Civil Rights Stories
Authors:
Gilles, Myriam E. / Goluboff, Risa L.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2007
18 chapters
have results for racial justice
Chapter 5: San Antonio v. Rodriguez and the Legal Geography of School Finance Reform 36 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Indeed, despite Justice Powell’s spirited defense of local control in , the long term trajectory of education policy in the United States has been in the direction of increased centralization. The problems of the schools reflect the larger problems of concentrated poverty, racial division, and long-term residential socio-economic segregation. Local school boards have little ability to address those problems.
- The Court had changed dramatically since Gochman had filed his complaint almost four years earlier. Nixon had won the 1968 election in part by arguing against the activism of the Warren Court. The Republican’s “Southern Strategy” made explicit appeals to whites’ racial fears, capitalizing on suburbanites’ opposition to forced busing and linking the Democratic Party to the radical movements of the late 1960s. Those movements—feminist, civil rights, anti-corporate, anti-war—led the “establishment” and Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” to believe that it was under siege. Between 1969 and 1971, three of the Court’s most liberal Justices had resigned and been replaced by Nixon appointees: Chief Justice Earl Warren was replaced by Warren Burger, Abe Fortas by Harry Blackmun, and Hugo Black by Lewis Powell. Further, the moderately conservative John Harlan was replaced by the distinctly conservative William Rehnquist. Nixon’s new justices were decidedly more hostile to the social movements...
- The justices discussed on October 17 during their regularly scheduled conference. They expressed their opinions in order of seniority, with the Chief Justice speaking first. Burger voted to reverse the district court, arguing that an affirmance would undermine state and local government. Justice Douglas, the longest serving justice on the Court, voted to affirm, arguing that while it may be impossible to equalize educational outcomes, it was possible at least to equalize the money received. Justice Brennan also voted to affirm. “Few cases trouble me more,” he said, arguing that the Texas scheme did not even have a rational basis—the least rigorous standard applied by the Court in assessing the constitutionality of legislation. Justice Stewart disagreed with Brennan and Douglas, arguing that the “equal protection clause does not require egalitarianism” and that “rich” and “poor” (terms of relative wealth) were not identifiable classes amenable to equal protection analysis. But both
- All of the most recently appointed justices voted to reverse, however. Justice Blackmun, appointed in 1970, commented that he would have preferred letting the lower courts wrestle with the issue more, but agreed that the Texas system provided an adequate basic education. Justice Powell, appointed less than a year earlier, also voted to reverse, arguing that education is not a fundamental right. He also worried that high property wealth/high taxing jurisdictions would lose funds under a state equalization system. Justice Rehnquist, the Court’s most junior justice, also voted to reverse.
- But Edgewood test scores are still far below those in Alamo Heights. Concentrated poverty and segregation contribute to the poor showing of poor minorities in poor places. According to the 2000 census, Edgewood continues to be ninety-two percent Hispanic and twenty-five percent below the poverty line. Alamo Heights continues to be seventy-five percent Anglo and only four percent poor. The racial geography of the city, which is now majority Hispanic, remains similar to what it was over 100 years ago. The poor people still live on the Edge and the rich live in the Heights. Moreover, the suburbs of San Antonio have grown apace and whites have fled San Antonio, reproducing the racial geography of the city on a regional scale. Between 1960 and 1970, approximately 98,000 Hispanics settled in the city and 44,000 whites left.
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Chapter 7: The Story of City of Los Angeles v. Lyons: Closing the Federal Courthouse Doors 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Additionally, there was a racial dimension to the use of the chokehold by Los Angeles police officers. According to statistics presented to the Supreme Court, an African–American man was twenty times more likely to be subjected to a police chokehold than a white man. Justice Marshall, in his dissent, noted that African–Americans also were much more likely to die from use of the chokehold. He wrote: “Although the City instructs its officers that use of a chokehold does not constitute deadly force, since 1975 no less than 16 persons have died following the use of a chokehold by an LAPD police officer. Twelve have been Negro males.” Justice Marshall noted: “Thus in a City where Negro males constitute 9% of the population, they have accounted for 75% of the deaths resulting from the use of chokeholds.”
- Interestingly, Justice White dissented from the denial of certiorari and was joined by Justices Rehnquist and Powell. A few years later, when the case made its way back to the Supreme Court, Justice White wrote the opinion in favor of the City and it was joined by both Justices Rehnquist and Powell.
- The Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, ruled that Lyons did not have standing to seek injunctive relief. Justice White wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor. Justice Marshall wrote a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Brennan, Blackmun, and Stevens. The Court thus divided along ideological lines, with the five most conservative Justices ruling in favor of the City and against Lyons. The case reflected a deep, underlying ideological divide over the importance of federal courts being available to remedy civil rights violations.
- (2002) (describing racial profiling by police departments in the United States).
- The City sought a stay of the injunction from then-Justice William Rehnquist, pending the Supreme Court’s consideration of its second petition for a writ of certiorari. Justice Rehnquist granted the stay and noted that certiorari was likely. He noted that when the case had come before the Court earlier, there had been three votes in favor of granting certiorari. He wrote: “[T]here is a substantial likelihood that an additional Member of this Court would now join Justice White’s dissent from denial of certiorari in Lyons I, thereby resulting in a grant if the city, as it proposes to do, files a timely petition for certiorari.” Justice Rehnquist concluded that there was “sufficient doubt about the correctness of the basic holding of the Court of Appeals with respect to standing on the part of respondent” to warrant the stay.
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Chapter 11: Missouri v. Jenkins: Why District Courts and Local Politics Matter 39 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Racial liberals reacted with outrage to the Court’s decision and Thomas’s role in it. Editorials with titles such as “On Race–Rehnquist’s Been Waiting 40 Years,” “On Race, It’s Thomas v. An Old Ideal,” and “The Supreme Court Lurches Backwards” appeared in leading newspapers. Commentators saw the decision as illustrative of the Rehnquist Court’s hostility to civil rights, and as proof that Thomas would provide the crucial vote to undo the constitutional revolution that Thurgood Marshall had made. Other cases from the October 1994 term framed liberal reaction to heralded a general retreat by the Supreme Court from its presumed role as guardian of racial justice.
- Justice Thomas’s concurrence substantiated the perception among some that he was an unrelenting ideological foe of civil rights claims, but his opinion served a useful purpose in at least one respect. The justice’s strongly-worded opinion reminded us that African Americans had rarely spoken in one voice on the issue of school desegregation. Thomas eloquently brought to light the diversity of views about school desegregation that had emerged over time. To be sure, skepticism about policies that compel students to attend racially diverse schools typically is voiced by conservative whites. But many whites and some blacks ...percent African American. Yet the school-aged population was 60 percent white, and whites lived in census tracts that were 99 percent white. As is true across America, most people in Kansas City clustered in racially homogenous enclaves and, in urban areas especially, attended schools lacking in racial diversity. This is so despite polls indicating that more than 90...
- The opinion’s rhetoric suggested that the expense of the remedy and the amount of time (seven years) that it had been in place were critical factors in the majority’s conclusion that Judge Clark had strayed from the proper remedial course. The Court called the KCMSD remedy the most expensive in history and noted that it had resulted in the district having “facilities and opportunities” purportedly “unavailable elsewhere in the country.” In striking this note, the majority opinion tracked the complaint that John Ashcroft and other state officials had lodged against Judge Clark’s remedial orders since 1985—they were overkill. The price of the remedy for Missouri’s racial past literally was too high; thus, it was time to lay the past to rest. Justice Rehnquist remanded the case to the district court with instructions that all but required it to declare KCMSD unitary. Judge Clark’s duty was not only to remedy the vestiges of discrimination, the majority wrote, but also to “restore state...
- was rooted in features of the Warren and Burger Court’s anti-discrimination jurisprudence. Sensitivity to local political dynamics, including white resistance to racial mixing in schools, loomed large in the Burger Court’s jurisprudence. The same had been true of the Warren Court’s desegregation cases. Hence, when observers reacted as if the pro-defendant standards in
- segregation was remedied once a state ceased classifying schools by race; after that, the racial make-up of a school’s student body was constitutionally inconsequential. For Thomas, the disastrous school desegregation experiment that had followed
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Chapter 1: Shelley v. Kraemer: Racial Liberalism and the U.S. Supreme Court 34 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Like many other decisions in the civil rights area, the Supreme Court opinions, rather than resolving a complex racial issue, opened up a discussion that continues today. Several legal scholars critiqued the Court’s approach, arguing that the justices extended the “state action” framework further than was appropriate. While the court’s legal reasoning may have been radical, the actual impact of the decision was much less so. , for the most part federal officials continued to sanction and support housing discrimination in suburban housing, public housing and the urban renewal program. The decisions made by federal housing officials in these years, the beginning of the suburban boom, exacerbated the racial segregation and placed additional obstacles to the fair housing laws later enacted.
- Though racial segregation remains a persistent fact of American life, the case contributed greatly to the advancement of civil rights encouraging the efforts of activists fighting racial discrimination. The litigation strategy pursued by the lawyers in the battle against restrictive covenants also served as a model for other efforts in the areas of education and employment discrimination.
