Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Supporting Inclusiveness At Seattle U. And In The Law, Mark Niles

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Teaching International Law: Lessons From Clinical Education: Introductory Remarks, Richard J. Wilson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Racializing Disability, Disabling Race: Policing Race And Mental Status, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

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 …

Outsiders Inside The Beltway: Latcrit Xiv - Critical Outsider Theory And Praxis In The Policymaking Of The New American Regime, Anthony E. Varona

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A substantive foreword to the symposium book for the Fourteenth Annual Latino/Latina Critical Legal Theory Scholarship Conference hosted by the American University Washington College of Law. The foreword includes information about the conference theme, its planning and execution, and includes excerpts from the presentations of a number of prominent plenary and keynote speakers, including Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Caroline Fredrickson (the executive director of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy), Robert Raben (the president of the Raben Group), Jarrett Barrios (the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), Prof. Jenny Rivera (professor of law and director …

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, …

Sidelined: Title Ix Retaliation Cases And Women's Leadership In College Athletics, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination against women seeking or serving in leadership positions in sport is worthy of analysis, not only for the sake of individual women who desire to self-actualize as a head coach or athletic administrator, but because the unique role of sport in society gives underrepresentation of women in leadership positions additional significance. Due to its high visibility and widespread appeal—its veritable iconic status—sport is a salient site of cultural production. That is, sport operates on a symbolic level, reflecting and transmitting shared cultural values. Among these values, sport helps define the attributes associated with leadership, and thus, derivatively, power. By …

The Cross-Dressing Case For Bathroom Equality, Jennifer Levi, Daniel Redman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new set of arguments for transgender equality based on a little-known series of cases in which courts declined to enforce cross-dressing laws against transgender defendants. As shown below, the arguments brought by the defenders of these laws closely mirror the arguments brought today in favor of bathroom discrimination. The Authors discuss both the bathroom and cross-dressing debates in historical context, draw out the underlying reasoning in the two sets of cases,and argue that the reasoning that supports bathroom discrimination is as flawed as the reasoning behind criminal cross-dressing laws. The analysis also suggests that, just as …

A Closer Look At Law: Human Rights As Multi-Level Sites Of Struggles Over Multi-Dimensional Equality, Susanne Baer

Articles

In many societies, deep conflicts arise around religious matters, and around equality. Often, religious collectives demand the right to self-determination of issues considered - by them - to be their own, and these demands collide with individual rights to, again, religious freedom. These are thus conflicts of religion v. religion. Then, collective religious freedom tends to become an obligation for all those who are defined as belonging to the collective, which carries the problem that mostly elites define its meaning and they silence dissent. Usually, such obligations are also unequal relating to gender, with different regimes for women and for …

Black And Brown Coalition Building During The Post-Racial Obama Era, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This essay explores how the past Civil Rights Movement and discrimination against persons of color, mainly Latinos and African Americans, can help to address current forms of discrimination in our country. In particular, since the election of the first African American President, who also has immigrant parents, many people have claimed that we have reached a “post-racial” America. In the new post-racial America, proponents claim that the pre-Civil Rights Movement racial caste system of the sixties has been eradicated. In this context, this essay seeks to explore whether there is any link between the past experiences of African Americans with …

Regulating The Use Of Genetic Information: Perspective From The U.S. Experience, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay comments on an empirical study documenting the policies, practices, and attitudes of Australian employers regarding the use of genetic information from the U.S. perspective. The U.S. Congress recently enacted the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), which, among other things, prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of genetic information and restricts employers’ access to their employees’ genetic information. Just as the Australian study found no evidence of systematic use of genetic testing or screening by employers, GINA was passed in the absence of any evidence of widespread employment discrimination on the basis of genetic characteristics. Although it …

Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N’Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adrienne D. Davis, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most of the legal scholarship on reparations for Blacks in America focuses on its legal or political viability. This literature has considered both procedural obstacles, such as statutes of limitations and sovereign immunity, as well as the substantive conception of a defensible cause of action. Indeed, Congressman John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, in 1989 and every Congressional session since, and there have been three law suits that have received national attention. This Essay takes a different approach, considering reparations as a social movement with a rich and under-explored history. As Robin Kelley explains, such an …

