, this article will examine a little more closely the answers of deeper questions about the nature of law and justice, and their roles in the accelerating world of new media.

"I Didn't Agree To Arbitrate That!"-How Courts Determine If Employees' Sexual Assault And Sexual Harassment Claims Fall Within The Scope Of Broad Mandatory Arbitration Clauses, Eric Koplowitz

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Throughout the last few decades, mandatory arbitration clauses have become more prevalent in employment contracts. Mandatory arbitration clauses provide employers with a cheaper and less formal method to resolve disputes with their employees once they occur. Employers who want most or all of their employees' claims subjected to mandatory arbitration will use broad language in the arbitration clauses. Despite the use of broad and seemingly all-encompassing language in broad mandatory arbitration clauses, some employees' claims can escape their reach and proceed to court. This Note will look at how courts determine if employees' sexual assault and sexual harassment claims against …

An Updated Quantitative Study Of Iqbal's Impact On 12(B)(6) Motions, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

The effect of Ashcroft v. Iqbal on pleading standards and behavior is a source of significant legal debate. This article serves as a follow-up to Professor Moore's 2010 empirical study on Iqbal's effect on courts' rulings on motions to dismiss complaints for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Professor Moore's previous study found a statistically significant increase in the likelihood that a court grants a 12(b)(6) motion with leave to amend following Iqbal. In this article, Professor Moore updates and increases the pool of cases in her database. The updated data …

Plausibility Pleading And Employment Discrimination, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Share His Dream: A Fair Use Standard For Historico-Political Figures' Rights Of Publicity, Joshua Bloomgarden

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Disparate Impact And Equal Protection After Ricci V. Destefano, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

As Professor Richard Primus noted in his article, Equal Protection and Disparate Impact: Round Three, the constitutional issues surrounding the disparate impact theory of discrimination have evolved significantly over time. First the question was whether the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee embodied disparateimpact. Most people assumed yes, but the Supreme Court said no in 1976 in Washington v. Davis. Second, the source of Congress’ power to prohibit disparate impact discrimination was called into question with the so-called federalism revolution. Only if it was within Congress’ power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment could disparate impact legislation be applied to the …

The New Illegitimacy: Tying Parentage To Marital Status For Lesbian Co-Parents, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Should a child be allowed two legal parents only if born into a marriage? For children of heterosexual parents, the answer, today, is definitively "no." Constitutional protection for parental rights does not permit the ties between an unwed father and his child to be severed simply because he is not married to the child's mother. But the answer is often different for the child of a lesbian mother. In a recent opinion, Debra H. v. Janice R., the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a lesbian co-parent- a woman who had participated in the conception, birth, and early rearing …

The Use Of Uncounseled Tribal Court Convictions In Federal Court Under The Habitual Offender Provision Of The Violence Against Women Act: A Violation Of The Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel Or An Extension Of Comity?, Rebecca Zimmerman

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Dangers Of Reform: Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, And The Limits Of Law, Jennifer L. Levi, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

Professors Jennifer Levi and Giovanna Shay review Dean Spade's new book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law." They argue that Professor Spade's theoretical approach, which he describes as "critical trans politics," is most useful when employed to analyze issues relating to criminal punishment and mass incarceration, and that it is less appropriate as a critique of the marriage equality movement. Despite some areas of disagreement with Professor Spade, the Authors conclude that the book makes an important contribution.

National Security Interest Convergence, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

Over a decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers, scholars, activists, and policy makers continue to confront the questions of whether and to what extent robust counterterrorism laws and policies should be reined in to protect against the abuse of civil rights and the marginalization of outsider groups. This Article uses political and critical race theory to identify areas of national security interest convergence in which political will can be marshaled to limit some national security policies.

Legislators act in their political self-interest — both in terms of responding to party forces and constituents — in casting votes …

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …

Response: The Death Of The Bisexual Saboteur, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor Glazer offers us, in Sexual Reorientation, an appealing and intuitive way to deal with the difficulty of bisexual identity, an identity that has always fit uneasily and sometimes quite unhappily in the LGBT rights movement. If the principal problem of bisexuality is its very temporal changeability, its tendency to dissolve into heterosexuality or homosexuality depending on the gender of one's sexual partner, then Glazer's solution is elegant. She proposes that we bifurcate (so to speak) sexual orientation into two subcategories and acknowledge for everyone both a general and a specific orientation. General orientation "is the sex toward which …

Reimagining Criminal Prosecution: Toward A Color-Conscious Professional Ethic For Prosecutors, Justin Murray

Publications

Prosecutors, like most Americans, view the criminal-justice system as fundamentally race neutral. They are aware that blacks are stopped, searched, arrested, and locked up in numbers that are vastly out of proportion to their fraction of the overall population. Yet, they generally assume that this outcome is justified because it reflects the sad reality that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime in America. They are unable to detect the ways in which their own discretionary choices--and those of other actors in the criminal-justice system, such as legislators, police officers, and jurors--contribute to the staggering and disproportionate incarceration of black …

Recovering The Assembly Clause, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

You Kill Me: Why I Don’T Want To Live Around People With Guns, Brandt Goldstein

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

The Fiscal Crisis As An Opportunity For Criminal Justice Reform: Defenders Building Alliances With Fiscal Conservatives, Randolph N. Jonakait, Larry Eger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Reframing Roe: Property Over Privacy, Becca Rausch

Faculty Articles

Roe v. Wade has received much criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. These critiques diverge divisively but for one commonality. Specifically, commentators from both the pro- and anti-choice camps have expressed concern about the absence of an express constitutional right to privacy, upon which the Supreme Court in Roe based its finding of a "fundamental" right to abortion. This lack of express constitutional provision renders the Roe decision, and its resulting reproductive rights, vulnerable. Further, pro-choice advocates find fault with the privacy basis because it yields no positive rights to funding or governmental support for accessing abortion services. …

American Skin: Dispensing With Colorblindness And Critical Mass In Affirmative Action, Deirdre Bowen

Faculty Articles

This exploratory empirical work examines whether students of color enjoy the benefits articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grutter decision that rationalized the continuation of affirmative action based on diversity interests. Specifically, the Court stated that affirmative action was permissible because students of all backgrounds would increase their racial understanding and decrease their racial stereotyping of minorities. Neither side was happy with the decision—both skeptical that such benefits could transpire for minority students. Yet, in the heat of continuing debate, neither group has empirical support for their arguments until now.

