Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Defusing Implicit Bias, Jonathan Feingold, Karen Lorang

Faculty Scholarship

The February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin has slowly reignited the national conversation about race and violence. Despite the sheer volume of debate arising from this tragedy, insufficient attention has been paid to the potentially deadly mix of guns and implicit bias. Evidence of implicit bias, and its power to alter real-world behavior, is stronger now than ever. A growing body of research on “shooter bias” reveals that, as a result of implicit bias, White and Black Americans are more likely to shoot unarmed Black men than unarmed White men. The problem has been diagnosed. What remains to be determined …

Work-Family Conflict And The Pipeline To Power: Lessons From European Gender Quotas, Julie C. Suk

Articles

The article examines the persistent gender disparities at the top of the legal profession, attributing them to work-family conflict and the disproportionate impact of caregiving responsibilities on women. It explores European gender quotas as a potential solution, arguing that such measures address the legitimacy and effectiveness of institutions by ensuring gender parity in leadership positions. While acknowledging the challenges in implementing quotas in the U.S., the analysis suggests that European approaches offer valuable insights for addressing the "leaky pipeline" and advancing gender equality in the legal profession.

This Is A Time For Hope And Change, Kevin D. Brown

Indiana Law Journal

Labor and Employment Law Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change? Symposium held November 12-13, 2010, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana

The North Carolina Racial Justice Act: An Essay On Substantive And Procedural Fairness In Death Penalty Litigation, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Slavery In The United States: Persons Or Property?, Paul Finkelman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democrats At Doj: Why Partisan Use Of The Voting Rights Act Might Not Be So Bad After All, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

In notable ways, the ongoing dispute over redistricting in Texas offers a mirror image to one of the major redistricting battles of the last decade, only with Democratic and Republican roles reversed. In both Texas v. United States and Georgia v. Ashcroft, a state attorney general (AG) decided he would not ask the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to approve new redistricting plans enacted in his state. In both cases, the state AGs were well aware that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) required them to obtain federal approval, known as preclearance, before changing any aspect of their state's election …

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …

Naim V. Naim, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

Part of a law review symposium on the worst Supreme Court cases, this essay nominates Naim v. Naim, in which the Court declined to review a Virginia antimiscegenation law, postponing action in this area for over a dozen years. This article argues that the Court's reluctance to enter this arena was unfortunate, short-sighted, and cruel; and that we might be a different nation if the Supreme Court had been less concerned about appearances and more about doing the right thing in 1955.

Diversity And The Virtual Workplace: Performance Identity And Shifting Boundaries Of Workplace Engagement, Natasha T. Martin

Faculty Articles

This article explores the meaning of workplace discrimination where reality meets the imaginary world in virtual work settings. Using a more recent development in the realm of virtual work--workplace avatars--the article considers the impact on law of virtual performance identity by workers where appearances can be altered in virtual reality.

Current protected-class approaches to antidiscrimination law have not served as the antidote to workplace bias and exclusion. Thus, the article investigates whether avatar technology holds promise for facilitating greater inclusion of marginalized workers in the contemporary workplace. Does this mode of virtual work serve as a platform for diversity or …

Equality Beyond The Three-Part Test: Exploring And Explaining The Invisibility Of Title Ix’S Equal Treatment Requirement, Erin E. Buzuvis, Kristine E. Newhall

Faculty Scholarship

It is clear from the proliferation of cases and complaints challenging programmatic disparities in school and college athletic programs that Title IX’s goal of equal treatment has not been fully realized. As the scholarship addressing equal treatment in athletics has been minimal, this Article is an effort to add to this scholarship in order to provide a greater understanding of equal treatment provisions. It examines why many school officials administer athletic departments in apparent oblivion to Title IX’s equal treatment mandate.

