Civil Rights Stories
Authors:
Gilles, Myriam E. / Goluboff, Risa L.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2007
21 chapters
have results for law stories
Introduction 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Civil Rights Stories
- The relationships between lawyers and clients in these stories is not always so straightforward, however. Many of the cases cannot be traced to a single lawyer, organization, or client. The stories in this volume reveal the broad and complicated coalitions behind many of these cases. details the efforts of an alliance made up of labor, civil, and women’s rights groups working on multiple fronts to achieve greater workplace equality and safety. Serena Mayeri’s story of similarly describes the creation of the Pro–Choice Network—a partnership of medical providers and lawyers from NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, the ACLU, and other groups. William Eskridge’s story on provides insight into the strategies of the ACLU and Lambda, working together to defeat sodomy laws. Because of the diversity of views, interests, and goals at stake in much civil rights litigation, however, the stories reflect conflict within litigation strategies and within social movements as often as they...
- The stories also shine a light on the often intrepid lawyers who took on these cases. For law students in particular, the lawyers’ stories highlight the dedication and imagination required to use the law as a tool for social change. Some of these lawyers are charter members of the civil rights pantheon—Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Charles Morgan, Jr. But most are not well known. Arthur Gochman, a local San Antonio lawyer, took the case of Hispanic parents challenging the Texas school financing system in without any prior experience in civil rights litigation. Perhaps less paradigmatic were litigation efforts by public agencies, such as the lawyers in the Departments of Education and Justice who brought a case against the Virginia Military Institute to force the school to admit women, as described in Cornelia Pillard’s story of
- This is a big book. In it, we have taken a broad approach to the idea of “civil rights” in the law. So broad, in fact that the question arises: what makes a case a “civil rights” case? Or, elementally, what are civil rights? Some of the stories describe cases that most Americans would think of as classic civil rights cases—cases concerning the rights of racial minorities, women, the poor, and people with disabilities to the equal protection of the laws. Other stories explore issues that go beyond the archetypal, focusing on cases that raise issues of privacy and bodily integrity. Indeed, the fact that “civil rights” can and does encompass so much makes this legal category all the more contested. We have accordingly included, perhaps most provocatively, cases where both parties to a conflict view themselves as heirs to the civil rights mantle.
- Taken together, the stories in this volume tend to undercut the dominant myths surrounding civil rights law. In these stories, we see that the relationship between legal pronouncements and social and political realities—between winning or losing a case and creating social change—is rarely direct. Indeed, many of the great civil rights “victories” may contain less than meets the eye. Risa Goluboff, for example, tacks sharply from the traditional civil rights narrative and retells
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Chapter 8: The Crime Against Nature on Trial, Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986 56 results (showing 5 best matches)
- John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence, Yale Law School. I am indebted to the family of Michael Hardwick for their helpful cooperation in the construction of this chapter. An expanded account of the story of Bowers v. Hardwick will be a chapter in my forthcoming book, tentatively entitled “Dishonorable Passions”: A History of the Crime Against Nature in America (Viking, forthcoming 2008).
- majority misunderstood almost everything—moral philosophy as well as the legal history of the crime against nature—does not mean that the Georgia sodomy law was unconstitutional as applied to consenting activities within the home. But Lewis Powell and his clerk Bill Stuntz thought there was a case to be made. I do, too. The core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment is to preserve the rule of law in a democracy. Section 1 of the Amendment advanced three principles essential to such a rule of law: legality, liberty, and equality. The Georgia sodomy law, as enforced by Keith Torick and defended by Michael Bowers, was inconsistent with these principles and therefore with the Fourteenth Amendment’s core purpose.
- Meanwhile, Hardwick’s arrest had generated considerable discussion among gay rights lawyers elsewhere. Founded in 1972, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund was the oldest gay rights organization in the country and had cooperated with the ACLU in challenging consensual sodomy laws during the 1970s. When Abby Rubenfeld became Lambda’s Legal Director in January 1983, she was determined to finish the job her Lambda predecessors (Bill Thom, Cary Boggan, Margot Karle, and Roslyn Richter) had started—the full-on and coordinated legal assault against the states’ sodomy laws. Soon after the federal district court dismissed Hardwick’s complaint in April 1983, Rubenfeld hosted a meeting of gay rights lawyers. There was a consensus at that meeting that sodomy law reform should be a priority for their social movement, because “sodomy laws are the bedrock of legal discrimination against gay men and lesbians.”