- The pamphlet also explained in simple terms the effect of covenants on housing overcrowding and neighborhood decline. Echoing Weaver’s earlier arguments, it claimed that covenants could not truly prevent the expansion of minorities, but they controlled the movements of blacks in ways that exacerbated segregation and helped increase racial animosity in areas where blacks did move. Reminding readers of the wartime calls for racial harmony and presaging the arguments for racial tolerance in the Cold War, the pamphlet criticized covenants for fueling racial misunderstanding. “As long as a group is relegated and confined to a physically undesirable area (as any overcrowded neighborhood inevitably becomes), its occupants are all lumped together in the minds of people.” Adopting Myrdal’s approach, the pamphlet argued that with segregation, “intergroup contact [diminishes], prejudiced attitudes grow stronger, and segregation gains increasing popular acceptance.” At the same time, the...
- during the early 1900s, as Jim Crow rules were established to cover many aspects of race relations, efforts to establish separate residential districts increased. During the 1910s, several cities used the still-fledgling institution of zoning to mandate racial exclusivity, particularly in newly developed middle-class communities. However, such efforts, which divided cities into racial zones, conflicted with deep-seated notions of private property. In the 1917 case of , the U.S. Supreme Court held that the city of Louisville’s racial zoning statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was the result of a convergence of interests between white homeowners who wanted to sell their property without restraints on potential buyers and NAACP lawyers. In its opinion, the Supreme Court declared that the government could not require the residential separation of the races.
- The increase in national attention to civil rights issues brought about by the Truman Civil Rights Committee resulted in unprecedented support for the attack on restrictive covenants. More than twenty organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Committee, the CIO and the National Bar Association, filed amicus briefs during the fall of 1947 asking the court to repudiate the enforcement of restrictive covenants. As further (albeit limited) evidence of the changing tone of the nation’s racial debate, these groups were joined by the federal government. Just weeks after the President’s Civil Rights Committee released its report, the Justice Department agreed to file a brief supporting the petitioners. In it, Solicitor General Philip Perlman argued that restrictive covenants “cannot be reconciled with the spirit of mutual tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of the individual which give vitality to our democratic way of life.”
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Chapter 3: Police, Race and Crime in 1950s Chicago: Monroe v. Pape as Legal Noir 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Justices granted certiorari in March 1960 and heard oral arguments on November 8, 1960. On February 20, 1961, the Court, in an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas (over a solitary dissent by Justice Felix Frankfurter on the issue of whether the city of Chicago was a “person” within the meaning of § 1983), reversed the lower courts and found that the federal civil rights statutes indeed provided a remedy to the Monroes. Justice Douglas began by reviewing the historical foundations of the Reconstruction-era legislation, enacted by the 42nd Congress largely in response to the failure of local law enforcement to curb incidents of racial violence.
- The Chicago Commission Report on Race Relations later cited police conduct as a contributing factor in the escalation of racial tensions that led to the violent outbreak. Indeed, as cities throughout the nation erupted in racial violence during the “Red Summer” of 1919, police brutality and indifference towards blacks were often implicated.
- ]. On the instability of the racial tensions, note 3, at 99 (“On Chicago’s bloody racial frontier, whites bombed eight separate properties bought by Negroes in the first three months of 1920.”).
- As the 1950s progressed, Chicago remained a city marred by deep and unresolved racial tensions that were most strongly symbolized by the relationship between its police officers and minority residents.
- The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study the cause of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, also reported that police were central to comprehending and resolving racial hostilities: “in practically every city that has experienced racial disruption since the summer of 1964, abrasive relationships between police and Negroes and other minority groups have been a major source of grievance, tension and, ultimately disorder.” According to that report, “[p]olice misconduct—whether described as brutality, harassment, verbal abuse, or discourtesy… contributes directly to the risk of civil disorder [and] is inconsistent with the basic responsibility of a police force in a democracy.”
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Chapter 4: Hadnott v. Amos: Unleashing the Second Reconstruction 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In the 1970s George Wallace himself would moderate on race. Likewise, throughout the south, the Democratic Party would transform from pro-segregation to pro-civil rights. As the “white supremacy” politics of southern Democrats was replaced by an orientation toward inclusion, the Republican Party emerged in the south through a rather intentional strategy of cultivating disaffected whites with race-coded issues like affirmative action, busing, crime, and welfare. Fortunately overt race-coded appeals have less resonance today. Yet the racial schisms of the past persist in a southern electorate that remains divided between white voters who lean heavily Republican and communities of color that lean Democratic. The second Reconstruction has wrought dramatic improvements in black political representation, yet we have not yet transcended a dominant narrative of racial cleavage in southern politics. Instead, southern politics is shaped by a tight racial architecture. Republicans dominate in...
