Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

Gatekeeping The Profession, Christopher Williams

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article argues that the U.S. model of legal education functions as a racial gatekeeper, perpetuating inequality by adopting and exacerbating societal prejudices. It highlights how structural mechanisms within legal education, such as standardized testing, admission processes, and socialization, disproportionately exclude and marginalize students of color, particularly black students, mirroring the experiences of Dalits in India's legal education system. The author introduces the concept of "adoptive prejudice," where legal education systems adapt and embed societal hierarchies, leading to systemic exclusion and disparity.

Do Abolitionism And Constitutionalism Mix?, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Mestizaje/Mesticagem: Racism & Citizenship In Latin America, Tanya Hernandez, Yuko Miki, Nitza Escalera

Posters

Maloney Library lecture series, Behind the Book

The Noisy "Silent Witness": The Misperception And Misuse Of Criminal Video Evidence, Aaron M. Williams

Indiana Law Journal

This Note examines recent developments in the research of situational video evidence biases. Part I examines the current and growing body of psychological research into the various situational biases that can affect the reliability of video evidence and the gaps in this research that require further attention from researchers and legal academics. Because these biases do not “operate in a vacuum,” Part I also examines some of the recent and exciting research into the interaction between situational and dispositional biases. Part II examines the development of camera and video processing technology and its limitations as a means of mitigating such …

Dehumanization, Immigrants, And Equal Protection, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article is divided into three parts. Part I explores the concept of dehumanization and its central role in the subordination of marginalized groups. Part II discusses the equal protection doctrine of suspect classes by analyzing key decisions by the Court and its reasoning for whether or not to consider a particular group as a suspect class. Part II also argues that the decision in Brown v. Board of Education regards racial segregation in public schools as a form of racial dehumanization and provides the doctrinal basis to consider dehumanization a central factor in determining suspect class status. Part III …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Shaw Claim: The Rise And Fall Of Colorblind Jurisprudence, Molly P. Matter

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Assessment Of Public Sector Service Quality: Gauging Experiences And Perceptions Of Racial Profiling, Aaron C. Rollins Jr.

Journal of Public Management & Social Policy

The absence of a culturally competent public sector workforce has led to increased public scrutiny and heightened levels of distrust. In the field of public safety, this is particularly important due to the sensitive nature of the task performed and the historically strained relationships that exist between racial minorities and law enforcement. Using national survey data to gauge the prevalence of citizen’s experiences and perceptions of racial profiling, this research reveals significant discrepancies amongst minorities and their white counterparts. In response, this research encourages public officials and agencies to eliminate inconsistencies in their interactions with the citizenry as a whole. …

Texas Indian Holocaust And Survival: Mcallen Grace Brethren Church V. Salazar, Milo Colton

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the first Europeans entered the land that would one day be called Texas, they found a place that contained more Indian tribes than any other would-be American state at the time. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government documented that American Indians in Texas were nearly extinct, decreasing in number from 708 people in 1890 to 470 in 1900. A century later, the U.S. census recorded an explosion in the American Indian population living in Texas at 215,599 people. By 2010, that population jumped to 315,264 people.

Part One of this Article chronicles the forces contributing …

Transitional Equality, Suzanne A. Kim

University of Richmond Law Review

Legal discussions of inequality often focus on the virtues of one legal status or regulatory structure over another, but a guarantee of the right to a particular legal status does not ensure a lived experience of equality in that status. In moments of legal change, when a person or class of persons obtain a new status or gain rights that had previously been denied to them, the path from one legal status to another becomes critically important and may itself be impacted by race, gender, age, and other factors. The process of transitioning to a new status can be complex …

Equal Protection Design Defects, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

One can understand constitutional doctrine as a tool designed to effectuate the Constitution and its various provisions. Equal protection doctrine, in turn, comprises a set of Justice-made rules designed to realize the promise of equal protection under the law. The substance of that promise remains a topic of deep contestation. Nonetheless, more than forty years of constitutional jurisprudence have entrenched a vision of constitutional equality that privileges what I refer to herein as the “right to compete.” Simply put, the Supreme Court has repeatedly embraced the view that the Equal Protection Clause mandates the government to allocate public benefits — …

Pretext And Justification: Republicanism, Policing, And Race, Ekow N. Yankah

Cardozo Law Review

On April 4, 2015, Police Officer Michael Slager gunned down Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina with a cool that resembled target practice. Scott's name joined a heartbreaking list of men of color killed by unjustified police violence. The video of the incident also broadcast to the world the spectacular violence always lurking beneath the surface of daily interactions between police and men of color.

The "Black Lives Matter" movement has fiercely insisted Scott's death not be viewed as an isolated incident but understood as woven into the fabric of American policing. American policing harms individual people of color, …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Resistance & The Stubborn But Unsurprising Persistence Of Hate And Extremism In The United States, Jeannine Bell

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Though the far right has a long history in the United States, the presidential campaign and then election of Donald Trump brought the movement out of the shadows. This article will analyze the rise in White supremacist activity in the United States-from well-publicized mass actions like the White supremacist march in Charlottesville in August 2017 to individual acts of violence happening since November 2016. This article focuses on contextualizing such incidents within this contemporary period and argues that overt expressions of racism and racist violence are nothing new. The article closes with a call to strengthen the current legal remedies …

Arlington Heights Won In The Supreme Court But The Fair Housing Act’S Goal Of Promoting Racial Integration Saved The Low-Income Housing, Henry Rose

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Adequate Education: The Disregarded Fundamental Right And The Resurgence Of Segregation Of Public Schools, Neubia L. Harris

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The New Impartial Jury Mandate, Richard Lorren Jolly