- (1965), which invalidated a state law barring the use of contraceptives. Although (1973) struck down a law denying contraceptives only to unmarried persons. “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the (1969), the Court had invalidated the arrest of a man viewing illegal pornography within his own home; resting upon the First and Fourth Amendments as well as the privacy right, the Court warned the state against intrusions into the home. In a Lambda amicus brief supporting Hardwick, Rubenfeld made an anti-discrimination argument: to the extent the Georgia sodomy law was applied solely against gay people, it denied gays the equal protection of the laws.
- Surprisingly, another vote to take Bowers’s appeal came the next day, from pro-privacy Justice William Brennan. Thinking strategically, Brennan concluded that the odds of striking down consensual sodomy laws would not improve with time. President Reagan had just won a landslide re-election, and new conservatives would surely join the Court in Reagan’s second term. Believing that there was a chance of striking down such laws with the current membership, Brennan voted for immediate review in a second Conference on October 18. Sensing Brennan’s strategy, Justice Thurgood Marshall also changed his vote, making four (two conservatives and two liberals), with the Chief a probable fifth. On October 23, after law clerks and colleagues had persuaded Brennan that it was unlikely he could secure five votes to strike down the Georgia sodomy law on privacy grounds, he withdrew his vote for review. But the next day, Burger then changed his “join three” to a firm vote to grant. Four was the magic...
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Chapter 10: International Union, U.A.W. v. Johnson Controls: The History of Litigation Alliances and Mobilization to Challenge Fetal Protection Policies 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- concrete holding and immediate impact have, in fact, made it more a darling of law review articles than the courts. A Westlaw search reveals that only 207 courts, compared with 900 law review articles, have cited to . Despite this outpouring of scholarship, the academic literature has paid little attention to the unique nationwide coalition of labor, workplace health and safety advocates, and women’s rights lawyers that formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to collectively oppose fetal protection policies. How this group came together, and ultimately dissolved, is its own significant story that speaks volumes about legal mobilization and the sustainability of reform efforts.
- story poses questions that have taken on much greater urgency in the current legal and political environment. What does this litigation-centered orientation mean for how problems are defined and addressed? How does it determine who participates in and influences the course of the advocacy and change process? Does a national law reform campaign have the capacity to sustain public attention to problems not addressed by the legal claim? Are there ways to connect litigation to a broader mobilization strategy that keeps problems’ multiple dimensions in view and sustains crucial alliances when litigation ends?
- III. Johnson Controls: The National Story
- Workers filed complaints with their union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), and the union went public with the story of the sterilization in late 1978. “No More Willow Islands” became a “rallying cry” of unions and interest groups.
- story provides some insight into the challenges and opportunities for making this transition.
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Chapter 3: Police, Race and Crime in 1950s Chicago: Monroe v. Pape as Legal Noir 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- And the story behind is very much a period piece; the product of a very specific moment in American history. Mid–1950s marches on Little Rock, Montgomery and Selma trained the attention of the world on Jim Crow laws and the quest for basic equality. But as the decade drew to an end, sophisticated civil rights advocates and lawyers shifted their focus to America’s northern cities and the discriminatory treatment of blacks at the hands of urban police. It was becoming clear to many Americans that the Frank Papes of the world were not heroes, and that the law and order for which they were lionized imposed radically disparate burdens, and conferred disparate benefits, on black and white city-dwellers.
- The discrepancies in Saisi’s story and whispers of her infidelity made Pape and the other detectives increasingly suspicious, and they started asking around about Mary Saisi.
- beginning to doubt Mary’s story about the events of that night; plus, there was just that gut-feeling of the seasoned detective: “[s]ince when does a stick-up man let someone leave his presence during the commission of a crime?”