The Unsettling ‘Well-Settled’ Law Of Freedom Of Association, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article argues that the Supreme Court’s categories of expressive and intimate association first announced in its 1984 decision, Roberts v. United States Jaycees, are neither well-settled nor defensible. These indefensible categories matter deeply to groups that have sought to maintain an unpopular composition and message in the face of antidiscrimination laws. These groups have been denied associational protections. They have been forced to change their composition - and therefore their message. They no longer exist in the form they once held and desired to maintain.

The Roberts categories of intimate and expressive association are at least partly to blame. …

The Voting Rights Act’S Secret Weapon: Pocket Trigger Litigation And Dynamic Preclearance, Travis Crum

Scholarship@WashULaw

Following NAMUDNO, the search is on for a way to save section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This Note offers a solution through an examination of the VRA’s most obscure provision: section 3. Commonly called the bail-in mechanism or the pocket trigger, section 3 authorizes federal courts to place states and political subdivisions that have violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments under preclearance. This Note makes a two-part argument. First, the pocket trigger should be used to alleviate the NAMUDNO Court’s anxiety over the coverage formula’s differential treatment of the states. The Justice Department and civil rights groups …

Regulating Polygamy: Intimacy, Default Rules, And Bargaining For Equality, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most legal scholarship about polygamy has approached it in one of two ways. Some have framed it as a question of how far constitutional protection for religious freedom and privacy rights extends, including what we might think of as “intimacy liberty,” particularly in light of Lawrence v. Texas. Others have debated decriminalization, based on the contested effects of polygamy on matters ranging from women’s subordination to fraudulent behavior to democracy. This Essay shifts attention from the constitutionality and decriminalization debates to a new set of questions: whether and how polygamy might be effectively recognized and regulated, consistent with contemporary social …

Introduction To The Symposium: The Politics Of Identity After Identity Politics, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Essays in this volume seek to shed some light on the politics of identity after the 2008 Presidential election in which identity politics dominated. To explore how 2008 and its aftermath have shifted both academic and political debates, Professor Adrienne Davis invited scholars from a variety of disciplines who embrace diverse methodologies—political theory; cultural studies; history; and law. These authors explore identity politics as a field of academic inquiry; a cultural discourse; a legal claim; a negotiation of institutions and power; and a predicate for political alliances. Collectively, the Articles both develop new frameworks and intervene in old ones …

Three Snapshots Of Scholarly Engagement: Catharine Mackinnon’S Ethical Entrenchment, Transformative Politics, And Personal Commitment, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of Catharine MacKinnon's germinal works calls attention to the political effects of modifiers. So, I was intrigued by the modifier of the conference panel that sparked this essay, the "engaged" scholar. I was struck by the quite distinct connotations invoked by this modifier. Of course there is the use I believe was envisioned by the plenary organizers as characterizing Professor MacKinnon's stunning body of legal work: engaged as in connected to something, seriously paying attention to consequences, rigorous and sustained involvement with a subject. Yet there are other connotations of engaged that I think are also helpful in understanding …

Regulating Cyberharassment: Some Thoughts On Sexual Harassment 2.0, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Front Loading And Heavy Lifting: How Pre-Dismissal Discovery Can Address The Detrimental Effect Of Iqbal On Civil Rights Cases, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

Although the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are trans-substantive, they have a greater detrimental effect on certain substantive claims. In particular, the Supreme Court’s recent interpretation of Rule 8(a)(2)’s pleading requirement and Rule 12(b)(6)’s dismissal criteria - in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal - sets forth a plausibility pleading standard which makes it more difficult for potentially meritorious civil rights claims alleging intentional discrimination to survive dismissal. Such claims are more vulnerable to dismissal because: plaintiffs alleging intentional discrimination often plead facts consistent with both legal and illegal conduct; discriminatory intent is often difficult, if not impossible, …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court's long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision's implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de …