Michigan Law Review

Impartiality is the cornerstone of the Constitution’s jury trial protections. Courts have historically treated impartiality as procedural in nature, meaning that the Constitution requires certain prophylactic procedures that secure a jury that is more likely to reach verdicts impartially. But in Peña- Rodriguez v. Colorado, 137 S. Ct. 855 (2017), the Supreme Court recognized for the first time an enforceable, substantive component to the mandate. There, the Court held that criminal litigants have a Sixth Amendment right to jury decisions made without reliance on extreme bias, specifically on the basis of race or national origin. The Court did not …

Section 5'S Forgotten Years: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth Amendment Before Katzenbach V. Morgan, Christopher W. Schmidt

Northwestern University Law Review

Few decisions in American constitutional law have frustrated, inspired, and puzzled more than Katzenbach v. Morgan. Justice Brennan’s 1966 opinion put forth the seemingly radical claim that Congress—through its power, based in Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to “enforce, by appropriate legislation,” the rights enumerated in that Amendment—shared responsibility with the Court to define the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment rights. Although it spawned a cottage industry of scholarship, this claim has never been fully embraced by a subsequent Supreme Court majority, and in City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court rejected the heart of the Morgan …

The Futile Fourth Amendment: Understanding Police Excessive Force Doctrine Through An Empirical Assessment Of Graham V. Connor, Osagie K. Obasogie, Zachary Newman

Northwestern University Law Review

Graham v. Connor established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims. The Supreme Court not only refined an objective reasonableness test to describe the constitutional standard, but also held that the Fourth Amendment is the sole avenue for courts to adjudicate claims that police violated a person’s constitutional rights in using force. In this Essay, we ask: What impact did this decision have on the nature of police excessive force claims in federal courts? To address this, we engaged in a qualitative examination of 500 federal cases (250 in the twenty-six years before Graham and 250 in the …

A Conversation On Learning From The History Of The Civil Rights Movement, Walter F. Mondale

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

Introduction & Abridged Transcript, The Summit for Civil Rights, November 10, 2017

Does The African American Need Separate Charter Schools?, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Steven Nelson, Matt Kronzer

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger

Northwestern University Law Review

The litigation campaign that led to McCleskey v. Kemp did not begin as an anti-death-penalty effort. It grew in soil long washed in the blood of African-Americans, lynched or executed following rude semblances of trials and hasty appeals, which had prompted the NAACP from its very founding to demand “simple justice” in individual criminal cases. When the Warren Court signaled, in the early 1960s, that it might be open to reflection on broader patterns of racial discrimination in capital sentencing, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) began to gather empirical evidence and craft appropriate constitutional responses. As …

The School To Deportation Pipeline, Laila L. Hlass

Georgia State University Law Review

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes.

Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in …

Dead Canaries In The Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited, Jeannine Bell

Georgia State University Law Review

The well-publicized deaths of several African-Americans—Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling among others—at the hands of police stem from tragic interactions predicated upon well-understood practices analyzed by police scholars since the 1950s. The symbolic assailant, a construct created by police scholar Jerome Skolnick in the mid-1960s to identify persons whose behavior and characteristics the police view as threatening, is especially relevant to contemporary policing. This Article explores the societal roots of the creation of a Black symbolic assailant in contemporary American policing.

The construction of African-American men as symbolic assailants is one of the most important factors characterizing police …

Schuette And Antibalkanization, Samuel Weiss, Donald Kinder

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Justice Kennedy’s controlling plurality revised the political process doctrine and ended the practice of affirmative action in Michigan. In this opinion, Kennedy followed in the Court’s tradition of invoking antibalkanization values in equal protection cases, making the empirical claims both that antibalkanization motivated the campaign to end affirmative action in Michigan and that the campaign itself would, absent judicial intervention, have antibalkanizing effects.

Using sophisticated empirical methods, this Article is the first to examine whether the Court’s claims on antibalkanization are correct. We find they are not. Support for the Michigan …

Multiracial Malaise: Multiracial As A Legal Racial Category, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

One byproduct of increased interracial marriages post Loving is a growing number of multiracial children. This cohort of multiracials tends to overshadow older and larger generations of multiracial people whose genealogical mixture is more distant. Some interracial couples, their multiracial children and others support a multiracial category on the U.S. Census. Proponents argued that multiracial individuals experience a unique type of discrimination that warrants treating them as a separate racial category. This article concedes that multiracial individuals should enjoy the freedom to self-identify as they wish, and like others, be protected by anti-discrimination law. It concludes, however, that current arguments …

Eyes Wide Open: What Social Science Can Tell Us About The Supreme Court's Use Of Social Science, Jonathan Feingold, Evelyn Carter

Faculty Scholarship

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rendered statistical evidence of racial disparities doctrinally irrelevant to a criminal defendant’s equal protection claim. Fifteen years later in Grutter v. Bollinger, Chief Justice Rehnquist—part of the McCleskey majority—invoked admissions data to support his conclusion that the University of Michigan Law School had unconstitutionally discriminated against White applicants. This facially inconsistent treatment of statistical data invites the following inquiry: Why do judges (including Supreme Court Justices) rely on social science in some cases, yet reject it in others? We suggest that one answer lies at the intersection of Critical Race Theory and empirical …

Buck V. Davis: Anti-Discriminatory Principles In Habeas Corpus Cases, Daniella Rubin

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Finality Of A Conviction: A Noncitizen's Right To Procedural Due Process, Daniela Mondragon

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Undocumented Citizens Of The United States: The Repercussions Of Denying Birth Certificates, Anna L. Lichtenberger

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming