Constitutional Law Commons^™

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in the public's knowledge of the case Lawrence v. Texas. Much of the rich post-arrest history of the case has been ignored. But for the courage, insight, and initiative of three men in particular, the arrest might have been another forgotten episode in what the author calls the under history of the Texas sodomy law, the history not told in appellate opinions or in most other accounts.

Section II reviews the "somewhat known" past, tracing the evolution of the Texas sodomy law from a statute so facially …

An Ohio Dilemma: Race, Equal Protection, And The Unfulfilled Promise Of A State Bill Of Rights, Jonathan L. Entin

Cleveland State Law Review

Race was a central issue in Ohio from the very beginning. The original state constitution of 1802 and the successor constitution of 1851 explicitly limited suffrage to whites even as both documents forbade slavery. Moreover, the legislature imposed various legal disabilities and restrictions on African Americans. For much of the Nineteenth Century, however, the Ohio Supreme Court tried to narrow the scope of those restrictions by developing a distinctive jurisprudence that was in some respects more progressive, and in general less obnoxious, than that developed in other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court. Before the end of the century, …

Two Wrongs Make A Right: Hybrid Claims Of Discrimination, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

This Note reinterprets and recontextualizes the pronouncement in Employment Division v. Smith (Smith II) that exemptions from generally applicable laws will not be granted unless claims of free exercise are accompanied by the assertion of another constitutional right. It argues that when Arab American Muslims, and others who are of minority race and religion, bring claims for exemption from generally applicable laws on the basis of free exercise and equal protection principles, they ought to be able to invoke Smith II's hybridity exception, thus meriting heightened judicial scrutiny and increased solicitude from courts.

Response To State Action And A New Birth Of Freedom, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I have just a few comments. The first comment is a contribution to the ''analytic" question posed by Professor Black's work and made explicit by Professors Peller and Tushnet's paper. To make the case for the constitutional status of welfare rights, I do not think it is sufficient-although it may well be necessary-to show that the "state action" problem is merely a pseudo-problem, whatever the reason for finding it not to be a problem. I do not agree with one of the claims put forward by Peller and Tushnet,' that Black's perceptive analysis of the state action problem in his …

Madisonian Equal Protection, James S. Liebman, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

James Madison is considered the "Father of the Constitution," but his progeny disappointed him. It had no effective defense against self-government's "mortal disease" – the oppression of minorities by local majorities. This Article explores Madison's writings in an effort to reclaim the deep conception of equal protection at the core of his constitutional aspirations. At the Convention, Madison passionately advocated a radical structural approach to equal protection under which the "extended republic's" broadly focused legislature would have monitored local laws and vetoed those that were parochial and "unjust." Rejecting this proposal to structure equal protection into the "interior" operation of …

Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Under the doctrine of reverse incorporation, generally identified with the Supreme Court's decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, equal protection binds the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. Since Bolling, however, the courts have almost never granted relief to litigants claiming unconstitutional racial discrimination by the federal government. Courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on nonracial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against racial minorities, Boiling has virtually no …

Grutter V. Bollinger: This Generation's Brown V. Board Of Education, Michelle Adams

Articles

At first blush, Grutter appears to be a deviation from the body of the Court's recent affirmative action jurisprudence: it says "yes" where the other cases said "no." But it is not so clear that Grutter is a deviation from current law. Instead, it might be seen as consistent with it, in that the justification for the racial preference recognized in Grutter transcended the justifications offered in the previous cases, and the method used to achieve that end, "race as a factor," diffused rather than highlighted race. From this perspective, Grutter addressed several concerns that had troubled the Court for …

Experimentalist Equal Protection, Brandon L. Garrett, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Elsewhere Garrett and Liebman have recounted that though James Madison is considered "the Father of the Constitution," his progeny disappointed him because it was defenseless against self-government's "mortal disease " – the oppression of minorities by local majorities – because the Framers rejected the radical structural approach to equal protection that Madison proposed. Nor did the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and federal courts enforcing it adopt a solution Madison would have considered "effectual." This Article explores recent subconstitutional innovations in governance and public administration that may finally bring the nation within reach of the constitutional polity …

A Glimpse Behind And Beyond Grutter, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Many people have suggested that the recent battle over affirmative action was a defining moment for the contemporary relevance of Brown v. Board of Education and that it would determine the promise and potential for widespread societal integration. In my remarks, I want to comment upon a couple of comparisons and links between the Brown, Bakke, Grutter, and Gratz cases.

