Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Getting Power Back: Court Restoration Of Executive Authority In Boston City Government (1985), Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article, originally published in 1985, is based partly on the author’s experience with the Boston school desegregation case, but goes beyond it. It chronicles some of the events that occurred when a state and a federal court attempted to disengage from active jurisdiction over two Boston public systems: the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Housing Authority. It makes three proposals, which, if enacted, would help to keep the courts out of day-to-day management of municipal operations. It also makes some generalizations about the court-agency interplay that are relevant to the post-remedial phase of institutional reform litigation. The author …

Behind The Numbers: Conditions Of Schooling In Boston (1981), Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article includes portions of a report on the structure, governance, operations, and effectiveness of the Boston School Committee that was commissioned by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau in 1980. The passages provide an overview of the mandate, background, and recommendations, examining how a set of prominent professionals and citizens viewed the problem facing school department governance, including its isolation and the longstanding credibility gap fueled by patronage politics. It also looks at continued tensions between “equality” and “quality,” which occupied the heart of court-ordered desegregation; rising demands on a system that lacked the capacity to serve a broad array …

Brief Of 42 Historians And The Fred T. Korematsu Center For Law And Equality As Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiffs-Appellees-Cross-Appellants, Fred T. Korematsu Center For Law And Equality, Counsel For Amici Curiae

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

Regents of the University of California, et al., v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, et al.

Sick And Tired Of Hearing About The Damn Bathrooms, Colin Pochie

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Gavin Grimm’s struggle to access restrooms which align with his gender identity brought the plight of transgender students to the fore of national consciousness. With it came scrutiny of the judiciary’s historical failure to understand transgender individuals’ place in the law. The trend in cases like G.G. ex rel. Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board and Whitaker ex rel. Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District No. 1 Board of Education is reliance on equality theory and the law of sex stereotyping. And yet sex-stereotyping law does not mesh soundly with equality theory. Equality theory eradicates gendered difference—but the law of …

Cuyahoga County Bail Task Force: Report And Recommendations, Jonathan Witmer-Rich, Jay Milano, Carmen Naso, Mary Jane Trapp

Law Faculty Reports and Comments

Introduction:

All Cuyahoga County courts should transition from a bail system based on bond schedules, which vary widely from one court to the next, to a centralized, consistent, and comprehensive system of pretrial services initiated immediately after arrest. For most minor offenses, the presumption should be release on personal recognizance. Money bail should not be used to simply detain defendants. Rather than relying on bond schedules, courts should assess each defendant’s risk of non-appearance and danger to the community using a uniform risk assessment tool. If money bail is considered, courts should evaluate each defendant’s risk of non-appearance and ability …

A Political Companion To W. E. B. Du Bois, Nick Bromell

Civil Rights

Literary scholars and historians have long considered W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) an extremely influential writer and a powerful cultural critic. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied for his profound insights on the politics of race and class in America. An activist as well as a scholar, Du Bois proclaimed, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to …

Teaching The Tough Stuff: The Opportunities And Challenges In Teaching Implicit Bias, Diversity And Inclusion To Supervising Attorneys, Kinda Abdus-Saboor, Gillian Dutton, Rachel Reeves, Marjorie Silver

Externships (X) Conferences

We entrust supervising attorneys with the critical responsibility of providing law students with a meaningful experiential learning experience. Supervising attorneys ultimately control the nature of work students receive, the delivery of feedback, and the work environment that the student inhabits. Thus, it is vital that we equip our supervising attorneys with the basic skills necessary to navigate student supervision effectively. Among those basic skills is the ability to traverse the cross-cultural complexities inherent in working with students whose cultural identities may differ from the supervising attorney. Equally important are the cross-cultural issues that may arise among students and the clients …

Dignity And Discrimination: Employment Civil Rights In The Workplace And In Courts, Laura Beth Nielsen, Ellen C. Berrey, Robert L. Nelson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Employment civil rights and the litigation associated with enforcing them are a complex interplay of public and private employers, regulatory agencies, and federal courts. When an employee loses a job or their position in an employing organization, the financial effects are very real. If the employee makes a claim of discriminatory treatment using the employer’s human resources complaint processes or with the EEOC or state equivalent, they often face workplace retaliation and even termination. Using interviews conducted with parties to employment civil rights lawsuits, this article argues that the regime of employment civil rights in the United States can be …

Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Maine Law Review

In 1997, Maine's Legislature passed “An Act to Protect Traditional Marriage and Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages” (Act). The summary attached to the bill states that the bill “prohibits persons of the same sex from contracting marriage.” The bill was the verbatim text of an initiative petition. Civil marriage in Maine and other states is regulated by state statute, and marriage regulation is generally considered to be within the state's police power. However, the state's power to regulate marriage is subject to constitutional limitations. I maintain that “heightened scrutiny” should be applied to the Act because the Act creates a gender-based classification, …

Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis

Maine Law Review

In this brief essay, I illustrate how Critical Race Feminist analysis could reconceptualize the human rights problems facing “Inter/national Black women” --in this case, Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. This focus on Jamaican American migrants is very personal as well as political; I was raised by Jamaican American women. However, I have begun to focus on such women in my research not only in a search for “home” but also because there are important lessons to be learned from those who are the least visible in the legal literature. I draw the framework for a …

Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn

Maine Law Review

Predicting the ways in which feminisms might develop in the next century is unfortunately well beyond my own capabilities. In the next decade or two, however, one thing I believe we might want to think about are the relationships between feminisms and global free market capitalisms. The question I am asking, simply stated, is the extent to which economic development (free-market global capitalism) advances, is neutral toward, or harms women. One traditional American way of viewing the global free market is to tout economic development as a panacea for the problems facing the world's poorest and most violated group, women. …

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act: Legitimating Discrimination Against Pregnant Women In The Workforce, Judith G. Greenberg

Maine Law Review

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) has been effective in making the most egregious and obvious forms of pregnancy discrimination illegal. Unfortunately, the PDA has also acted as a shield behind which employers can hide as they discriminate against their pregnant employees. The result is that the PDA permits discrimination based on the very sort of stereotyping that it was expected to eradicate. There are two dominant stereotypes of pregnant women. Both are inconsistent with the image of a good worker. One stereotype connects pregnant women with the home. In one form or another it says, “Pregnant women are/should be preoccupied …

The Right To Counsel In Mississippi: Evaluation Of Adult Felony Trial Level Indigent Defense Services, Sixth Amendment Center, The Defender Initiative

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

The Right to Counsel in Mississippi: Evaluation of Adult Felony Trial Level Indigent Defense Services

Born This Way: Transgender Student Access To School Bathrooms, Madison Shaner

University of Colorado Law Review Forum

No abstract provided.

Thinking Outside Of The Race Boxes: A Two-Pronged Approach To Further Diversity And Decrease Bias, Samia E. Mccall

Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Practical Look At Ending Homelessness, Aimee Majoue

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Korematsu Overruled? Far From It: The Supreme Court Reloads The Loaded Weapon, Lorraine Bannai

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Comment On U.S. Department Of Health And Human Services Rule, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

In medical facilities across the country, doctors whose conscience would require them to perform a sterilization on a patient who requests one, offer truthful information about accessing abortion services, or provide comprehensive LGBTQ+ health care are forbidden from doing so by their employer. The conscience of such medical providers is entirely ignored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) recently proposed rule that purports to “ensure that persons or entities” providing health care “are not subjected to certain practices or policies that violate conscience, coerce, or discriminate.” As explained in a comment submitted today by the Columbia …

Racial Justice And Federal Habeas Corpus As Postconviction Relief From State Convictions, Leroy Pernell

Mercer Law Review

It is the purpose of this Article not to simply document the influence of race on our criminal system and its role in the current racial crisis of overrepresentation of minorities in our prisons, but rather to focus on the future and importance of a key tool in the struggle for racial equity--federal habeas corpus as a postconviction remedy. By looking first at the racial context of several "landmark" criminal justice reform decisions, this Article considers how race serves as the root of the procedural due process reform that began in earnest during the Warren Court. This Article then notes …

Trapped In Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality, And Law, David Dante Troutt

Marquette Law Review

Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse, and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological, and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, this Article argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally sanctioned environments of isolated, segregated poverty. The sources of psychological trauma may be largely environmental, but the traumatic environments themselves are caused …