Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Mancession Or Momcession? Good Providers, A Bad Economy, And Gender Discrimination, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

Against this backdrop of precarious and disappearing work, two new elements became important: who was out of work, and how those still employed were navigating bad jobs. These questions laid the foundation for a flood of stories concerning unemployment and bad employment. Unsurprisingly, gender played a leading role in the debates. This article will discuss these two concerns--employment and workplace discrimination-as they intersect with gender and gender stereotypes.

Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, And The Afterlife Of Homophobia, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2011 marked an important turning-point in the geography and politics of sex: public sex, previously a domain dominated by the specter of a hypersexualized gay man, became the province of the irresponsible, foolish, and self-destructive heterosexual man, such as Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, homosexuals were busy domesticating their sexuality in the private domain of the family. Just as hetero-sex shamefully seeped out into the open, homo-sex disappeared from view into the dignified pickets of private kinship. In this essay I examine the panic that unfolded in connection with Representative Weiner’s tweets as a kind of afterlife of homophobia; …

The Curious Relationship Of Marriage And Freedom, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores why and how today’s marriage equality movement for same-sex couples might benefit from lessons learned by African Americans when they too were allowed to marry for the first time in the immediate post-Civil War era. Why has the right to marry, rather than say, employment rights, educational opportunity or political participation, emerged as the preeminent vehicle by and through which the freedom, equality and dignity of gay men and lesbians is being fought in the present moment. Why marriage? In what ways are the values, aspirations, and even identity of an oppressed community shaped when they are …

Making Willing Bodies: Manufacturing Consent Among Prisoners And Soldiers, Creating Human Subjects, Patriots, And Everyday Citizens, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In March 1944, doctors at the University of Chicago began infecting volunteer convicts at Stateville Prison with a virulent strand of malaria to test the effectiveness and side-effects of potent anti-malarial drugs. According to Dr. Alf Alving, the principal investigator, malaria "was the number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific" and "we were losing far more men to malaria than to enemy bullets." This refrain would rehearse one of the most productive ways of speaking about prisoner experimentation. The Stateville prisoners became human once again and regained their citizenship and political voice by sacrificing their bodies to the …

Hastening The Wheels Of Change: International Cold War Pressure And Civil Rights Reform During The Truman Presidency, Caley A. Robertson

Honors Theses

In the early Cold War arena, international pressure on the United States to live according to its ideological rhetoric enabled the Truman Administration to set a precedent for federal engagement in domestic civil rights reform. As the United States led the march to institutionalise human rights as the standard of moral legitimacy in the global arena, the country’s grisly record of racial oppression and violence invited foreign and domestic criticism alike. This paper intends to prove five discrete points. First: Cold War tensions brought questions of moral legitimacy to the forefront of the U.S. national agenda. Second: during the Truman …

Judicial Interference With Effective Assistance Of Counsel, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

A lawyer’s ineffective representation of a client may be attributable to a lawyer’s own personal failings. However, impairment of the right to effective assistance of counsel may also come from a trial judge’s conduct, and can takes many forms, and occur in varying circumstances. It is therefore difficult to formulate clear principles to cover all of the various situations in which a judge can undermine effective representation. The Borukhova and Mallayev case is only the most recent illustration of the way a ruling of a judge – forcing the lawyer to sum up his case without giving the lawyer adequate …

Unsex Cedaw? No! Super-Sex It!, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article reflects upon Darren Rosenblum's provocative piece Unsex CEDAW, or What's Wrong with Women's Rights. At the outset I should note that this critical analysis should not be misinterpreted. I do not quarrel with Professor Rosenblum's observations that inequality in law and life is much broader than sex inequalities. To the contrary, I am in full accord with him that discrimination along other categorical axes is also undesirable and sometimes as prevalent as sex inequality. Indeed, oftentimes such other discriminatory tendencies dovetail with those rooted in sex discrimination.

Where we diverge, however, is in his proposal that the …

Why Reparations To African Descendants In The United States Are Essential To Democracy, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Thoughts On The State Of Women Lawyers And Why Title Vii Has Not Worked For Them, Theresa M. Beiner

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay discusses why women lawyers have not been as successful in large firms in spite of graduating from law school in large numbers over the last twenty years. It begins by giving a snapshot of the state of women lawyers, including women lawyers of color. It includes stories and studies of women’s struggles at these firms. It also describes why Title VII has not worked to solve the problems associated with being a successful woman in a law firm. Finally, it suggests some potential solutions that may help women be more successful in these environments.

The Family Law Canon In A (Post?) Racial Era, Shani M. King

UF Law Faculty Publications

While the debate about a post-racial society rages, our justice system continues to operate in a way that is race-conscious. It seems as though most of the discussion about race and the justice system concerns criminal justice, juvenile justice, education, and immigration. But race consciousness also impacts family law. Nonetheless, the family law canon does not scrutinize race-based disparities in laws, procedures, and outcomes, and that omission feeds a mistaken notion of a race-blind or a post-racial society. One consequence of this omission is that it obscures race-based decision making by legislatures, judges, legal reform organizations, legal scholars, lawyers, and …

Sex Work By Law: Bedford's Impact On The Municipal Regulation Of Sex Work, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The recent Ontario trial decision in Bedford suggests three interrelated principles that municipal law makers should consider when formulating bylaws aimed at regulating sex work. These principles, if upheld on appeal, will inform the constitutionality of both current and prospective bylaws regulating sex work in Canadian cities.