One Strike And You're Out? Constitutional Constraints On Zero Tolerance In Public Education, Eric D. Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Various studies reported that juvenile crimes of violence fell in the 1990s by as much as 30%. ¹⁰ In high schools specifically, the incidence of threatening behavior in 1996 changed little from two decades earlier, ¹¹ with the chances of being killed in school far less than being struck by lighting. ¹² The "juvenile crime bomb" proved illusory (as Delulio himself eventually acknowledged ¹³), but the severe measures designed to deal with it remain entrenched. Zero tolerance has taken on a life of its own, partly because public misperception remains high, ¹⁴ and partly because in our hardheaded times …

Does A Marriage Really Need Sex?: A Critical Analysis Of The Gender Restriction On Marriage, Randi E. Frankle

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Note discusses the issues surrounding intersex persons and the right to marry. The Comment first discusses the constitutional protection of the right to marry, intersex conditions, and case law regarding intersex, transsexual, and same-sex marriage. It further addresses the consequences for marriage when it is narrowly defined. Further, the Comment proposes an alternative solution to the one many courts have used. This solution allows an intersex person to self-designate her gender and be able to marry either a man or a woman. Finally, this Comment argues that if an intersex person can marry either a man or a woman, …

2002 U.S. Supreme Court Term Includes Zoning Referendum Case, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Race Conscious Affirmative Action By Tax Exempt 501(C)(3) Corporations After Grutter And Gratz, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment generally acts as a legal limit on the permissible bounds of government action. Accordingly, public universities and other government entities are constitutionally prohibited from engaging in acts that violate equal protection of the laws. The Supreme Court recently reinforced this point when it ruled, in two related cases, that public universities may consider the race of applicants when making admissions decisions, so long as an applicant's race does not amount to a deciding factor when granting admission. By its very terms, the constitutional limitation imposed by the Equal Protection Clause only directly …

Locked In Inequality: The Persistence Of Discrimination, Daria Roithmayr

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In this Article, the author argues that the practice of charging school fees to attend public school is an example of locked-in discrimination that persists over time, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Exploring the lock-in model of discrimination in the unique context of South Africa, Roithmayr makes two central points. First, discriminatory practices often become locked into institutional structures because high switching costs-the costs of moving from a discriminatory practice to an inclusive one—make it too difficult for an institution to discontinue discriminating. Even when institutional actors are fully committed to eradicating racial disparity, they may be constrained …

Come Back To The Nickel And Five:* Tracing The Warren Court's Pursuit Of Equal Justice Under Law, Jim Chen

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court's Misplaced Concern With Selective Fairness: Bush V. Gore And Three Analogies To Grading Dilemmas, William K.S. Wang

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of What Brown V. Board Of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Recision, Wendy Parker

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Bad Women Deserve Equal Protection: A Look At The Constitutionality Of The Florida Prostitution Statute, Patricia Padrino

St. Thomas Law Review

Laws against prostitution are antiquated and based primarily on moral considerations. While there is moral outcry against the proliferation of prostitution, prostitutes themselves are allowed to take the blame and suffer the punishment for its practice. Although prostitution is often referred to as a victimless crime, the criminalization of prostitution certainly victimizes prostitutes. Laws criminalizing prostitution in the United States do nothing to benefit society and everything to harm prostitutes themselves. One way to attack these laws in Florida is to show that they violate the equal protection rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. By approaching the …

Baker's Promise, Equal Protection, And The Modern Redistricting Revolution: A Plea For Rationality, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The conventional wisdom contends that Baker v. Carr did not set down a standard for lower courts to follow. This Article responds to this position. It reaches three conclusions. First, it argues the implicit promise of Baker v. Carr pointed toward a loose, flexible rationality standard for deciding redistricting controversies. Under this approach, states were given much room to enact redistricting plans in accordance to their states' particular needs. Second, the lower courts applied precisely this standard in litigation in the wake of Baker, and did so quite capably. This conclusion responds to those who exhort the imposition of a …

A Partial Defense Of An Anti-Discrimination Principle, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Over a quarter century ago, Professor Fiss proposed that the constitutional principle of equal protection should be interpreted to prohibit laws or official practices that aggravate or perpetuate the subordination of specially disadvantaged groups. Fiss thought that the anti-subordination principle could more readily justify results he believed normatively attractive than could the rival, anti-discrimination principle. In particular, anti-subordination would enable the courts to invalidate facially neutral laws that have the effect of disadvantaging a subordinate group and also enable them to uphold facially race-based laws aimed at ameliorating the condition of a subordinate group. Since Fiss’s landmark article appeared, Supreme …