- And so, without first securing a search or arrest warrant, Pape led twelve officers out at 5:45 a.m. to a large, four-story apartment building at 1424 S. Trumbull Avenue.
- The complaint detailed the events of October 29, 1958, and claimed that, in illegally entering and searching the Monroe home and seizing James Monroe, the police officers had violated the Monroes’ rights under the 14th amendment. On June 2, District Judge Julius Hoffman (who would later preside over the trial of the Chicago Seven) quickly dismissed the complaint, finding that § 1983 did not provide a cause of action against state officers who engaged in a search that violated state law. In other words, § 1983’s “under color of” language required a finding that the official was authorized by state law or custom to do what he did; here, the policemen, in breaking into the Monroe home, “violated the Constitution and laws of Illinois” rather than acted under authority of those laws. On November 23, 1959, the Seventh Circuit affirmed, suggesting that Monroe seek relief in the state courts. Moore filed for Supreme Court review.
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Chapter 2: Brown v. Board of Education and the Lost Promise of Civil Rights 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Within this changing legal and political environment, the question for lawyers was how to construct a new civil rights law with the materials at hand. As the conventional wisdom would have it, that process was an arduous one only because lawyers had to convince courts to accept their arguments. On this conventional account, the lawyers knew their goal (the destruction of state-mandated segregation, especially in education) and they knew their constitutional argument (that such segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment). In other words, the story goes,
- embraced and projected was natural and inevitable. The usual story about
- The story of
- The answer to both questions was the complex of laws and customs that arose in the late nineteenth century and eventually came to be called Jim Crow. When southern states managed through both violence and legal chicanery to nullify the vote blacks had so recently won, they made it possible to inscribe Jim Crow into legal and political structures for generations. When railroads decided to segregate their railroad cars and local school boards decided to allocate fewer tax dollars to black schools than to white ones, they helped create Jim Crow. When white planters preferred black to white farm hands and tenants because they could get more work out of black workers for less pay, they drew on and reinforced Jim Crow. When unions excluded black workers and companies refused to hire them, they perpetuated Jim Crow. When the Ku Klux Klan, often with the acquiescence and participation of local law enforcement, lynched black men and women, they enforced Jim Crow. Jim Crow existed because...
- Those who hoped to question the constitutionality of this multifaceted system faced quite a challenge. On paper, the task did not look that hard. After all, in the wake of the Civil War, the nation had ratified three new amendments to the United States Constitution, all intended to safeguard African American rights. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed due process of law and the equal protection of the laws. And the Fifteenth Amendment protected the voting rights of African American men.
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Civil Rights Stories 3 results
Chapter 14: US Airways v. Barnett and the Limits of Disability Accommodation 31 results (showing 5 best matches)
- I use the male pronoun because women generally were not regarded as authentic workers by poor relief systems at this time. But that’s a civil rights story for another day.
- The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules
- The League of the Physically Handicapped eventually petered out, but new organizations of people with disabilities arose in its place. The National Federation of the Blind, founded in 1940, was a notable example. Federationists favored “independence” for blind people. They urged states to adopt “white cane laws” (which give blind pedestrians carrying white canes the right of way when crossing the street) and “guide dog laws” (which eliminated restrictions on the use of service animals by blind people). Those laws, and other similar legal developments, were crucial to giving blind people the same freedom of movement as was enjoyed by the nondisabled.
- As the 1960s came to a close, Professor tenBroek’s “right to live in the world” began to creep into the law. In 1968, a senator with a disabled staffer secured the passage of the Architectural Barriers Act. That law required federal government buildings to become more accessible to people with disabilities. In 1973, a group of Senate staffers working on civil rights issues inserted a provision into the reauthorization of the Rehabilitation Act; the new provision, section 504, prohibited disability-based discrimination by recipients of federal funds. The Architectural Barriers Act was the first rights-oriented federal disability law, and section 504 would become an extremely important vehicle for asserting disability rights.
