Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Foreword: Somebody’S Watching Me: Surveillance And Privacy In An Age Of National Insecurity, Robert N. Strassfeld, Cheryl Ough

Faculty Publications

Forward to the Institute for Global Security Law and Policy at Case Western Reserve University symposium Somebody's Watching Me: Surveillance and Privacy in an Age of National Insecurity, Cleveland, OH, October 22-23, 2009

The Changing Shape Of Federal Civil Pretrial Practice: The Disparate Impact On Civil Rights And Employment Discrimination Cases, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Interview: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness, Richael Faithful

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Personal Essay: My Ordeal Of Regaining Voting Rights In Virginia, Frank Anderson

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

But I Love Him! Why The Sixth Circuit Erred In Thompson V. North American Stainless, Lp By Denying A Third Party Retaliation Claim Under Title Vii, Angela J. Schnell

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Religion-Based Claims For Impinging On Queer Citizenship, Bruce Macdougall, Donn Short

All Faculty Publications

Competing claims for legal protection based on religion and on sexual orientation have arisen fairly frequently in Canada in the past decade or so. The authors place such competitions into five categories based on the nature of who is making the claim and who is impacted, the site of the competition, and the extent to which the usual legal and constitutional norms applicable are affected. Three of the five categories identified involve a claim that a religion operate in some form in the public area so as to impinge on the usual protection of equality on the basis of sexual …

Reconciling Equal Protection And Federal Indian Law, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this essay for a festschrift in celebration of Philip Frickey and his work, I show how equal protection and federal Indian law can be reconciled without succumbing to what Professor Frickey has called the seduction of artificial coherence. Federal Indian policies increasingly face arguments that, in providing special treatment for individuals and groups defined in part by descent from indigenous tribes, they violate the requirement of equal protection before the law. I argue that such arguments ignore the congruence of federal Indian policy and equal protection as a matter of constitutional norms, constitutional history, and constitutional text. Federal Indian …

Situations, Frames, And Stereotypes: Cognitive Barriers On The Road To Nondiscrimination, Marybeth Herald

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

A study of the psychological literature can enhance legal theory by focusing attention on how the human brain perceives, distinguishes, categorizes, and ultimately makes decisions. The more that we learn about the brain's intricate operations, the more effective we can be at combating the types of gender biased decisions that influence our lives. In developing strategies to achieve equality, feminist, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex activists would be wise to learn from the psychological literature. This Article highlights a few examples illustrating how this knowledge might re-direct strategic choices for combating gender inequality.

Different Shades Of Bias: Skin Tone, Implicit Racial Bias, And Judgments Of Ambiguous Evidence, Justin D. Levinson, Danielle Young

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Show Me The Money The Applicability Of Contract Laws Ratification And Tenderback Doctrines To Title Vii Releases, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

War And Peace Between Title Vii's Disparate Impact Provision And The Equal Protection Clause: Battling For A Compelling Interest, Eang L. Ngov

Faculty Scholarship

“[T]he war between disparate impact and equal protection will be waged sooner or later, and it behooves us to begin thinking about how – and on what terms – to make peace between them.” This Article addresses Justice Scalia’s premonition in Ricci v. DeStefano by providing an analysis of how that war may be waged and whether peace can be made between Title VII’s disparate impact provision and the Equal Protection Clause. Ricci involved a challenge to the City of New Haven’s decision to void the test results of an examination required for promotion within the City’s fire department. The …

Drug Testing Students In California – Does It Violate The State Constitution?, Floralynn Einesman

Faculty Scholarship

The Department of Education has granted federal funds to California school districts for the purpose of initiating and maintaining drug-testing programs for students and volunteers involved in athletics and extracurricular activities, yet no California court has fully examined these programs to determine their validity under the California Constitution. Before any additional California schools adopt drug-testing programs, the legality of these programs should be examined under the California Constitution. This Article seeks to accomplish that task. Part II summarizes the United States Supreme Court decisions on student drug testing. Part III examines state law on student drug testing. Part IV focuses …