Bush V. Gore As An Equal Protection Case, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court applied the Equal Protection Clause to the mechanics of state election administration. The Court invalidated the manual recount of the so-called undervote – that is, ballots that vote-counting machinery had found contained no indication of a vote for President – which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to determine the winner of Florida's vote for presidential electors in the 2000 presidential election. The United States Supreme Court reasoned that the principles it had previously articulated in applying the Equal Protection Clause to the vote were violated by the Florida court's …

What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

One of the striking and original achievements of the Michigan Law Review in its first century was the publication in 1989 of a Symposium entitled Legal Storytelling. Organized by the remarkable editor-in-chief, Kevin Kennedy - who tragically died not long after his graduation - the Symposium not only brought an important topic to the forefront of legal thinking, it did so in an extraordinarily interesting way. For this was not a mere collection of papers; the authors met in small editorial groups to discuss their work in detail, and as a result the whole project has a remarkable coherence and …

Race-Based Affirmative Action In American Legal Education, Adrien Katherine Wing

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Polling Establishment: Judicial Review, Democracy, And The Endorsement Theory Of The Establishment Clause - Commentary On 'Measured Endorsement', Jamin B. Raskin

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

[In Measured Endorsement] Shari Seidman Diamond and Andrew Koppelman argue that courts should rely on the techniques and methodologies of public opinion polling to survey the public and determine whether such displays endorse religion and therefore violate the Establishment Clause.' The authors support the point by developing an analogy to litigation under the Lanham Act, where courts regularly use evidence from public opinion poll results to determine whether there is legally salient 'consumer confusion' in a trademark dispute. The theoretical problem with this analogy is that the issue at stake under the Lanham Act is whether there is a likelihood …

The Supreme Court, The Florida Vote, And Equal Protection, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

The Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore1 has taken a lot of flak for its ruling that the Florida count of undervotes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Commentators, and not only those on the left, have labeled the Court’s reasoning as without basis in precedent, weak in its logic, and breathtakingly sweeping in its implications.2 For those inclined to suspect the justices of naked partisanship, the equal protection argument did nothing to allay those suspicions.

It is argued in this Essay, however, that the case for an equal protection violation is supported both by precedent …

"Invidious" American Indian Tribal Sovereignty: Morton V. Mancari Contra Adarand Constructors, Inc. V. Pena, Rice V. Cayetano, And Other Recent Cases, Frank Shockey

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

'Appropriate' Means-Ends Constraints On Section 5 Powers, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

With the narrowing of Congress' Article I power to regulate interstate commerce and to authorize private suits against states, Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment provides Congress with an increasingly important alternative source of power to regulate and police state conduct. However, in City of Boerne v. Flores and subsequent cases, the Supreme Court has tightened the doctrinal test for prophylactic legislation based on Section Five. The Court has clarified Section Five's legitimate ends by holding that Congress may enforce Fourteenth Amendment rights only as they are defined by the federal judiciary, and the Court has constrained Section Five's permissible …

Lessons From The Past And Strategies For The Future: Using Domestic, International And Comparative Law To Overturn Sodomy Laws, Charlene Smith, James Wilets

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will first discuss the legal importance of challenging sodomy laws, even though those laws are rarely enforced. It will then discuss the importance of incorporating international and comparative law in formulating these challenges. In Section II, Professor Charlene Smith will discuss past and future strategies, focusing on the topics of equal protection, morality, and the difference (or lack thereof) between acts and status. In Section III, Professor Jim Wilets will explore incorporating international and comparative law into domestic challenges to U.S. sodomy laws. This Article will demonstrate that there is binding Supreme Court authority requiring all U.S. courts …

Private Remedies For Public Wrongs Under Section 5 (Symposium: New Directions In Federalism), Evan H. Caminker

Articles

The Supreme Court has ushered in the new millennium with a renewed emphasis on federalism-based limits to Congress's regulatory authority in general, and Congress's Section 5 power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in particular. In a recent string of cases, the Court has refined and narrowed Section 5's enforcement power in two significant ways.1 First, the Court made clear that Congress lacks the authority to interpret the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment's substantive provisions themselves, and may only "enforce" the judiciary's definition of Fourteenth Amendment violations. 2 Second, the Court embraced a relatively stringent requirement concerning the relationship between means …

Dissecting The State: The Use Of Federal Law To Free State And Local Officials From State Legislatures' Control, Roderick M. Hills Jr.

Michigan Law Review

In discussions about American federalism, it is common to speak of a "state government" as if it were a black box, an individual speaking with a single voice. State governments are, of course, no such thing. Rather, a "state" actually incorporates a bundle of different subdivisions, branches, and agencies controlled by politicians who often compete with each other for electoral success and governmental power. In particular, these institutions compete with each other for the power to control federal funds and implement federal programs. This article explores one aspect of this intrastate competition - the extent to which federal law can …