- On November 4, 1994, Barnett filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. His complaint asserted four causes of action: (1) that US Air violated the ADA by refusing to make an accommodation for his back injury; (2) that US Air violated the ADA by retaliating against him because of his request for an accommodation; (3) that US Air’s actions intentionally inflicted emotional distress, in violation of California law; and (4) that US Air’s actions inflicted emotional distress, in violation of California law.
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Chapter 4: Hadnott v. Amos: Unleashing the Second Reconstruction 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Unrecognized Heroics in Alabama: the Hadnott v. Amos Story, Part I
- Judge Frank Johnson dissented. He was emerging as a dependable judicial voice favoring civil rights and this case was no exception. He reasoned that the application of the corrupt practices and Garrett laws to NDPA constituted an equal protection violation under the U.S. Constitution. On the belated application of the corrupt practices law to NDPA candidates he stated: “The best of laws … can be invoked in an unworthy manner.” Here, he observed the law had been “invoked strictly as an afterthought.” Worse, Johnson noted, this was the first time in recent memory that state officials had enforced the law. In previous cases of disqualification for failure to comply with the statute, it was invoked by opposing candidates or by concerned voters.
- One platform plank anticipated the court battle that would come: the NDPA delegates called for a repeal of the 1967 “Garrett Law,” which required that any potential candidate for public office file a declaration of intent to run by March 1st—a full eight months before Election Day. The law was clearly aimed at the formation of new political parties, and if valid, the Garrett Law would keep NDPA ballots off the ballot in the fall elections.
- ...their Sunday best, flocked to the polls, many giddy with the freedom of voting for the first time. They walked with pride. Or they rode to the polls in frantically organized car pools set up the night before. NDPA volunteers and SCLC workers from across the state drove and cajoled whomever they could find. Dad reserved the most recalcitrant cases for himself. He often told me the story of a woman, a septuagenarian, who refused to leave her house to vote. She lay in her bed, complaining of a toothache and whining about how nothing would change in a county where whites had run everything since time out of memory. Dad physically picked her up and carried her to his car and then to the polls. She entered the polling place in his arms, in disbelief that she would be allowed to vote. She came out the voting booth with her head high, walking on her two feet as if they had been renewed in some way. For the rest of the day she told Dad where to go and went with him into house after...
- ...“civil rights” story, I must disclose that I am not unbiased in its telling. My father, Dr. John L. Cashin, Jr., was the founder of NDPA. I grew up licking NDPA envelopes, attending NDPA meetings, and watching my parents’ activism in the social and political movements that dominated the South in the 1960s and ’70s. A measure of the political transformation that occurred in Alabama, in no small part as a result of NDPA, is that by the time I entered a voting booth for the first time in March, 1980, as an eighteen year old, I voted for Jimmy Carter in that Democratic presidential primary and for myself as a convention delegate pledged to Carter. By then the Alabama Democratic Party was actively recruiting women and minorities to serve as delegates and to play a leadership role in the party. When they approached my father to run for delegate he demurred, instead suggesting that his daughter, the next generation, take up the mantle. I garnered enough votes to attend the...
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Chapter 6: Civil Rights in Private Schools: The Surprising Story of Runyon v. McCrary 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- I would like to thank my colleagues on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law, and particularly those in the law library, for their assistance with this article. Molly Mitchell provided indispensable research assistance, as did Walton Walker and Stephanie Wright.
- Sandra McCrary organized the effort to bring the litigation to desegregate Bobbe’s School and the Fairfax–Brewster School. Together with her husband, she brought suit on behalf of her son Michael and convinced Raymond and Margaret Gonzales to sue on behalf of their son Colin. This effort, despite the personal costs and threats of violence that accompanied it, led her to attend law school herself and become a lawyer. In a remarkable achievement, she also had the opportunity to argue for the vitality of the precedent that she had helped to create. When the Supreme Court asked for briefing on whether to overrule was and should remain good law.
