Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …

Criminalization Of Immigration, Emily Ryo, Jennifer M. Chacón, Cecilia Menjívar

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a critical analysis of social scientific research from the past fifteen years on the criminalization of immigration in the United States. Our review reveals three central themes. First, although immigration law is considered federal civil law, immigration enforcement has become substantially intertwined with criminal law enforcement in ways that have broad-ranging and radiating effects on immigrant communities of color. Second, race plays an important bidirectional role in the increasing criminalization of immigration. Specifically, criminalizing immigration results in the racialization of certain immigrant groups as dangerous outsiders, and such racialization has the effect of sustaining and promoting the …

Right Not To Work: Unions And Title Vii, Seth Oranburg

FIU Law Review

This article explores how Title VII's mandate for religious accommodation conflicts with union seniority rights, as revealed in Groff v. DeJoy. It argues that labor unions often oppose Sabbath accommodations not out of hostility to religion, but to protect bargained-for entitlements. The piece highlights a growing legal tension: whether co-worker burdens count as “undue hardship” under Title VII—a question with major implications for religious liberty in unionized workplaces.

Foreword, Patricia B. Barnett

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

How Climate Change And Environmental Policies Affect Impoverished Communities, Nicole Skala

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

Climate change is a global problem that affects everyone, but not proportionately. Lower income communities face greater physical and economic impacts, and policies often fail to consider their needs. These communities struggle to adapt and recover from disasters due to limited resources, and they lack access to resilient housing. Major corporations like Exxon and Shell profit while their workers are underpaid for dangerous labor. Historically, regions like rural Appalachia have seen exploitation through industries like coal. People of Color (POC) communities experience environmental racism, suffering greater environmental harm due to systemic neglect. Increasing commodity costs can hurt lower income individuals, …

6. Mark: Sources And References, Matthew Lipman

Secondary School Curriculum

This sequential bibliography matches the 1980 edition of Mark page by page. It contains both sources—works that influenced Matthew Lipman in writing the novel—and references to philosophical works he and Ann Margaret Sharp recommend to explore the novels’ philosophical themes.

Judicial Economy In The Age Of Ai, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Individuals do not vindicate the majority of their legal claims because of access to justice barriers. This entrenched state of affairs is now facing a disruption. Lawyers and non-lawyers alike are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools to perform legal tasks tools that sharply reduce the costs of generating legal materials. There is finally hope that AI might allow many more to access justice.

Paradoxically, what we gain in access to justice we might lose in the delivery of justice. The problem is not that AI tools are ineffective. Indeed, they are even more effective than most realize affecting every stage …

Strengthening The Right To Accessible Web Sites For Consumers With Disabilities Through The Development Of A Clear Test For The Nexus Rule Under Title Iii Of The Americans With Disabilities Act, Jonathan Lazar

Loyola Consumer Law Review

Currently, most of the U.S. Federal disability rights laws expressly require accessible websites for people with disabilities, either in the statute or the regulation. There is one major exception: for websites of public accommodations under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the scope of accessibility coverage is determined by a combination of case law and agency interpretations, rather than expressly in the statute or regulations. To make it more complex, there is a three-way circuit split as to whether websites of public accommodations covered under Title III are required to have accessible websites. The predominant view in the …

Gender Discrimination In The Workplace: A Retrospective Analysis Of 'Young V. United Parcel Service, Inc., 575 U.S. 206 (2015)’ Through The Lens Of Feminist Jurisprudence, Christina Jackson

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

When Is Discrimination Harmful?, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Publications

In Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the Supreme Court held that Title VII does not require a plaintiff to establish material harm to prove employment discrimination. Instead, any action that is negative and affects a term, condition or privilege of employment is sufficient, if the employer took the action because of a protected trait.

At first glance, Muldrow appears to be a middling case focused on a technical aspect of discrimination law. This Article argues that Muldrow has the potential to be one of the most important modern discrimination cases. If taken to its natural conclusion it will …

Legal And Policy Responses To Sexual Harassment In Housing, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

The sexual harassment of low-income women by their housing providers is a clear national problem that has only recently become the focus of coordinated nationwide enforcement efforts by federal agencies, including the Department of Justice. While these developments are welcome, the problem requires proactive responses as well. This Essay examines data from a study of all of DOJ's sexual harassment in housing cases and uses this information to identify the most problematic types of housing providers and the most common forms of harassment. Specifically, harassment appears to occur most frequently in private rental housing and is perpetuated by managers (usually …

303 Creative, Exclusive Private Enforcement, And Blue-State Revenge, Howard M. Wasserman, Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes

Journal of Legislation

Red states have made exclusive private enforcement schemes targeting locally unpopular but constitutionally protected conduct a cornerstone of culture-war legal strategy. Laws such the Texas Heartbeat Act (“S.B. 8”) in 2021 and anti-“WOKE” laws forego public enforcement in favor of private enforcement; this forces targeted federal rights-holders to vindicate their rights by raising the law’s constitutional invalidity as a defense to liability rather than through pre-enforcement offensive litigation against the government or government officials responsible for enforcing the law. This threatens rights-holders with a wave of costly and burdensome litigation and liability.

Blue states and liberal scholars and advocates have …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

The Anti-Discriminatory Right To Travel, Noah Smith-Drelich

Indiana Law Journal

Travel rights and travel restrictions shape nearly every part of society, moderating where and how we go about our daily lives. Yet a central aspect of travel has gone largely unnoticed in the legal literature. Oppressive governments have routinely restricted free movement as a principal means of effectuating discrimination. And travel rights, as a result, have always had a strong anti-discriminatory valence. From the Magna Carta to Blackstone’s Commentaries to the Constitution itself, rights to travel have consistently emerged from struggles against discrimination.

This Article makes several independent but related contributions. First, the Constitution’s protections of travel have a strong …

Masthead

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Social Rights From Latin America, Christian Gonzalez Chacon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

International human rights courts and bodies have traditionally enforced social rights within constrained frameworks, such as “available resources” and “minimum provision,” often overlooking deeper structural inequalities and urgent global challenges. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift grounded in the capabilities framework, reconceptualizing rights to encompass sustainability, harmony, and human flourishing. Drawing on indigenous philosophies from Latin America, I propose strategies to strengthen enforcement mechanisms, including the establishment of specialized human rights courts, equitable taxation systems, and regenerative economic models. By aligning human rights with capabilities and ecological stewardship, this paper illustrates their potential to address poverty, inequality, and climate …

Ftc V. Amazon: A Turning Point For Antitrust Law?, Matthew Cole Conover

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The United States is experiencing crippling economic inequalities that harken back to the Gilded Age. For the first time, legal scholars have turned to antitrust law to reverse this alarming trend. These scholars, including current Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, are testing this ambitious theory in the E-commerce industry. E-commerce is a market largely dominated by one company: Amazon. With its dominance, Amazon lures small businesses into its third-party seller marketplace, where it controls those business’s prices and punishes those that resist. Lina Kahn’s FTC has formally launched its litigation campaign against Amazon, claiming that the company has violated …

Table Of Contents

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.