Law and Race Commons^™

Desegregating The Adoptive Family: In Support Of The Adoption Antidiscrimination Act Of 1955, 30 J. Marshall L. Rev. 593 (1997), Rebecca Varan

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proposition 209, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I have a proposition for you. It's called Proposition 209. All you have to do is stop discriminating in favor of women and racial minorities, and your perpetual problems of race and gender discrimination will finally disappear. If this Proposition sounds too good to be true ... well, you know how the saying goes. In law, as in life, the seductiveness of a proposition owes as much to its disregard of established norms as to its underlying content. Eliminate the affront to social convention, and a proposition promises about as much excitement as a routine liaison with one's spouse. But …

Regulatory Sins Versus Market Legacies: A Short Reply To Mr. Leech, 29 J. Marshall L. Rev. 617 (1996), Richard A. Epstein

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Historical Perspectives On Fair Housing, 29 J. Marshall L. Rev. 315 (1996), Julian Bond

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legalizing Employment Discrimination: A Foolish And Dangerous Policy, 29 J. Marshall L. Rev. 587 (1996), Michael J. Leech

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Title Vi A Magic Bullet? Environmental Racism In The Context Of Political-Economic Processes And Imperatives, Steven A. Light, Kathryn R.L. Rand

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines avenues of redress and pollution prevention for impoverished people of color that flow from Title VI litigation strategies within the larger context of the environmental justice movement. Environmental justice issues can serve as tools with which to question status quo distributive policymaking processes and outcomes. Specifically, this Article concerns itself with practical routes toward increasing distributive justice and democratic efficacy.

Stepping Into The Projects: Lawmaking, Storytelling, And Practicing The Politics Of Identification, Lisa A. Crooms

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In her article, "The Black Community," Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification, Professor Regina Austin proposes a paradigm to move the Black community beyond a "manifestation of a nostalgic longing for a time when blacks were clearly distinguishable from whites and concern about the welfare of the poor was more natural than our hairdos.” Austin's politics of identification provides the conceptual framework through which the Black community can reconstitute itself in accordance with its own principles, which may or may not be those embraced by the mainstream. This article considers Professor Regina Austin’s politics of identification as practiced by …

No Time For Trumpets: Title Vii, Equality, And The Fin De Sièchle, D. Marvin Jones

Michigan Law Review

My essay seeks to examine the internal architecture of the discursive barrier - the wall - that the Supreme Court has built within the doctrinal framework of Title VII and concomitantly within the discourse of equality. To understand how the Court has erected this discursive wall, we must begin with history. Equality, while historically a vehicle for national identity and contemporaneously for modernist conceptions of justice, is synchronically and diachronically indeterminate. Equality is a deeply sedimented concept with not one objective meaning but successive levels of meaning built up over time. Each of those historic understandings is itself a unity …

Eliminating The Labyrinth: A Proposal To Simplify Federal Mortgage Lending Discrimination Laws, Stephen M. Dane

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The object of this Article is to demonstrate that the statutory and regulatory framework established by the federal government in its efforts to fight mortgage-lending discrimination is an extremely complicated labyrinth of dead ends, false passages, and elusive goals. Instead of addressing the mortgage-lending discrimination problem directly and comprehensively, Congress has taken a piecemeal and incomplete approach that generally has failed to bring the mortgage-lending industry into equal access compliance.

After pointing out the problems and deficiencies in the current statutory and regulatory scheme, this Article suggests a bold, comprehensive solution to the problem that, if implemented effectively, should ensure …

An Imperfect Remedy For Imperfect Violence: The Construction Of Civil Rights In The Violence Against Women Act, David Frazee

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) could be the most significant addition to federal civil rights laws in the last century. While potentially revolutionary, the VAWA's civil rights remedy forges two problematic legal concepts-traditional civil rights jurisprudence and "perfect" violence-into a super-remedy that risks combining the worst aspects of each. Those who utilize and interpret the Act can avoid this outcome by situating individual violent acts in the broader social and historical context of gender-motivated violence.