- Lawsuits against both schools soon followed, alleging violations of section 1981 because the defendants had engaged in racial discrimination in refusing to enter into contracts for the schooling of Michael and Colin. In the words of the statute, which date back to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the plaintiffs had been denied “the same right … to make and enforce contracts, … as is enjoyed by white citizens….” Both schools denied that they had engaged in racial discrimination and officials from both schools testified to this effect, denying the substance of the telephone conversations with Michael’s and Colin’s parents. This issue of credibility was resolved against the schools by the district court and the litigation proceeded on appeal on the pure question of law: whether section 1981 prohibited discrimination by private schools.
- which declared segregation in private schools to be illegal. It subordinated private choice to civil rights policy and extended federal law beyond the limitations of the state action doctrine. Yet few major civil rights decisions have been more anticlimactic. Where demonstrations and massive resistance greeted
- reflects in microcosm the central paradox of civil rights law: having achieved formal equality of opportunity, how to get beyond it to actual equality of resources and results.
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Chapter 7: The Story of City of Los Angeles v. Lyons: Closing the Federal Courthouse Doors 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The underlying story of
- The Ninth Circuit noted that under well-established law, it could overturn a preliminary injunction only if it was convinced that there was an abuse of discretion by the district court. The Ninth Circuit concluded that there was no abuse of discretion in this case:
- to deny standing to plaintiffs who sought relief for past violations of a federal law, but did not seek compensation for themselves, and did not allege that the company was likely to violate the statute in the future).
- The Court concluded that “[a]bsent a sufficient likelihood that he will again be wronged in a similar way, Lyons is no more entitled to an injunction than any other citizen of Los Angeles; and a federal court may not entertain a claim by any or all citizens who no more than assert that certain practices of law enforcement officers are unconstitutional.”
- When the police stopped Adolph Lyons in the early morning hours on October 6, 1976, they could not possibly have imagined that their actions would result in a lawsuit culminating in a Supreme Court decision that would change the law across the country. Perhaps that is one of the great lessons of
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Chapter 15: The Constitution and the Klan: Understanding the Burning Cross in Virginia v. Barry Black 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The story of
- The arrest was big news in Carroll County. The local newspaper—the Carroll News—covered the story extensively. Carol Lee Lindsey, the head editor, wrote an editorial expressing outrage at having the Klan meeting in Carroll County. “I had kind of a knee jerk reaction, and my knee jerk reaction was, ‘I don’t want Carroll County known for something like this. Because I know Carroll County to be a friendly place with caring people.” The editorial sounded a theme that would become a common refrain among community members: this was something that was done by outsiders. There was strong sentiment in favor of prosecuting Black for the cross-burning.
- Smolla also emphasized that there was no need for a state to punish cross-burning. In those situations where cross-burning was truly part of a directed activity to intimidate someone, the actions could be punished through a law designed to prohibit threats or other laws such as criminal trespass. “If you can prove that somebody burned a cross to threaten somebody, then indict them under a threat law and throw them in jail. No problem.”
- Also volunteering to work on Black’s case was Professor Rodney Smolla, a noted constitutional law scholar and Dean of the University of Richmond School of Law. Smolla had authored many articles and a leading treatise on the First Amendment. Like many academics, he was a political liberal and not at all sympathetic to the Klan, but as a constitutional law expert, he thought it important to protect their rights of expression. “I was never defending the content of his message and he knew that from the very beginning. It was the classic, almost cliché, I don’t like what you say but I’ll defend your right to say it.”
- In crafting a response to the motion to dismiss the case, Hurd emphasized the historical background of the statute. The cross-burning law dated from 1952, a time when Virginia was still a segregationist state. What prompted the legislative action was a series of cross-burnings throughout Virginia. While it was true that the Virginia legislature at the time supported segregation, it did not support the violence associated with groups like the Ku Klux Klan. This law was justified by the Klan’s long history of “vigilante injustice.”
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Chapter 9: DeShaney v. Winnebago County: Governmental Neglect and “The Blessings of Liberty” 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- When such horrific cases of abuse become front-page news stories, the resulting public outrage typically produces a flurry of reform proposals to improve the child welfare system. These efforts have produced mixed results. Both the causes of these agencies’ failures and the reforms required to improve the child welfare system are extraordinarily complex subjects, and they remain today the focus of intense debates among children’s rights advocates and public policy experts.
