Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

The Blind Leading The Deaf: An Investigation Of The Inconsistent Accommodations The Justice System Provides To People Who Are Deaf, Elizabeth Pindilli

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Historically, and to this day, people with disabilities have not been considered capable of determining their own needs. Instead, the general population has taken it upon themselves to dictate what accommodations they shall receive. This becomes particularly problematic for the deaf community when interacting with the criminal justice system, where a lack of communication is synonymous with a lack of justice. In this situation, the state should defer to the individual’s understanding of their needs, or carry the burden of proving that another accommodation is equally effective.

Disaggregated Discrimination And The Rise Of Identity Politics, George Rutherglen

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Website Accommodations Test: Applying The Americans With Disabilities Act To Websites, Ashley Cheff

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

In 2017, 814 lawsuits were filed alleging discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) due to website inaccessibility, up from 262 in the previous year. Beginning in July 2010, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) considered issuing regulations under ADA Title III related to website accessibility. However, no changes have been made to date, leaving courts split over whether websites constitute places of public accommodation via the ADA. Dispositive to some jurisdictions’ holdings is whether a website has a nexus to a physical place, which may lend toward viewing the site as a public accommodation. Other jurisdictions provide that …

"The Tyranny Of The Majority" A Framework Proposal To Assess The Moral Justification Of Voter Identification Laws In The United States, Sally Jordan

Honors Theses

One of the most fundamental rights of democratic citizens is the right to vote. As a result, voters are entitled to equal opportunity to access the polls. Yet recently, states have begun instituting policies that impact individual access to polls, such as voter identification laws.

Since the 2013 dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, 35 states across the United States implemented voter identification laws varying in strictness and the forms of identification they accept. Numerous studies and articles have been written regarding the justification of these voter identification laws in conjunction with their disproportionate effects on certain minorities; however, many …

Locked Up And Locked Out: True Stories Of Individuals Who Experienced The Intersection Between Homelessness And The Criminal Justice System, Jean Johnson

Senior Honors Projects

JEAN JOHNSON (Criminology & Criminal Justice)

Locked Up and Locked Out: True Stories of the Interlocking Cycle of

Homelessness and the Criminal Justice System

Sponsor: Jill Doerner (Criminology & Criminal Justice, Sociology & Anthropology), Heather Johnson (Writing & Rhetoric)

Key locks work when a key made with teeth is placed into a cylinder with a series of pins and tumblers. If you don’t insert the right key one or more of the pins will remain in the way, preventing the key from turning and the lock will remain closed. According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, tens of …

Environmental Justice In Little Village: A Case For Reforming Chicago’S Zoning Law, Charles Isaacs

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Chicago’s Little Village community bears the heavy burden of environmental injustice and racism. The residents are mostly immigrants and people of color who live with low levels of income, limited access to healthcare, and disproportionate levels of dangerous air pollution. Before its retirement, Little Village’s Crawford coal-burning power plant was the lead source of air pollution, contributing to 41 deaths, 550 emergency room visits, and 2,800 asthma attacks per year. After the plant’s retirement, community members wanted a say on the future use of the lot, only to be closed out when a corporation, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, bought the lot …

Public Accommodations & Human Flourishing: Sexual Orientation & Religious Liberty: An Essay In Honor Of Greg Alexander, Joseph William Singer

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Greg Alexander's monumental contributions to our understanding of property and property law are unequaled. He is also a mensch and that comes through loud and clear in his work. His recent book, Property and Human Flourishing, develops a quasi-Aristotelian theory of property that focuses our attention on the ways property law protects plural incommensurable objective values that regulate social relationships in order to empower us to become the authors of our own lives. This Essay honors him and his contributions by applying his analysis to the fraught question of whether owners of public accommodations must serve the public without regard …

Re-Reading Anita Bernstein's The Common Law Inside The Female Body From The Bottom Of The Well: Analysis Of The Central Park Five, Border Drownings, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, And The Coronavirus, Nadia B. Ahmad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

North Carolina's H.B.2: A Case Study In Lgbtq Rights, Preemption, And The (Un)Democratic Process, Mark Dorosin

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

For Cause: Rethinking Racial Exclusion And The American Jury, Thomas Ward Frampton

Michigan Law Review

Peremptory strikes, and criticism of the permissive constitutional framework regulating them, have dominated the scholarship on race and the jury for the past several decades. But we have overlooked another important way in which the American jury reflects and reproduces racial hierarchies: massive racial disparities also pervade the use of challenges for cause. This Article examines challenges for cause and race in nearly 400 trials and, based on original archival research, presents a revisionist account of the Supreme Court’s three most recent Batson cases. It establishes that challenges for cause, no less than peremptory strikes, are an important—and unrecognized—vehicle of …

Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records because it …

Valuing Black Lives: A Case For Ending The Death Penalty, Alexis Hoag

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disaggregation & Diversity: A Case For Race Conscious Admissions, Connor Oniki

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Since its founding, people all over the world have looked towards

America as a land of opportunity. Immigrants viewed it as a place

for fresh starts, new beginnings, and equal chances. However, for

centuries, concrete and subtle barriers have slowed the opportunity

for progress for those who are not in the majority. Throughout America’s

beginnings, lawmakers legalized segregation and discrimination

throughout the country multiple times. The Chinese Exclusion

Act prevented Asian Americans from immigrating to the United

States to pursue opportunities. Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation

and ensured that though African Americans were no longer

enslaved, they did not …

A "Meaningful" Seat At The Table: Contemplating Our Ongoing Struggle To Access Democracy, James M. Binnall

SMU Law Review Forum

In recent years, felon-voter disenfranchisement has received considerable attention from academics, policymakers, and the media. In turn, a number of jurisdictions have eased record-based voter restriction statutes. And while those efforts represent a significant step toward full civic reintegration for those with a felony criminal history, they are far from comprehensive, as they regularly omit citizens with certain types of felony convictions and typically address only one form of civic marginalization. Focusing on recent reform in the area of civic restrictions, this Article suggests that incomplete civic restoration comes with significant consequences that ought to be considered during legislative negotiations. …

Erasing Race, Llezlie L. Green

SMU Law Review Forum

Low-wage workers frequently experience exploitation, including wage theft, at the intersection of their racial identities and their economic vulnerabilities. Scholars, however, rarely consider the role of wage and hour exploitation in broader racial subordination frameworks. This Essay considers the narratives that have informed the detachment of racial justice from the worker exploitation narrative and the distancing of economic justice from the civil rights narrative. It then contends that social movements, like the Fight for $15, can disrupt narrow understandings of low-wage worker exploitation and proffer more nuanced narratives that connect race, economic justice, and civil rights to a broader anti-subordination …

Immigration Challenges Of The Past Decade And Future Reforms, Fatma Marouf

SMU Law Review Forum

Over the past decade, immigrants have faced numerous challenges in the United States, including a dramatic increase in deportations, the expansion and privatization of immigration detention, major changes to the asylum system combined with drastic cutbacks in refugee admissions, and a new wave of racism and xenophobia. This Article discusses these challenges and explores possible ways to address them in 2020 and beyond.

Identity: Obstacles And Openings, Osamudia R. James

SMU Law Review Forum

Progress regarding equality and social identities has moved in a bipolar fashion: popular engagement with the concept of social identities has increased even as courts have signaled decreasing interest in engaging identity. Maintaining and deepening the liberatory potential of identity, particularly in legal and policymaking spheres, will require understanding trends in judicial hostility toward “identity politics,” the impact of status hierarchy even within minoritized identity groups, and the threat that white racial grievance poses to identitarian claims.

Four Pathways Of Undermining Board Of Trustees Of The University Of Alabama V. Garrett, Derek Warden

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

In Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, the Supreme Court held that Title I of the ADA did not validly abrogate state sovereign immunity; and as such, a plaintiff could not obtain damages against the states or sue the states directly for injunctive relief. Many courts and scholars have read Garrett as sounding the death knell for ADA Title I government employee plaintiffs. This article shows that such fears are misplaced. Indeed, this article offers four pathways around Garrett that show Title I and its requirements are very much alive and well. First, the article shows …

A Ticket To Jail: Do Minor Traffic Violations Result In Jail Time For Poor Arkansans?, Jessie Wallace Burchfield

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Litigating Citizenship, Cassandra B. Robertson, Irina D. Manta

Vanderbilt Law Review

By what standard of proof-—and by what procedures—-can the U.S. government challenge citizenship status? That question has taken on greater urgency in recent years. News reports discuss cases of individuals whose passports were suddenly denied, even after the government had previously recognized their citizenship for years or even decades. The government has also stepped up efforts to reevaluate the naturalization files of other citizens and has asked for funding to litigate more than a thousand denaturalization cases. Likewise, citizens have gotten swept up in immigration enforcement actions, and thousands of citizens have been erroneously detained or removed from the United …