This Piece examines the deployment of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a mechanism for regulating campus conflict following the 2023 to 2024 campus protests and seeks to reset the discourse in light of the statute’s history, doctrine, and role in higher education. Title VI is an important tool for addressing identity-based harassment, epithets, and violence between students, but it is neither designed nor effective as a tool for negotiating...
Antidiscrimination
Are refusals to provide services for same-sex weddings anti-gay discrimination? The answer, the Supreme Court seems to say, is “no.” Last Term in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court held that the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause granted a web designer the right to refuse same-sex wedding services. In so doing, the Court also appeared to opine that the refusal involved no anti-gay discrimination.
Scholarship has yet to explore...
From mandating separate and unequal gravesites, to condoning mutilation after lynchings, to engaging in cover-ups after wrongful police shootings, governmental actors have often degraded dignity in death. This Article offers an account of the constitutional law of the dead and takes aim at a legal rule that purports to categorically exclude the dead from constitutional protection. The rule rests on two faulty premises. The first...
Affordable housing residency preferences give residents of a specific geographic “preference area” prioritized access to affordable housing units within that geographic area. Historically, majority-white municipalities have sometimes used affordable housing residency preferences to systematically exclude racial minorities who reside in surrounding communities. Courts have invalidated such residency preferences, usually on the grounds...
This contribution to the Constance Baker Motley Symposium examines the future of civil rights reform at a time in which longstanding limitations of the antidiscrimination law framework, as well as newer pressures such as the rise of economic populism, are placing stress on the traditional antidiscrimination project. This Essay explores the openings that nevertheless remain in public law for confronting persistent forms of exclusion and makes the...