- engagement for the first wave of newly registered black voters propelled into full citizenship by the Voting Rights Act. It was the most pronounced example in the south of the re-emergence of black political strength—one that inspired similar mobilization of black voters in other Deep South states and marked the beginning of racial realignments in American politics. Through its challenges for recognition at the 1968 and 1972 Democratic national conventions, NDPA forced liberalization of party rules on delegate selection, opening the way for a more inclusive state and national Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party became a meaningful home to most southern black voters, the racial narrative under-girding southern and American politics would be transformed indelibly, even as modern racial schisms of an increasingly diverse electorate continue. This is the story of the beginnings of that second Reconstruction.
- Racial Transformations
- Justice Black happened to be the justice at the Supreme Court assigned to receive emergency appeals from the then-Fifth Circuit in which Alabama was located.
- Specifically he invoked the Fifteenth Amendment “right of people regardless of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude to cast their votes effectively” and the First Amendment right “to band together for the advancement of political beliefs.” Justices Stewart and White dissented in part and Justice Black took no part in the case.
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Chapter 12: United States v. Virginia: The Virginia Military Institute, Where the Men are Men and So are the Women 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Chief Justice would ordinarily decide which justice would write the opinion, and could have assigned it to himself. Because Chief Justice Rehnquist had voted with VMI in the Court’s post-argument conference, however, Justice Stevens, the most senior member of the initial majority, had authority to assign, and gave the opinion to Justice Ginsburg. Fearing a strict scrutiny opinion would not garner maximal consensus among the justices, she did not even mention the United States’ bid for strict scrutiny. Ginsburg instead declared “skeptical scrutiny” to be the appropriate standard for sex-based classifications, attaching that new moniker to the “exceedingly persuasive justification” requirement of Justice O’Connor’s opinion in and Justice Kennedy’s in
- At oral argument, it quickly became apparent, however, that the justices were not interested in strict scrutiny. Justice O’Connor peppered Principal Deputy Solicitor General Paul Bender with questions that were openly hostile to the government’s plea for strict scrutiny. Why had the solicitor general even asked for strict scrutiny, when the level of scrutiny was “not exactly an open question”? opinion). Justice O’Connor brushed that assertion aside, asking why the intermediate standard did not suffice to decide this case, too. When another justice interrupted with a new line of questioning, Justice O’Connor sat back with knitted brow, evidently unpersuaded.
- by a 7–1 majority, over the lone dissent of Justice Scalia, with Justice Thomas (whose son attended VMI) recusing himself. The standard the Court announced was a demanding one. Justice Ginsburg saw it as the practical equivalent to what women would have obtained had the Equal Rights Amendment succeeded. Even Chief Justice Rehnquist’s separate concurrence providing the seventh vote underscored the strength of the majority, both because the majority had brought the reluctant Chief Justice around, and because no other justice signed on to his less skeptical approach.
- The first remarkable thing about Chief Justice Rehnquist’s solo concurrence was that it was not a dissent. His opinion echoed the “comparability” analysis of the Fourth Circuit, except that, in the Chief Justice’s view, VWIL did not provide constitutionally equivalent opportunity because it was “distinctly inferior to the existing men’s institution and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.” He thought separate schools for each sex could be quite different in character and still be constitutional: “one could be strong in computer science and the other in liberal arts.” They need only “offer … the same quality of education and [be] of the same overall caliber.” A state could “consider the public’s demand” in setting different curricula, so long as it avoided “assuming demand based on stereotypes.” For all its apparent lenience, the Chief Justice’s opinion demanded more for women than VWIL offered. In hinting that women might be better served by something other than admission...
- Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pe˜na, 515 U.S. 200 (1995) (symmetrically imposing strict scrutiny against benign as well as malign racial distinctions);
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Chapter 14: US Airways v. Barnett and the Limits of Disability Accommodation 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Justice O’Connor’s concurrence was more interesting. She disagreed with Justice Breyer’s reading of the application of the ADA to seniority systems. But she joined it anyway to create five votes for a single interpretation of the statute. In Justice O’Connor’s view, the relevant question should be whether the position to which the plaintiff sought assignment was “vacant,” because the ADA lists “reassignment to a vacant position” as a possible accommodation. Accordingly, Justice O’Connor would have held that a seniority system could not be accommodated when, and Justice O’Connor nonetheless believed that Justice Breyer’s view would “often lead to the same outcome as the test [she] would have adopted.”