Name-Calling And The Clear Error Rule, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Triumph Of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act And The Theory Of Black Electoral Success, Lani Guinier

Michigan Law Review

In this article, my goal is to organize the divergent themes of black electoral success strategy within one conceptual framework in order to give the themes more cogency and attention. Having exposed the existence of a coherent theory, I then argue that the theory posits many of the correct goals but fails to provide a realistic mechanism for achieving them. The article proceeds in three Parts. In Part I, I develop the ideological and statutory roots of black electoral success theory. In Part II, I analyze the inadequacies of current voting rights litigation and its failure to realize the statute's …

Voting Rights Act Section 2: Racially Polarized Voting And The Minority Community's Representative Of Choice, Evelyn Elayne Shockley

Michigan Law Review

A much needed congressional effort to give substance to African-American suffrage resulted in the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the Act). Although the fifteenth amendment gave African-American men the right to vote in 1870, almost a hundred years later they were still largely unable to exercise the right. This condition did not result from apathy on the part of African-American voters, but rather from their inability to overcome barriers set up by white racists. Practices whites instituted, such as "[l]iteracy and 'understanding' tests, poll taxes, the white primary, intimidation, [and] violence," prevented African-Americans from realizing their constitutional …

Finding A "Manifest Imbalance": The Case For A Unified Statistical Test For Voluntary Affirmative Action Under Title Vii, David D. Meyer

Michigan Law Review

This Note analyzes the "manifest imbalance" standard developed in Weber and Johnson and the various approaches the lower courts have taken in trying to apply the test. Part I examines the Weber and Johnson opinions in some detail, and argues that the Court intended to permit affirmative action aimed at remedying the evident effects of past discrimination, regardless of whether the employer or society at large is to blame. Section I.A describes the diverging constitutional and statutory standards for evaluating voluntary affirmative action programs, and the policies behind the divergence. Sections I.B and I.C take a closer look at the …

Legislative Inaction And The Patterson Case, Earl M. Maltz

Michigan Law Review

In its October 1988 issue,1 the Michigan Law Review published a symposium on Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, a case in which the Supreme Court has requested reargument on the question of whether Runyon v. McCrary should be overruled or modified. Each of the three distinguished contributors to the symposium concludes that the Court should not overrule Runyon. In reaching this conclusion, Professor William N. Eskridge and Professor Daniel A. Farber rely heavily on the view that because Congress has recognized the existence of the Runyon doctrine and has refused to overrule the decision, the doctrine of stare decisis …

Statutory Interpretation, Legislative Inaction, And Civil Rights, Daniel A. Farber

Michigan Law Review

This month the Supreme Court will hear reargument in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union on the question of whether section 1981 prohibits discrimination by private parties. Professor Farber identifies three issues which lie at the heart of Patterson: Must statutes be construed to conform to the intent of the drafters? Does legislative inaction provide reliable guidance to interpreters of statutes? And should the nature of the claim at issue - here a claim of civil rights - influence the interpreters? On this last point, Professor Farber argues that public values must be relevant to statutory interpretation and that judges …

Interpreting Legislative Inaction, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

This month the Supreme Court will hear reargument in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union on the question of whether section 1981 prohibits discrimination by private parties. In this article, Professor Eskridge addresses the issue of how legislative inaction should affect statutory interpretation. He begins by constructing a detailed analysis of the Court's legislative inaction cases, arguing that the case law is much more coherent than previous analysts have suggested. Professor Eskridge then considers Justice Scalia's critique of that case law and provides support for Justice Scalia's views by distinguishing actual and presumed legislative intent, arguing that, based on a conception …

The Voting Rights Amendment Act Of 2014: A Constitutional Response To Shelby County, Gilda R. Daniels, William Yeomans, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Gabriel J. Chin, Samuel Bagenstos

All Faculty Scholarship

This Issue Brief from the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy begins by explaining the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County v. Holder, and the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 (VRAA). The remaining sections then explain the four specific ways the VRAA attempted to counter the holding from the Shelby County decision.

