Tribal Civil Judicial Jurisdiction Over Nonmembers: A Practical Guide For Judges,
2010
University of Colorado Law School
Tribal Civil Judicial Jurisdiction Over Nonmembers: A Practical Guide For Judges, Sarah Krakoff
Publications
This Article provides a summary of the law of tribal civil jurisdiction over persons who are not members of the governing tribe ("nonmembers'), followed by an analysis of trends in the lower courts. It was written to respond to a consensus view at the University of Colorado Law Review Symposium: "The Next Great Generation of American Indian Law Judges," in January 2010, that a concise, practical, yet in-depth treatment of this subject would be useful to the judiciary as well as practitioners. The Article traces the development of the Supreme Court's common law of tribal civil judicial jurisdiction from 1959 …
Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics,
2010
University of Colorado Law School
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 …
Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion,
2010
University of Colorado Law School
Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Publications
This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the "health exception" to abortion regulations to demonstrate why equality arguments are needed--namely because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences has developed. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom by requiring that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. As a result, equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social aspect of …
Shining A Light On Democracy's Dark Lagoon,
2010
University of Colorado Law School
Shining A Light On Democracy's Dark Lagoon, Helen Norton
Publications
Written for a symposium examining the Fourth Circuit’s jurisprudential tradition, this short essay explores the Fourth Circuit’s approach to the emerging government speech doctrine, under which the government’s own speech is exempt from free speech clause scrutiny. In developing this doctrine, the Supreme Court has been too quick to defer to public entities’ assertion that contested speech is their own; indeed, it has yet to deny the government’s claim to expression in the face of a competing private claim – at significant cost to the public’s ability to hold government politically accountable for its expressive choices. The Fourth Circuit, in …
Front Loading And Heavy Lifting: How Pre-Dismissal Discovery Can Address The Detrimental Effect Of Iqbal On Civil Rights Cases,
2010
University of Colorado Law School
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, …
A Popular Approach To Popular Constitutionalism: The First Amendment, Civic Education, And Constitutional Change,
2010
University of Richmond School of Law
A Popular Approach To Popular Constitutionalism: The First Amendment, Civic Education, And Constitutional Change, Thomas G. Donnelly
Law Faculty Publications
Popular constitutionalists fear that our constitutional culture is becoming less popular. At the same time, these scholars often ignore key popular sources of constitutional meaning. Their accounts focus, instead, on the elite conflicts that give rise to constitutional change, particularly the ongoing debates between elected officials, movement leaders, and the Supreme Court. Although these studies are essential to understanding the pathways for promoting non-Article V constitutional change, they are "popular" only in the sense that they focus on non-judicial actors and politically salient controversies. The constitutional life of the average citizen is generally ignored. If legal scholars are serious about …
The Causation Standard In Federal Employment Law: Gross V. Fbl Financial Services, Inc., And The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1991,
2010
Boston University School of Law
The Causation Standard In Federal Employment Law: Gross V. Fbl Financial Services, Inc., And The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1991, Michael C. Harper
Faculty Scholarship
This article analyzes and recommends a Congressional response to the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc.. The article places the Gross decision’s choice of a causation standard for disparate treatment causes of action in historical context by comparing that choice with that made by Congress for Title VII in § 107 of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and criticizes the Court’s activist refusal to follow its own Title VII precedent. Stressing the lower courts’ misinterpretation of § 107, both before and after the Court’s own interpretation of this section in 2003 in Desert Palace, …
In Defense Of Appearances: What Caperton V. Massey Should Have Said,
2010
Boston University School of Law
In Defense Of Appearances: What Caperton V. Massey Should Have Said, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
In June of 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the first time that an elected judge must recuse himself from a case that involves a major campaign contributor. In Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., a coal company had been hit with a $50 million jury verdict. While appealing this verdict, the company's CEO, Don Blankenship, spent $3 million to help a challenger, Brent Benjamin, who had no judicial experience, defeat the incumbent, West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. Blankenship funded political attack ads by a political organization (And for the Sake of the Kids) that …