Significant Statistics: The Unwitting Policy Making Of Mathematically Ignorant Judges, Michael I. Meyerson, William Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article will explore several areas in which judges, hampered by their mathematical ignorance, have permitted numerical analysis to subvert the goals of our legal system. In Part II, I will examine the perversion of the presumption of innocence in paternity cases, where courts make the counter-factual assumption that regardless of the evidence, prior to DNA testing, a suspect has a 50/50 chance of being the father. In Part III, I will explore the unnecessary injection of race into trials involving the statistics of DNA matching, even when race is entirely irrelevant to the particular case. Next, in Part IV, …

After Iqbal, Joseph Seiner

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Slavery Jurisprudence On The Supreme Court Of North Carolina, 1828-1858: William Gaston And Thomas Ruffin, Timothy C. Meyer

Campbell Law Review

In the years preceding the Civil War, two North Carolina Supreme Court Justices, Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin and Associate Justice William Gaston, offered starkly different legal opinions on issues relating to slavery. Despite broad similarities in their backgrounds and their agreement on many other legal and judicial issues, Ruffin and Gaston approached slavery from sharply contrasting perspectives. Both men used their positions on the bench to influence the treatment and legal status of slaves. While Ruffin vigorously defended the peculiar institution and took the concept of chattel to a logical extreme, Gaston denounced many of its dehumanizing elements. In fact, …

Taxing Civil Rights Gains, Anthony C. Infanti

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article is divided into four parts. In Part I, the nature of the levy that the DOMAs impose on same-sex couples is explained. In Part II, how this levy can be classified as a "tax" is explained. In Part III, the federal- and state-level ramifications of classifying the levy that the DOMAs impose as a "tax" are discussed. Finally, brief concluding remarks are provided that discuss how this Article might pave the way for making similar arguments with respect to other nontraditional families and, concomitantly, how it demonstrates the transformative potential of same-sex marriage.

Past As Prologue: Old And New Feminisms, Martha Chamallas

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Each "stage" of feminist legal theory-and each brand or strand of feminism- stays alive and is never completely replaced by newer approaches. When I first attempted to synthesize the field of Feminist Legal Theory for a treatise I was writing at the end of the twentieth century, I thought it would be useful to think chronologically and to analyze the major developments of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I crudely divided feminist legal theory into three stages roughly corresponding to the preceding decades: the equality stage of the 1970s, the difference stage of the 1980s, and the diversity stage of …

Iqbal, Procedural Mismatches, And Civil Rights Litigation, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Understanding the twin pleading cases of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal from the vantage point of only a few months (or even years) requires as much prediction as explanation. Early confusion is a product of the long-heralded link between substance and procedure. What we are seeing now may be less about Court-imposed changes to procedure as about changes to substantive law and a "mismatch " between new substance and the old procedure of the Federal Rules. Much of the current business of federal courts involves constitutional litigation under 42 U.S. C. §S 1983 and Bivens, …

Outsourcing Democracy: Redefining The Public Private Partnership In Election Administration, Gilda R. Daniels

All Faculty Scholarship

“We are left with a system in which almost every state still outsources its elections to what are actually private organizations.”

Federal, state and local governments are deeply indebted to private organizations, political parties, candidates, and private individuals to assist it, inter alia, in registering voters, getting citizens to the ballot box through get out the vote campaigns (GOTV), assisting limited English proficient (LEP) citizens, and monitoring Election Day activities. In a recent Supreme Court case, Crawford v. Marion County, Justice Souter recognized that voting legislation has “two competing interests,” the fundamental right to vote and the need for governmental …

“Equal Citizenship Stature”: Justice Ginsburg’S Constitutional Vision, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Siegel examines the nature and function of constitutional visions in the American constitutional order. He argues that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg possesses such a vision and that her vision is defined by her oft-stated commitment to “full human stature,” to “equal citizenship stature.” He then defends Justice Ginsburg’s characteristically incremental and moderate approach to realizing her vision. He does so in part by establishing that President Barack Obama articulated a similar vision and approach in his Philadelphia speech on American race relations and illustrated its capacity to succeed during the 2008 presidential election.