- Justice Breyer wrote the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Stevens, O’Connor, and Kennedy. Rejecting US Airways’ more aggressive argument, Justice Breyer’s opinion held “that preferences will sometimes prove necessary to achieve the Act’s basic equal opportunity goal.” As Justice Breyer explained, “[i]t is the word ‘accommodation,’ not the word ‘reasonable,’ that conveys the need for effectiveness. An
- Four justices dissented, but they did so from two radically different perspectives. Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, argued that the Court had not gone far enough to reject Barnett’s claim. In Justice Scalia’s view, As Justice Scalia read the statute, it “eliminates workplace barriers only if a disability prevents an employee from overcoming them—those barriers that would not be barriers If the ADA were not limited to “disability-related obstacles,” Justice Scalia contended, it would become “a standardless grab bag—leaving it to the courts to decide which workplace preferences (higher salary, longer vacations, reassignment to positions to which others are entitled) can be deemed ‘reasonable’ to ‘make up for’ the particular employee’s disability.”
- Accordingly, Justice Breyer continued, the question in Barnett’s case was whether an accommodation that would violate the rules of a seniority system could be “reasonable.” And he concluded that, at least “ordinarily,” such an accommodation would not be reasonable. Justice Breyer looked to the important interests a seniority system serves for employers and employees. Any requirement that the employer defend its seniority system against accommodation requests on a case-by-case basis, he said, might itself “undermine the employees’ expectations of consistent, uniform treatment.” “That,” Justice Breyer explained, “is because such a rule would substitute a complex case-specific ‘accommodation’ decision made by management”—a decision with “inevitable discretionary
- , it should not be surprising that Justice Scalia sought to confine the accommodation requirement to cases where individuals seek alteration of “disability-specific obstacles.” What might be surprising, though, is that Justice Scalia’s restrictive reading carried some interesting disability-rights overtones, particularly in its effort to keep the ADA from serving as a vehicle for judicial decisions of what “preferences … can be deemed ‘reasonable’ to ‘make up for’ the employee’s disability.” Although Justice Scalia was taking a position that most disability rights activists opposed, he was speaking their language. His effort, consistent with the goals articulated by disability rights activists themselves, was to ensure that the ADA would remain a civil rights law, rather than a demand for charitable largesse.
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- women’s rights as “primarily one of economic justice and education,” since many working poor women, a large proportion of whom were racial and language minorities, “were ill-informed about the effect of the toxins with which they worked, the legal implications for agreeing to work with those toxins, and the potential, probable and likely health outcomes for themselves and their families.”
- In concurrence, Justice White, Kennedy, and Rehnquist asserted that Justice Blackmun’s “speculation” about tort liability would be “small comfort to employers,” and that an employer who was able to set forth evidence that fertile women’s presence in a workplace made the company susceptible to serious tort liability could have a valid BFOQ defense if it chose to exclude fertile women from its workforce. Justice Scalia concurred separately, asserting that a court may take costs to a company into account when ruling on a BFOQ defense.
- Gender Justice, and the Justices: The Limits of Equality
- On March 20, 1991, the Supreme Court issued a 9–0 decision overruling the Seventh Circuit’s decision and finding that Johnson Control’s fetal protection policy was facially discriminatory because it categorized employees on the basis of their potential for pregnancy, which was prohibited by Title VII, as amended by the PDA. The BFOQ defense was not available to Johnson Controls, Justice Harry F. Blackmun wrote for the majority, because fetuses were neither customers nor third parties (following Furthermore, the Court found, a benevolent motive, such as concern for fetal harm, could not justify female sterility as a BFOQ. Justice Blackmun opined that employer liability “seem[ed] remote at best” if the employer adequately warns the employee about the risk and has not acted negligently.
- As federal courts become less available as a site for affirmative progress, social justice advocates must address problems involving race and gender in the context of broader structural dynamics in order to make a difference on the ground. Public interest organizations must rethink their litigation-centered strategies to find new sites of mobilization and ways of sustaining coalitions that cut across different interests and locations. The
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Chapter 6: Civil Rights in Private Schools: The Surprising Story of Runyon v. McCrary 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Justice White’s highly technical argument, if unconvincing on its own terms, is convincing for what it reveals about the history of section 1981. This history has been, from its inception, contentious and dependent as much on a general commitment to civil rights as on legal doctrine. Justices who, like Justice White in , were concerned about the extent of federal power to prohibit discrimination took a narrower view of the statute than justices who gave greater weight to the need to eliminate discrimination and its persistent effects. It was natural for Justice Stewart, the author of the majority opinion, to give decisive weight to the prior decision in , since he was the author of that decision also. Yet more than simply the force of precedent or the preferences of a majority of justices were involved. As Justice Stevens recognized in his concurring opinion, the force of the decision in
- 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.