- In his discussion of the “botched rescue” argument, Posner emphasized that the traditional common law tort theory of detrimental reliance—focusing on the idea that the rescuer’s botched or negligent attempt made it less likely other potential rescuers would make an attempt—should not be applied in a
- “Constitutional tort law, … which ties a defendant’s liability to
- For an overview of the law of § 1983, see S
- (“To place every state welfare department on the razor’s edge, where if it terminates parental rights it is exposed to a section 1983 suit (as well as a state-law suit) by the parent and if it fails to terminate those rights it is exposed to a section 1983 suit by the child, is unlikely to improve the welfare of American families, and is not grounded in constitutional text or principle.”).
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Contributors 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is Professor of Law, Professor of History, and F. Palmer Weber Research Professor in Civil Liberties and Human Rights at the University of Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and a law degree from Yale University, where she was a senior editor of the
- is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis, Missouri, where. He teaches constitutional law, civil rights litigation, and labor and employment law courses, and he writes on civil rights, antidiscrimination and social welfare law, with a particular focus on disability law. Among his notable publications on these topics are
- , Professor of Law at Duke Law School, teaches courses in Civil Procedure, Legal Ethics, Constitutional Law, and Dispute Resolution. For the past four years, he has been the Director of the “Voices of American Law” project. The purpose of the project is to interview participants in leading Supreme Court cases in order to create documentaries about the cases to be used in law schools and other educational settings. Most of the cases involve constitutional law issues.
- is Professor of Law and Class of 1948 Professor in Scholarly Research in Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He teaches property, local government law, and urban law and policy, and has published a number of articles at the intersection of constitutional and local government law, including graduate of Harvard Law School and served as a law clerk for Judge Dolores Sloviter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Before coming to the University of Virginia, Professor Schragger was a Visiting Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Quinnipiac University School of Law and a Visting Scholar at the Yale Law School. Before that, he was an associate with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C.
- is Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia. A legal historian, her scholarly interests include civil rights, constitutional law, and labor law. In addition to numerous law review articles and book chapters, in 2007 Goluboff published from Harvard in 1994 and spent the following year teaching at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) as a Fulbright Scholar. She received her law degree from Yale Law School, and an M.A. with distinction and a Ph.D. in history, both from Princeton University. Goluboff clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
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Chapter 11: Missouri v. Jenkins: Why District Courts and Local Politics Matter 8 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In reality, though, the story of did not move the law far from where it had been before. It is difficult, for example, to fault the Rehnquist majority, more than the district court or the Burger Court, for the collapse of the interdistrict transfer program. Granted,
- only tell part of the story. The steadfast opposition of John Ashcroft and Missouri officials of both political parties to the
- Judge Clark’s expansive rhetoric returned in remedial orders issued in 1985 to “eliminate the vestiges of segregation” from KCMSD. The court’s purpose, he wrote, was to “make the constitutional ideal of equal justice under the law a living truth.” He quoted
- is most remarkable in the way it reminds us of two related truths: the basic consistency over time in the Supreme Court’s school desegregation cases, and the tremendous extent to which majoritarian politics, showcased in various local contexts, have mediated that doctrine. William Rehnquist, writing as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, captured this reality in a 1952 bench memorandum on the constitutionality of the segregation cases.