The Article provides the history of Title IX’s equal treatment provisions and their enforcement at the high school and …

Judicial Formalism And The State Secrets Privilege, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

Congress has, in the last few years, toyed with the idea of attempting to rein in the executive’s increasing reliance on the state secrets privilege as a means of escaping the possibility of accountability. The Author examines one high-profile case, that of Binyam Mohamed and other plaintiffs claiming that they had been subject to extraordinary rendition, torture, and prolonged detention. The Mohamed litigation offers evidence of a disturbing trend of U.S. courts retreating to formalistic reasoning to extend unwarranted deference to the executive branch in security-related contexts. In this essay the Author limits her analysis to the recent jurisprudence surrounding …

Including Transgender Athletes In Sex-Segregated Sport, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

The Author focuses her chapter on the varying degrees of trans inclusive policies found across the sport spectrum. Presently, private and public policy addressing participation by transgender athletes can be described on a spectrum of least to most inclusive. The Author’s chapter describes and evaluates different ways in which athletic associations and sport organizers are trying to accommodate transgender athletes into single-sex athletic teams. It ends with recommendations for advocacy to promote the inclusion of transgender athletes across all sports.

Centering The Immigrant In The Inter/National Imagination (Part Iii): Aoki, Rawls, And Immigration, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

Fifteen years ago, Keith Aoki and Professor Robert Chang published "Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination" in an early LatCrit symposium. Fifteen years later Professor Chang uses the occasion of the current Symposium to revisit conversations with Keith about centering the immigrant in political theory, as he addresses the issue of immigration, the rights of immigrants, and what is to be our national self-conception. What follows is a sketch that shows how centering the immigrant exposes the inattention paid to the immigrant and the issue of immigration in social contract theory. It focuses on how the immigrant might be …

How Shall The Constitution Be Enforced? A Preview Of Minneci V. Pollard, John F. Preis

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Preis discusses Minneci v. Pollard, a case he argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of his client (Pollard), a federal prisoner who had brought a civil rights action for various forms of mistreatment in alleged violation of the Eighth Amendment. He outlines his and Pollard's contention that federal courts should enforce the civil rights of prisoners without regard to the availability of equivalent tort relief under state common law.

A New Era For Desegregation, Danielle R. Holley-Walker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Response: The Death Of The Bisexual Saboteur, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor Glazer offers us, in Sexual Reorientation, an appealing and intuitive way to deal with the difficulty of bisexual identity, an identity that has always fit uneasily and sometimes quite unhappily in the LGBT rights movement. If the principal problem of bisexuality is its very temporal changeability, its tendency to dissolve into heterosexuality or homosexuality depending on the gender of one's sexual partner, then Glazer's solution is elegant. She proposes that we bifurcate (so to speak) sexual orientation into two subcategories and acknowledge for everyone both a general and a specific orientation. General orientation "is the sex toward which …

Fisher V. Grutter, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is no reason for the Supreme Court to have granted certiorari in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Unless, of course, the Court plans to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger—the case on which the Texas affirmative action plan at issue in Fisher was based. If that is its plan, the Court can invalidate the Texas program on some narrow ground that masks the magnitude of what it is doing. Or it can explicitly overrule Grutter—a case that no longer commands majority support on a Supreme Court whose politics of affirmative action has now been refashioned by …

Whatever, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author cannot say that she disagrees with any of the analytical observations made by her co-contributors to this roundtable discussion of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. They all agree that the Supreme Court plans to use the case as an occasion to do something noteworthy to the constitutionality of affirmative action. And they all agree that the Court’s actions are likely to provide more comfort to opponents than to proponents of racial diversity. Their views diverge only with respect to doctrinal details about what the Court could or should do. But in translating the racial tensions …

De-Concentrating Poverty: De-Constructing A Theory And The Failure Of Hope, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the late 1980s, led by William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, scholars have been writing about the social problems caused by the concentration in residential communities of high levels of poverty. Even before Wilson’s book, government policy, which previously had resulted in racially and economically segregated communities, had begun to shift towards de-concentration. The consent decree in Hills v Gautreaux, and the HOPE VI and Moving to Opportunity Programs all pointed towards de-concentration of poverty. Commentators have suggested both benign and not-so-benign reasons for the policy shift.

There were a variety of quite hopeful goals promoted by …

Breaking The Cycle Of “Unequal Treatment” With Health Care Reform: Acknowledging And Addressing The Continuation Of Racial Bias, Ruqaiijah A. Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the Civil War access to health care in the United States has been racially unequal. This racially unequal access to health care remains even after the passage of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VI”) and the election of an African-American President. Both of these events held the promise of equality, yet the promise has never been fulfilled. Now, many hail the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (“ACA”) as the biggest governmental step in equalizing access to health care because it has the potential to increase minority access to health …