- Even the most stringent enforcement of section 1981 would not alter the racial imbalance in private schools. A prohibition against intentional discrimination, especially one enforced through private lawsuits, can only go so far to achieve integration. Even cutting off tax subsidies, as the IRS tries to do, results only in a modest progress towards full integration. The presumptions the IRS uses to test a private school’s commitment to integration address only the most egregious forms of racial imbalance. Litigation to prevent discrimination cannot be expected to accomplish more.
- Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation
- The plaintiffs asserted their claims under section 1981 and under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in public accommodations, such as hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters. The latter claim apparently was asserted in an effort to bolster the plaintiffs’ request for attorney’s fees, which were not then generally available under section 1981. Private schools, however, were not among the public accommodations covered by Title II,
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Chapter 2: Brown v. Board of Education and the Lost Promise of Civil Rights 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren shrugged on his long, black robe and took his place at the center of the Supreme Court dais. Appointed just seven months earlier by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, Warren was about to disappoint his president, incite a considerable portion of the nation to violence, and validate the claims of a racial minority who had worked hard and waited long to hear what he had to say. In
- Even so, these developments often reinforced, rather than undermined, the image of Jim Crow and racial harm that depicted. Media representations of the 1963 March on Washington largely forsook the protest’s economic emphasis for Martin Luther King Jr.’s invocation of formal color-blindness—in which people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The War on Poverty took as its mission not the redress of economic inequality for its own sake but rather as a cause of the psychological alienation that underlay rising racial violence across the nation. And Title VII prohibited “discrimination on the basis of race” in the same terms as it prohibited discrimination in education and public accommodations. The law addressed work-related inequality as simply an ordinary manifestation of the general problem of race discrimination. Title VII, like
- as afterwards, civil rights doctrine primarily addressed questions of racial classification. In fact, neither lawyers, judges, nor scholars had viewed . It was not until the post-Brown years privileged a race-focused equal protection clause, and contrasted stringent judicial review of government actions affecting racial minorities with those affecting the economy, that race and labor truly diverged in constitutional law. It was not until then that constitutionally-grounded civil rights became squarely rights against the government, in contrast to both rights against private power and rights protected by
- In viewing Jim Crow as both a racial and an economic system, I draw on R
- Racial Discrimination and Judicial Integrity: A Reply to Professor Wechsler
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Chapter 8: The Crime Against Nature on Trial, Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986 39 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Letter from Arthur G. Wirth to Justice Byron White, July 25, 1986, Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folder 6; Letter from Steven Cantor to Justice Lewis Powell, August 11, 1986, Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folder 1; Letter from Barbara Shor to Justice Byron White, July 2, 1986, Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folder 5.
- Memorandum from Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. to Mike Mosman, May 21, 1986, Powell Papers, Bowers v. Hardwick File; Memorandum from Mike Mosman to Justice Lewis Powell, June 12, 1986, Powell Papers, Bowers v. Hardwick File.
- Letter from Reverend Robert Nugent, S.D.S., to Justice Harry Blackmun, July 1, 1986, Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folder 4; Letter from Reverend Kenneth A. Bastin to Justice Harry Blackmun, June 15, 1987, Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folder 1.
- Letter from Matt Miller to Mr. Harry A. Blackmun, July 5, 1986; Letter from Carl Laurent to Justice Blackmun, July 5, 1986; Letter from Mrs. H.F. Mitchell to Justice Harry Blackmun, August 23, 1986. All of these letters, and others like them, are in Blackmun Papers, Box 452, Folders 8–9.
- Hobbs filed the state’s petition for Supreme Court review on July 25, 1985. In the Court’s Conference on October 11, 1985, Justice Byron had resolved nothing, and the Court should settle the matter for good. Justice William Rehnquist agreed; he and White were the only dissenters from the Court’s decision in (1973), where the Court had extended the privacy right to protect a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Chief Justice Warren Burger suggested he would vote for certiorari if three other Justices did so (“join three”). But with four votes required to take review, the Conference of October 11 denied the petition.