Narf North: Alaska Office Opens, Charles F. Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Black English And Equal Educational Opportunity, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

There is a danger that the King case will be misunderstood. The press has sometimes portrayed it as a vindication of the right to use black English in the classroom rather than of the educational opportunities of the children who speak it, and the King opinion itself is at times confusing. This Note clarifies the meaning of King and section 1703(f) by examining four critical steps in Judge Joiner's reasoning. Section I examines the court's holding that "language barriers" under section l 703(f) include impediments to equal educational opportunity arising from dialect differences, and concludes that although the court's argument …

The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments: Constitutional Authority For Federal Legislation Against Private Sex Discrimination, Emily Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action: Hypocritical Euphemism Or Noble Mandate?, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was adopted in an atmosphere of monumental naivete. Congress apparently believed that equal employment opportunity could be achieved simply by forbidding employers or unions to "discriminate" on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," and expressly disavowed any intention to require "preferential treatment." Perhaps animated by the Supreme Court's stirring desegregation decisions of the 1950's, the proponents of civil rights legislation made "color-blindness" the rallying cry of the hour. Today we know better. The dreary statistics, so familiar to anyone who works in this field, tell the story. …

Racial Preferences In Higher Education: Political Responsibility And The Judicial Role, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Controversy continues unabated over the question left unresolved by DeFunis v. Odegaard: whether in its admissions process a state law school may accord preferential treatment to certain racial and ethnic minorities. In the pages of two journals published by the University of Chicago, Professors John Hart Ely and Richard Posner have established diametrically opposed positions in the debate. Their contributions are of special interest because each undertakes to answer the question within the framework of a theory concerning the proper distribution of authority between the judiciary and the other institutions of government. Neither position, in my judgment, adequately confronts the …

The Equal Rights Amendment As An Instrument For Social Change, Lynn Andretta Fishel, Clarine Nardi Riddle

IUSTITIA

"The Equal Rights Amendment: Will it do so little, we don't need it -or so much, we shouldn't have it?"

The paradox stems from the arguments of the groups who oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). On one hand, they claim that the 14th Amendment and Title V1II provide all the tools women need, so the ERA won't be able to accomplish anything uniquely significant. On the other hand they contend, with even greater fervor, that the ERA will be so powerful it will destroy the fabric of society. The paradox is not altogether ludicrous, however, when it is recognized …

New York City School Decentralization, Barry D. Hovis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The 1969 New York Education Act grew out of a movement demanding decentralization of the New York City school system. The ultimate goals of this movement were to: (1) encourage community awareness and participation in the development of educational policy, and (2) create sufficient flexibility in the school system to enable administrators to resolve the diverse needs of the varying communities within the city. Support for the plan arose out of more than a decade of dissatisfaction with the centralized system by educators, school administrators, and parents. Supporters of decentralization had pointed in particular to the failure of the centralized …

Political Thickets And Crazy Quilts: Reapportionment And Equal Protection, Robert B. Mckay

Michigan Law Review

If asked to identify the two most important cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in the twentieth century, informed observers would be likely to name, in whichever order, Brown v. Board of Education and Baker v. Carr.

The Administraton's Anti-Literacy Test Bill: Wholly Constitutional But Wholly Inadequate, William W. Van Alstyne

Michigan Law Review

The nature of American national government has undergone a profound metamorphosis, moving from the near oligarchy which characterized the system as established in 1789 to the imperfectly representative government which it is today. At the time the Constitution was ratified, all restrictions then imposed by the several states on the right to vote for state and federal electors were preserved. These various limitations on the franchise restricted the active body politic to approximately four percent of the total population. Disfranchisement applied then, as now, to those under twenty-one, to those lacking sufficient residence in a given community, to the insane, …