- had become the law of the land, several African American families joined in an unusual alliance with the Kansas City school board. The parties filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri and a range of federal, state, and local housing, transportation, and finance agencies. The plaintiffs claimed that these defendants had spun a web of school and residential discrimination that denied black students their right to equal educational opportunity. Missouri’s wrongdoing extended back to the antebellum era. The state had decreed schooling slaves a crime. It had mandated separate schools beginning in 1865, just as the slaves gained the right to live freely among whites. The provision of Missouri’s constitution mandating Jim Crow schools was not repealed until 1976. The plaintiffs alleged that the state and school district had done little to implement
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Chapter 1: Shelley v. Kraemer: Racial Liberalism and the U.S. Supreme Court 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , the violent reaction of many white neighborhoods, and the government’s tepid response, however, spurred greater activism in the area of housing discrimination, resulting in the creation of what today is known as the “fair housing” movement. Led by, among others, future HUD Secretary Robert Weaver, lawyer and housing activist Charles Abrams, and future New York Judge Hortense Gable, advocates argued that housing discrimination was bad law and bad policy. Unable to secure federal statutory or constitutional law against covenants and other forms of discrimination, activists focused their efforts on states and localities and built fair housing law brick by brick, beginning with laws preventing discrimination in public housing and working to expand the scope of fair housing to the private market.
- cases, claimed that the enforcement of restrictive covenants violated federal law and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In addition, Houston claimed, the case had significant international ramifications, because restrictive covenants were an example of the failure of the United States to live up to the promises of equality under the law. These obstacles to racial mobility created “a divisive, caste society” that was “a direct danger to our national unity,” Houston claimed, and they were morally wrong.
- The attorneys defending the enforcement of restrictive covenants were confident with the precedents behind them, and they presented briefs that were much shorter than those of the petitioners. The attorneys argued that the restrictive covenants were allowed under existing law in every state, and they claimed that private agreements were necessary to protect the property rights of the owners. The appellees were joined by several homeowners associations and the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which filed briefs in support of the decisions upholding covenants.
- . Changing the law was one thing. Changing society was another.
- Although the Shelleys and the Kraemers denied knowledge of the covenant, several other homeowners brought suit, demanding that their agreement be rescinded. At trial, the Shelleys, represented by attorney George Vaughn, attacked both the validity of the covenant and the policy behind restrictive covenants. Vaughn argued that the agreement violated several aspects of covenant law, particularly the requirement of “horizontal privity,” and he succeeded in convincing a local judge that the restriction was invalid. The Missouri Supreme Court, however, reversed the decision and issued an injunction ordering the Shelleys to vacate the premises. In 1947, the Shelleys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Chapter 12: United States v. Virginia: The Virginia Military Institute, Where the Men are Men and So are the Women 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , Brief for National Women’s Law Center et al. as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner, United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (No. 94–1941); Brief for Employment Law Center et al. as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner, United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (No. 94–1941).
- Finally, the story of the
- Leading the litigation team for the VMI Alumni Association and its Board of Visitors (both private entities) was Robert H. Patterson, Jr., a senior partner at an establishment Richmond law firm and a devoted VMI alumnus. He was fortunate to have as a law partner another true believer and able lawyer—this one female. Anne Marie Whittemore, a 1970 graduate of Yale Law School and a
- None of the justices interrupted. They had studied law when the law schools were just beginning to accept women. They were well familiar with stereotypes about women and lawyering. Perhaps they were sobered by awareness of the bias that Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor had surmounted in their own legal careers. Bender’s analogy to early exclusion of women from the bar would surface in the opinion ruling in the United States’ favor.
- As an advocate decades earlier, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had made it her mission to rid the state and federal statute books of laws that treated women differently, and to persuade the Court to recognize sex as a suspect ground of classification that, like race, warranted strict constitutional scrutiny. unanimous vote, invalidated an overtly sex-based law under equal protection. That same year, the ACLU established a Women’s Rights Project (WRP) and persuaded Ginsburg, then a new professor at Columbia Law School, to lead the WRP on a part-time basis. On behalf of the ACLU, Ginsburg shared oral argument time in
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Chapter 13: Civil Rights on Both Sides: Reproductive Rights and Free Speech in Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- magazine story that ridiculed the Spring of Life demonstrations as “Operation Fizzle.”