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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 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- ...of basic civil rights, as advocates for and against reproductive choice struggled to define themselves as the natural heirs to the civil rights movement. For abortion rights proponents, the initial challenge was to frame women seeking reproductive health services as citizens attempting to exercise legitimate constitutional rights in the face of violence, intimidation, and obstruction, and to depict anti-abortion demonstrators as a modern day version of the Ku Klux Klan. Bringing suit under section 1985(3), the civil rights statute aimed at racial violence and intimidation, virtually required the Pro–Choice Network and other reproductive rights organizations to draw this analogy explicitly or implicitly. The rhetorical problem they faced was that while white supremacists acted out of hatred for African Americans and other nonwhites, pro-life demonstrators—many of whom were themselves women—were motivated by what they felt to be love and concern for women and their families. As a...
- Overall, the justices seemed skeptical of the floating bubble zone, but the oral argument had barely touched upon the core of the injunction—the fixed buffer zone and the cease-and-desist provision. Finley remained optimistic, believing that a successful challenge to the floating zone might actually work in her clients’ favor by justifying a much larger fixed buffer zone. “It may turn out to be a case where the defendants should have been careful what they wished for,” Finley told reporters after the argument. courtroom confident. Robert Schenck told his brother’s former congregation at New Covenant Tabernacle that he felt “the Justices were with us,” singling out Justice Scalia for special praise as “our angel on the Court.”
- oral argument, where he insisted that both the floating and fixed buffer zones squelched protected speech. Despite tough questioning from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about his characterization of the factual record, and an onslaught of queries from the other justices pressing him to explain exactly how the buffer zones limited speech, Sekulow did manage to insert a reference to the petitioners’ favorite case, , driving home the analogy between anti-abortion protesters and civil rights demonstrators. Finley, too, faced an immediate and unrelenting barrage of questions. Inquiries from Justice Scalia and others about the underlying legal basis for the injunction threatened to devolve into a debate over the proper use of medical evidence as a basis for restricting speech. Justice Anthony Kennedy declared at one point, “I would say that persons who walk through a picket line in order to work despite a strike face extreme stress…. [but labor picketing] cases do not talk about stress to...
- On the “cease-and-desist” provision, the Court also found a middle way, upholding the restriction but refusing to endorse the more capacious “right to be left alone” that respondents had urged. Evenhandedness aside, the decision was splintered, with Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg, and David H. Souter in agreement with the Chief Justice on the permissibility of the fixed zone and the unconstitutionality of the floating bubble; Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas proclaiming the unconstitutionality of the fixed zone as well as the floating bubble; and Justice Stephen Breyer voting to uphold the entire injunction. Scalia’s dissent echoed his screed in
- , a challenge to an abortion clinic protest injunction in Florida. Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s majority opinion for a divided Court established a new test for injunctions: “whether the challenged provisions of the injunction burden no more speech than necessary to serve a significant government interest.” It found portions of the Florida injunction, which provided for a thirty-six-foot buffer zone and restricted the extent to which protesters could approach persons coming in and out of the clinic, constitutional, and struck down others as too speech-restrictive. Contrasting the majority’s decision with prior rulings in labor picketing and civil rights cases, Justice Antonin Scalia’s vitriolic dissent ridiculed the indeterminacy of the
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Chapter 15: The Constitution and the Klan: Understanding the Burning Cross in Virginia v. Barry Black 9 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Many Supreme Court oral arguments are dramatic with the Justices interrupting the usually skilled advocates to ask difficult questions or make key points. But the argument in is among the most dramatic in recent memory, because just as several of the Justices began to ask the attorneys questions, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke up. This itself would be noteworthy, as Justice Thomas seldom asks questions during oral argument, preferring to reflect on the attorneys’ arguments. And, furthermore, Black’s lawyers had assumed that Justice Thomas would likely favor their position based upon some of his prior decisions. What followed stunned everyone in the Court that day.
- Justice Thomas did not speak against the ban; rather, he spoke powerfully and with great passion in favor of Virginia’s law. He noted the hundred years of lynching and violence by the Klan, which he called a “reign of terror.” Justice Thomas declared that burning a cross went far beyond a mere threat of violence: “My fear is that you are understating the symbolism and effect of the cross; it is unlike any symbol in our society.” As Justice Thomas spoke, the tension in the Court was palpable. Smolla recalls that the Justice was “shaking as he’s talking, he’s eloquent; you could hear a pin drop in the courtroom.” Justice Thomas’ invective was front-page news the next day.