In Bedford, Justice Himel concluded that the constitutionality of laws regulating the sex trade must be determined in a legal context which recognizes the violence faced by sex workers. She confirmed that laws that indirectly make sex work more dangerous and harmful must be consistent with those principles that our legal system, through …

Sex Work By Law: Bedford's Impact On The Municipal Regulation Of Sex Work, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The recent Ontario trial decision in Bedford suggests three interrelated principles that municipal law makers should consider when formulating bylaws aimed at regulating sex work. These principles, if upheld on appeal, will inform the constitutionality of both current and prospective bylaws regulating sex work in Canadian cities. In Bedford, Justice Himel concluded that the constitutionality of laws regulating the sex trade must be determined in a legal context which recognizes the violence faced by sex workers. She confirmed that laws that indirectly make sex work more dangerous and harmful must be consistent with those principles that our legal system, through …

Immigrant Education And The Promise Of Integrative Egalitarianism, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

Although not an equal protection case, Martinez v. Regents of the University of California challenges us to grapple with the Supreme Court’s post-Brown commitment to equal opportunity within the context of immigrant higher education. Sadly, Brown’s progeny from Bakke to Parents Involved reveals the cost of embracing a color-blind constitutionalism unmoored from a fundamental commitment to vigilantly combat subordination and dismantle unearned privilege. More optimistically, the Supreme Court’s gay rights jurisprudence developed in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas provides insights into how a conservative court can accurately distinguish irrational discrimination from democratic deliberation, a lesson that might help …

Iqbal Signals Bivens’ Peril: A Call For Congressional Action, Megan Gephart

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Note examines the propriety of a statutory replacement for the Bivens action. Part I of this Note outlines the history of implied causes of action generally, including the shifting attitude of the Court toward its power to fill gaps through the use of implied causes of action, as well as the Court’s attitude toward the Bivens action specifically. Part II examines the arguments for and against the adoption of a statutory replacement for Bivens in the context of the United States post-9/11. Part III contemplates a statutory replacement for Bivens, which would strike a balance between deterring rogue government …

School Districts As Weathermen: The School's Ability To Reasonably Forecast Substantial Disruption To The School Environment From Student's Online Speech, Samantha M. Levin

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Note concerns the issue of school officials punishing students for online speech and the precedential value of the Supreme Court's landmark school speech case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) in the internet era. Because off-campus, "intangible" internet speech does not easily fit into the Supreme Court's framework, the author proposes a new standard for internet school speech cases and analyzes how a new standard might be applied to the specific context of "parody profiles" created by students on social networking sites.

Dignifying Rights: A Comment On Jeremy Waldron’S Dignity, Rights, And Responsibilities, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities1 Jeremy Waldron offers a characteristically thoughtful and elegant account of rights, or as he calls it, responsibility-rights. As Waldron rightfully acknowledges, rights understood as a form of responsibility are not meant to capture every species of rights, but to provide us with a new analytic resource for better understanding a particular subset of rights that curiously entail a form of responsibility on the part of the rights holder. The link between rights and responsibility, Waldron argues, is built upon a strong foundational commitment to human dignity. The most compelling contribution of Waldron's paper is his …

Stimulus And Civil Rights, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Federal spending has the capacity to perpetuate racial inequality, not simply through explicit exclusion, but through choices made in the legislative and institutional design of spending programs. Drawing on the lessons of New Deal and postwar social programs, this Essay offers an account of the specificfeatures offederal spending that give it salience in structuring racial arrangements. Federal spending programs, this Essay argues, are relevant in structuring racial inequality due to their massive scale, their creation of new programmatic and spending infrastructures, and the choices made in these programs as to whether to impose explicit inclusionary norms on states and localities. …

Using Human Rights Mechanisms Of The United Nations To Advance Economic Justice, Risa E. Kaufman, Joann Kamuf Ward

Human Rights Institute

As a growing number of social justice lawyers employ human rights standards and strategies to advocate for their clients. human rights mechanisms of the United Nations have become a promising way for lawyers to work toward economic justice. These mechanisms are not only an alternative to traditional litigation and administrative advocacy but also unique opportunities for collaboration among U.S. civil society groups and engagement with policymakers. Because they are grounded in international human 1ights norms. human rights mechanisms have the potential to deal with social and economic issues beyond the reach of traditional domestic protections. By strategically using these mechanisms. …

Gender Justice In The Americas: A Transnational Dialogue On Violence, Sexuality, Reproduction, And Human Rights University, Human Rights Clinic, Centro De Derechos Humanos De La Universidad Diego Portales, Center For Reproductive Rights

Human Rights Institute

On February 23-25, 2011, over 100 women's rights, gender, and sexuality advocates and scholars from twenty countries in North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean gathered at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida to attend a groundbreaking convening, Gender Justice in the Americas: A Transnational Dialogue on Violence, Sexuality, Reproduction, and Human Rights. The Convening, hosted by the University of Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic, University of Diego Portales Human Rights Center, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, brought together key players in the region to exchange views and …

Serving 99 To 149 Years For Wearing Butt-Huggers And Resisting To Subscribe To Cable Tv: The Presence Of The Law In Chicano Theatre, Maria Patrice Amon

Studio for Law and Culture

In the canon of Chicano theatre, the law holds a prominent role; the relationship between Chicanos and the law is a theme explored widely across Chicano theatre in both comedy and tragedy. This paper discusses how the comedy of Chicano theatre conceals the insidiousness of unchallenged racial stereotypes and acts as a safety valve to release the pressures of an abjected community. Yet, where comedy conceals the structure of abjection, drama critically challenges the status quo Chicano drama is capable of questioning the authority of the dominant hegemony over the cultures it oppresses. Beginning from a framing of the law …