- But Finley and her colleagues sensed that they were working within a somewhat uncharted area of the law. “Where is the line between free speech and harassment?” Finley wondered aloud to fellow attorney and law professor Isabel Marcus as they worked late one night at Finley’s house drafting the complaint. Marcus replied that the law in the area was far from clear. “Do you think this will ever get to the Supreme Court?” she asked Finley. Finley scoffed at the idea, vowing, “If this ever gets to the Supreme Court, I’ll go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
- Upon finding the pamphlet, Buckham immediately called Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The daughter of a labor lawyer and a physician, Finley had graduated from Columbia Law School and taught for a time at Yale before relocating to Buffalo in 1989. Finley had been trying for months, without success, to help procure legal representation for Buckham and the Pro–Choice Network, but lawyers in the Buffalo area were reluctant to take the case. Some demanded too much money up front; others told Finley that they would love to help, but could not disregard the wishes of prolife firm partners.
- The complaint drafted by Finley and Marcus based their request for a temporary restraining order on section 1985(3) and a number of state law claims. They used the pamphlet Buckham had found, among other evidence, to argue that the planned blockade posed an imminent danger of impeding all access to reproductive services at Buffalo-area clinics. After several unsuccessful attempts at obtaining relief in state court, the plaintiffs hoped that they would find in Judge Richard Arcara of the Federal District Court for the Western District of New York a more sympathetic ear. Arcara, a former U.S. Attorney, was a Catholic Republican appointed by Ronald Reagan. But Finley and her colleagues hoped that Arcara’s prosecutorial background would kindle his law-and-order instincts in favor of the pro-choice group.
- , on March 18, 1996, the Schenck brothers themselves had finally managed to leave their Buffalo lives as rabble-rousers behind them and relocate to the nation’s capital. As the justices began to examine the injunction that had restrained their protest activities in western New York, Robert Schenck was comfortably installed as the general secretary of the National Clergy Council, and Paul Schenck—despite his status as a convicted felon—had become executive vice president and chief of operations at the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Pat Robertson-sponsored public interest law firm helping to represent him before the Court.
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Chapter 5: San Antonio v. Rodriguez and the Legal Geography of School Finance Reform 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- MALDEF challenged a Texas law that authorized local school districts to deny enrollment to school-aged children of undocumented aliens. Justice Brennan, writing for a 5–4 majority, declared the law unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Powell, the author of , “Justice Powell … [had] expressly rejected the proposition that state laws dealing with public education are subject to special scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.”
- His family had roots in San Antonio. His father Max began selling tires in the city in 1938 and then shifted to military surplus; in the 1950s Max opened a number of Academy Super Surplus stores in Austin. Arthur, a graduate of the University of Texas Law School, would join his father’s business in 1973 and turn the company into one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the south. In 1968, however, he was practicing law with a small firm in San Antonio that was well-known for its civil rights work.
- Thus, in 1969, when law professors John Coons, Stephen Sugarman and William Clune published an influential law review article describing a legal theory for challenging state school finance systems, civil rights advocates were primed.
- with an invidiously-defined group of individuals, the fact that Edgewood taxpayers were treated differently from Alamo Heights taxpayers was not relevant for constitutional purposes. The Texas tax system discriminated against property-poor places. But places do not have constitutional status. As Harvard law professor Frank Michelman wrote in a prescient (and now famous) 1969
- Justice Lewis Powell was given the assignment to draft the opinion for the Court. It was, for him, a very personal case. Before joining the Court, Powell—a native of Richmond, Virginia—had been a prominent attorney in one of the leading law firms in the south. He had been a member of the Richmond School Board for eleven years and the Virginia State Board of Education for eight years, serving as chairman of the former and president of the latter. As the only justice with direct experience in school governance, he was the natural author of the majority opinion.
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Copyright Page 1 result
- This publication was created to provide you with accurate and authoritative information concerning the subject matter covered; however, this publication was not necessarily prepared by persons licensed to practice law in a particular jurisdiction. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or other professional advice and this publication is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. If you require legal or other expert advice, you should seek the services of a competent attorney or other professional.
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- Publication Date: November 15th, 2007
- ISBN: 9781599410814
- Subject: Civil Rights
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This book provides students with a three-dimensional picture of the most important cases that are addressed in civil rights courses. These stories give the students and faculty members a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural background of the cases and an insight into their long-term impact on the development of civil rights law.