- Hurd’s main tact at oral argument was to stress the violent history of the Klan. “The burning cross, based on a hundred years of usage, is a sign of intimidation—a threat of violence soon to come. The Klan has burned crosses because they wanted that message of intimidation.” The cross was not just a symbol of hatred, but stood for something far more dangerous: a warning to blacks and other outsiders that “if you don’t succumb to what we want you to do, there’s going to be violence.” To convey to the Justices just how intimidating a burning cross could be, Hurd drew their attention to the grand marble columns before which the Justices sat. As several Justices turned their heads to look, Hurd told
- flames grew higher, they cast a bright glow over the countryside. To those in attendance, it was a traditional ritual; to those seeing it from their homes or hearing about it later, it was a sad reminder of racial hatred and violence.
- On the day of the rally, Sheriff Manning had been out during the day. When he returned home around 6:00 p.m., he had a message telling him that there was a Klan rally going on in Cana and that he had “better get down there.” Manning found the news surprising. Carroll County had never had an active Klan that he had known about; he was not aware of any racial issues or problems that would have precipitated local interest in the Klan. He decided he had better drive out to the rally. In a rural area like Carroll County, the Sheriff is expected to be involved personally when something unusual happens.
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Civil Rights Stories 1 result
Chapter 9: DeShaney v. Winnebago County: Governmental Neglect and “The Blessings of Liberty” 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In December, the justices began exchanging opinion drafts and memos for the case. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s initial draft of the majority opinion was circulated, and he incorporated minor suggestions for revisions in subsequent drafts until Justices Stevens, O’Connor,
- Justice Blackmun wrote a brief but passionate separate dissenting opinion, criticizing the Court’s “sterile” formalistic approach and arguing in favor of a “compassionate” jurisprudence that does not shy away from the moral ambition that the pursuit of justice requires. He lamented the result of this case, concluding that it was “a sad commentary upon American life, and constitutional principles—so full of late of patriotic fervor and proud proclamations about ‘liberty and justice for all’—that this child, Joshua DeShaney, now is assigned to live out the remainder of his life profoundly retarded.”
- This dramatic interruption in the presentation was incorporated in Justice Blackmun’s dissenting opinion, and his evident concern for Joshua’s plight would become, by the time of his retirement in 1994, a much remarked upon episode in Blackmun’s long tenure on the Court. In a post-retirement interview with Dean Harold Koh, Justice Blackmun explained that he had become frustrated listening to the oral argument: “Sometimes we overlook the individual’s concern, the fact that these are live human beings that are so deeply and terribly affected by our decision.” Transcript, The Justice Harry A. Blackmun Oral History Project, Library of Congress, at 397, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cocoon/blackmun-public/page.html?FOLDERID=D0901&SERIESID=D09.
- On July 17, 1987, Sullivan and First filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, which the Supreme Court granted on March 21, 1988. Throughout the spring and summer, there was much speculation about the impact of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s arrival on the Court. The press coverage of the Court focused in particular on the fact that the 1988–1989 Supreme Court Term would be the first in over forty years in which conservative justices held a majority on the Court.
- “enmeshment” of DSS and the DeShaney household, a choice of terminology that appeared to both confuse and annoy Chief Justice Rehnquist. Justice O’Connor attempted to draw his attention to the question of the special relationship doctrine and the arguments in favor of expanding it beyond the custody context. But Sullivan was unfocused. In his oral argument notes, under the section for Donald Sullivan, Justice Blackmun wrote, simply, “hostile questions.”
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Introduction 3 results
- 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.
- —has been easier to obtain than vindication of rights requiring more complicated remedies. As civil rights cases moved away from formal racial equality and toward claims involving material equality, sex, poverty, disability, and sexual orientation, the cases became messier and effective remedies became harder to devise. Sam Bagenstos makes this point well 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
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Contributors 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , 89 Va. L. Rev. 825 (2003). Bagenstos is also a frequent appellate advocate in civil rights cases in the federal courts. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a law degree from the Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, he clerked for a year for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then worked for three years as an attorney in the Appellate Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, then clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.
- She teaches courses on American social and legal history, constitutional law, public interest law, and education law. Brown–Nagin has written widely on civil rights history and law. She has published articles about the NAACP’s legal campaign against Jim Crow and contemporary campaigns for racial equality in law and history journals, including the
- (forthcoming PublicAffairs, 2008) traces the arc of American race relations through five generations of her family. Cashin has published widely in academic journals and trade publications. She worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban economic policy and was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She graduated
- 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.
- , as well as litigating over twenty cases before the Supreme Court. She has written extensively on gender issues, focusing on equality and reproductive choice. In 1998–2000, Professor Pillard took leave from Georgetown to work in the Department of Justice as Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel. Professor Pillard is graduate of Yale College, where she earned her B.A., and Harvard Law School, where she earned her J.D. After law school, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Louis H. Pollak of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
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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.
