Varying enforcement of school hair policies and other grooming regulations against students has contributed, at least in part, to disparate exclusion of Black students from classroom and extracurricular activities. The consequences arising out of exclusion from school activities can be severe, ranging from lower academic performance to early involvement with the criminal justice system. Generally, disputes around such policies have been settled...
Civil Rights
The Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence provides little guidance on a central component of the doctrine: the proper sources of “clearly established law.” As a result, lower courts often resort to a restrictive definition of clearly established law, requiring a controlling precedent in the jurisdiction where the violation took place. This formalist approach unmoors qualified immunity from its intended purpose: ensuring that...
Introduction Partisan gerrymandering has a lengthy history, as political parties in power have repeatedly sought to construct electoral districts in ways that disfavor the minority party and ensure majority-party dominance. While more recently it appears that Republicans have reaped more of the benefits of partisan gerrymandering, over the past fifty years, each major political party, […]
Batson v. Kentucky is widely regarded as a failure. In the thirty-plus years since it was decided by the Supreme Court, the doctrine has been subjected to unrelenting criticism for its inability to stop the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. The scholarly literature is nearly unanimous: Batson is broken. But this Article approaches Batson from a different perspective, focusing on Batson’s appellate...
County of Los Angeles v. Mendez, the Supreme Court’s recent decision rejecting shooting victims’ excessive force claims, has been written off as yet another case in which police violence has no civil rights consequences. The Court found that the deputies who shot Jennifer Garcia and Angel Mendez fifteen times used reasonable force because Mendez was holding a BB gun. But the deputies barged in on Garcia and Mendez while they were napping...
The rhetoric surrounding the benefits of local governments has changed: In response to many cities passing progressive local regulations, state and federal legislators have shifted from emphasizing local control to promoting broad state preemption statutes designed to reduce local power. Additionally, as a result of the work of national interest groups, much of this state-level legislation has become increasingly homogenized. Although not an exclusively...
Introduction Constance Baker Motley, the first female attorney of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), was dedicated to reimagining the nature and scope of civil rights protections in American jurisprudence. Motley’s legal career chronicles the ways in which litigation served to bring about revolutionary social changes in our society. Motley, a staunch believer in the […]
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...
Introduction In 1961, James Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi. Although he was eminently qualified, he was rejected. The University had never admitted a black student, and Meredith was black. Represented by Constance Baker Motley and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), Meredith brought suit in the United States District […]
This Essay examines how the Supreme Court has used conceptions of time and the passing of time to narrow the definition of racial discrimination and, ultimately, to constrain the very meaning of equal protection. The Essay challenges the common notion in equal protection that as time passes, discrimination and its harmful effects dissipate and eventually expire. Based largely on this notion, courts set artificial time horizons for identifying the...