Housing Law Commons^™

The Agency Roots Of Disparate Impact, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The disparate impact strand of antidiscrimination law provides the possibility of challenging harmful employment, education, housing, and other public and private policies and practices without the often-difficult burden of proving intentional discrimination. And yet the disparate impact standard seems to be facing its own burdens. Rulings by the Supreme Court in recent years have shaken the disparate impact standard's footing. In Ricci v. De- Stefano, the Court rejected a frontal assault to the disparate impact standard under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but cast the standard as at odds with Title VII's true core – …

Guilty Of Homelessness: Evaluating The Criminalization Of Homelessness Through A Human Rights Framework, Cristina M. Semi

Departmental Honors Projects

Several international treaties and declarations affirm adequate housing as a fundamental human right. However, the United States, while a signatory to several of these agreements, does not recognize this right. Homelessness violates the right to housing. Moreover, homelessness often subjects individuals to additional rights violations. These additional violations often occur because governments criminalize homelessness.

Public order laws that criminalize basic life-sustaining behaviors, such as sitting, lying, and sleeping in public spaces, violate several constitutional rights when applied to unsheltered individuals experiencing homelessness. Devoid of any accommodation aside from the public streets, such individuals must necessarily perform the prohibited conduct in …

Service For Learning, Service For Life: Depaul's Vincentian Mission In Action

DePaul Magazine

Through the thousands of alumni and students who are putting their education to work in service to others through service learning, volunteerism, and social welfare careers, DePaul University's Vincentian mission is being realized. In addition, the university is creating research partnerships to help service organizations develop effective strategies to combat such stubborn problems as poverty and homelessness.

Three Proposals For Regulating The Distribution Of Home Equity, Ian Ayres, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently-released “qualified mortgage” rules effectively discourage predatory lending but miss an equally important source of systemic risk: low-equity clustering. Specific “volatility-inducing” mortgage terms, when present in a substantial cluster of mortgage contracts, exacerbate macroeconomic risk by increasing the chance that the housing and lending markets will have to absorb a wave of simultaneous defaults after a downturn in housing prices. This Article shows that these terms became prevalent in a substantial proportion of residential mortgages in the years leading up to the home mortgage crisis. In contrast, during the earlier “amortization era” (when mortgagors were …

Coasean Bargaining In Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

During my first weeks as a graduate student in economics, a professor described the Coase Theorem as “nearly a tautology:” Assume a world in which bargaining is costless. If there are gains from trade, the Theorem tells us, the parties will trade. The initial assignment of property rights will not affect the final allocation because the parties will bargain (costlessly) to an efficient outcome. “How can that be a theorem?,” I remember thinking at the time.