Using survey data of over 370 under-represented minority …

En Paz Descanse: Remembering Keith Aoki’S Contributions Toward Latina/O Equality, Steven W. Bender

Faculty Articles

Part of the forthcoming University of Oregon Law Review tribute to the scholarship of the late Professor Keith Aoki (1955-2011), this article situates Keith’s engagement of Latina/o policy issues within his scholarly identity and legacy. Although best remembered for his renowned contributions in the fields of intellectual property, property law, and Asian American jurisprudence, Keith wrote extensively on Latina/o issues in pursuit of equality of treatment. As addressed in the article, Keith’s notable advocacy on behalf of Latinas/os includes the significance of political representation as a strategy for social change and his innovative proposals for regional formulation of immigration policy.

Gringo Alley, Steven W. Bender

Faculty Articles

As a tribute to the late Professor Keith Aoki, this piece engages an uncompleted collaboration with Professor Aoki sketching through art and words a profoundly dystopian immigration nightmare centered in the Southwestern United States. In detailing the plot and themes of the borderlands gauntlet of "Gringo Alley," the article confronts some of the disturbing recent developments in immigration policy that approach or match the horrors imagined in fictional Gringo Alley. Finally, the article draws on science fiction influence and demographic reality to suggest a frightening future for all U.S. residents -- the prospect of economic collapse in a landscape of …

Preliminary Report On Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

For this Report, the Research Working Group reviewed evidence on disproportionality in Washington’s criminal justice system and considered whether crime commission rates accounted for this disproportionality. They found that crime commission rates by race and ethnicity are largely unknown and perhaps unknowable, but that some researchers simply take arrest rates as good proxies for underlying commission rates for all crimes. They found that use of arrest rates likely overstates black crime commission rates for several reasons. But even if arrest rates are used as a proxy for underlying crime commission rates, the extent of racial disproportionality is not explained by …

Keith Aoki’S Theory Of Racial Microclimes, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Supercolleague, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

This memorial tribute to the late Keith Aoki traces the impact of his overlapping activities as an artist, warrior, and mentor, particularly in the area of Asian-American jurisprudence.

Centennial Reflections On The California Law Review'S Scholarship On Race: The Structure Of Civil Rights Thought, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

The author reviews one hundred years of the California Law Review's rich body of scholarship on race and civil rights in an effort to discern its general direction and contours. Discerning two broad paradigms--a black-white binary of race and a liberty-equality divide--he notes that the two not only have been emerging in roughly the same period but are beginning to occupy the same territory. After describing the two paradigms and explaining their origin and operation, he puts forward a prediction for what their convergence may portend for the future of civil rights thought.

Four Reservations On Civil Rights Reasoning By Analogy: The Case Of Latinos And Other Nonblack Groups, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

The protection of civil rights in the United States encompasses remedies for at least five separate groups. Native Americans have suffered extermination, removal, denial of sovereignty, and destruction of culture; Latinos, conquest and the indignities of a racially discriminatory immigration system. Asian Americans suffered exclusion, wartime internment, and discriminatory labor laws. Middle Eastern people suffer from suspicion that they are terrorists. Blacks suffered slavery and Jim Crow.

Yet our system of civil rights derives, in large part, from the experience of only Blacks, and aims to redress a single, momentous harm, namely slavery and its lingering effects. This is particularly …

Disparately Seeking Jurors: Disparate Impact And The (Mis)Use Of Batson, Anna Roberts

Faculty Articles

This Article, "Disparately Seeking Jurors: Disparate Impact and the (Mis)use of Batson," uncovers a stark inequality within Equal Protection jurisprudence. On the 25th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which established a three-step test for assessing claims of purposeful discrimination in jury selection, I present the first comprehensive research on the application by the lower federal courts of Batson’s disparate impact analysis. The results are striking. Whereas the test was developed to prevent the discriminatory removal of African American jurors from the trials of African Americans, the courts now use disparate impact analysis only to …

Diversity Within Racial Groups And The Constitutionality Of Race Conscious Admissions, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Articles

This Article offers a novel doctrinal resolution of the key issues in Fisher v. Texas, the impending Supreme Court case which involves race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas at Austin ("UT"). The resolution proposed here addresses Justice Anthony Kennedy's concerns about race-conscious policies, but also preserves most of the Courts 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling, in spite of the fact that Justice Kennedy dissented in Grutter. Substantively, the Article clarifies the key issues in Fisher (the meaning of "critical mass" and the scope of deference that courts give to universities) by focusing on a simple idea that permeates …

Intentional Discrimination In Farrakhan V. Gregoire: The Ninth Circuit's Voting Rights Act Standard "Results In" The New Jim Crow, Jonathan Sgro

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Occupying America: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The American Dream, And The Challenge Of Socio-Economic Inequality, Trina Jones

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.