The Yale Law Journal

Antidiscrimination Law

Article

The Unabridged Fifteenth Amendment

Travis Crum

The Fifteenth Amendment is usually an afterthought compared to the Fourteenth Amendment. This oversight is perplexing: the Fifteenth Amendment ushered in a brief period of multiracial democracy and laid the constitutional foundation for the VRA. This Article completes the historical record, providin…

Forum

An Expansive View of “Federal Financial Assistance”

Shariful Khan

Thanks to an ambiguity in civil-rights statutes passed under Congresss spending power, many programs enjoy ample financial benefits while avoiding the requirements of federal antidiscrimination laws. This Essay argues that the remedy lies in a statutory reading that aligns with the expansive nature…

Forum

“We Do No Such Thing”: 303 Creative v. Elenis and the Future of First Amendment Challenges to Public Accommodations Laws

David Cole

In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Supreme Court ruled that a business had a right to refuse to design a wedding website for a same-sex couple. But properly understood, the decision’s parameters are narrow, and the decision should have minimal effect on public accommodations laws. 

 

Comment

Seeking Equity in Electronic Monitoring: Mounting a Bearden Challenge

Ryanne Bamieh

In Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held a defendant cannot be imprisoned for failure to pay a fine they could not afford. Yet, many defendants remain incarcerated because they cannot pay for Electronic Monitoring. This Comment seeks to remedy that disparity by applying Bearden to Electronic Mo…

Note

Protecting Transgender Youth After Bostock: Sex Classification, Sex Stereotypes, and the Future of Equal Protection

Erik Fredericksen

This Note argues that Bostock v. Clayton County’s holding under Title VII—anti-LGBT discrimination is sex discrimination—applies under equal-protection analysis. It then combines Bostock with sex-stereotype reasoning to argue that recent laws and policies targeting transgender minors unconstitutiona…

Feature

Sex Equality’s Irreconcilable Differences

Courtney Megan Cahill

Sex equality assures us that laws based on real biological differences between the sexes are not sex stereotypes about the sexes. This Feature uses LGBTQ equality to show why sex equality is wrong: laws based on real differences are sex stereotypes, all the way down.

 

Note

Familial-Status Discrimination: A New Frontier in Fair Housing Act Litigation

Rubin Danberg Biggs & Patrick Holland

A key exception to the Fair Housing Act’s prohibition of familial-status discrimination has allowed municipalities to weaponize senior-only housing to block the construction of affordable housing and perpetuate segregation. This Note documents this practice, offers a framework for advocates to chall…

Article

Disparate Limbo: How Administrative Law Erased Antidiscrimination

Cristina Isabel Ceballos, David Freeman Engstrom & Daniel E. Ho

Does administrative law have a racial blind spot? Ceballos, Engstrom, and Ho examine “disparate limbo”: how claims that agencies caused racial disparities have come to evade review under both antidiscrimination and administrative law, and how ignoring race may have helped build modern administrative…

Forum

Reckoning with Race and Disability

Jasmine E. Harris

Intersectionality surfaces the experiences of disabled people of color, but it tells us less about the malleability of this type of discrimination. This Essay contends that aesthetic theories of structural subordination can supplement emerging discussions on intersectionality by underscoring the vis…

Forum

Equality Metrics

Veronica Root Martinez & Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

For decades firms have asserted their support for diversity efforts but struggled to achieve increased demographic diversity. This Essay argues that institutional investors should require firms to disclose information regarding the current demographic diversity of their workforces and supply chains,…

Note

Disability Law and HIV Criminalization

Joshua D. Blecher-Cohen

Over thirty states maintain laws that criminalize people living with HIV, exposing them to incarceration, fines, and social stigma. This Note argues that many such laws violate the ADA’s ban on public discrimination. While previous challenges to HIV-criminalization laws have failed, federal disabili…

Forum

Disability Law and the Case for Evidence-Based Triage in a Pandemic

Govind Persad

When lifesaving medical treatments are scarce, disability law permits triage policies to consider patients’ probability of survival and post-treatment life expectancy. Evidence-based triage that considers these factors, rather than inaccurate stereotypes, can be not only legal and ethical, but conso…

Forum

Who Gets the Ventilator? Disability Discrimination in COVID-19 Medical-Rationing Protocols

Samuel R. Bagenstos

The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to take the threat of rationing life-saving treatments seriously. Many health systems employ protocols that explicitly deprioritize people for these treatments based on pre-existing disabilities. This argues that such protocols violate the Americans with Disabi…

Article

Respect, Individualism, and Colorblindness

Benjamin Eidelson

The “colorblind” approach to equal protection purports to treat people as individuals. This Article excavates the philosophical foundations of that idea and argues that the Supreme Court has misconceived it. If the Court pursues colorblindness, it should do so not with indignation but with ambivalen…

Feature

Sex as a Pedagogical Failure

Amia Srinivasan

This Feature offers an account of what is wrong with consensual professor-student sex. Such sex constitutes a failure, on the professor’s part, to satisfy the duties that arise from the practice of teaching. It often also feeds on and reinforces women students’ second-class standing in the universit…

Forum

The Nineteenth Amendment and the Democratization of the Family

Reva B. Siegel

Women’s claim to vote advanced a broader effort to democratize the family. This Essay recovers debates over the family connecting the Reconstruction Amendments and the Nineteenth Amendment, and considers how this lost history might guide the Constitution’s interpretation in courts and politics today

Forum

Lessons from the Suffrage Movement in Iran

Arzoo Osanloo

The women’s suffrage movement in Iran achieved the vote in 1963, several decades after women in the United States. The challenges and opportunities in Iranian women’s fight for equal rights offer insight into the complex and often fraught politics of calling for women’s rights and participation in a…

Forum

After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy

Serena Mayeri

This Essay chronicles Pauli Murray’s intersectional feminist legal advocacy, which transformed post-suffrage women’s citizenship and continues to shape an ambitious and urgent agenda for universal enfranchisement in the Nineteenth Amendment’s second century. 

Forum

Reconstituting the Future: An Equality Amendment

Catharine A. MacKinnon & Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

A new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U.S. treatment of race and sex and additional hierarchical social inequalities. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the ame…

Forum

Pushed Out and Locked In: The Catch-22 for New York’s Disabled, Homeless Sex-Offender Registrants

Allison Frankel

New York’s poor, disabled sex-offender registrants are ensnared in a cruel catch-22: New York will not release them from prison without housing, but laws and policies make finding housing nearly impossible for this population. This Essay explores potential legal challenges to New York’s harmful, cou…

Forum

An Intersectional Critique of Tiers of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches to Equal Protection

Devon W. Carbado & Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Examining a long-overlooked passage on gender in Justice Powell’s Bakke concurrence, the Essay applies the theory of intersectionality to show that Justice Powell’s reasoning was flawed. As his “single-axis” approach reveals, tiers-of-scrutiny analysis creates a doctrinal puzzle in equal-protection …

Article

Sex in Public

Elizabeth Sepper & Deborah Dinner

This Article provides the first history of sex discrimination in public accommodations. Fifty years ago, bars displayed “men-only” signs. Women held secondary status in leisure, professional, and financial institutions. In the 1970s, feminists challenged this discrimination. Sex equality came to sig…

Note

Disparate-Impact Liability for Policing

Alisa Tiwari

This Note develops the first analysis of the Safe Street Act’s (SSA’s) antidiscrimination power and argues that the SSA imposes disparate-impact liability on police departments. When conventional legal tools have proven inadequate in curbing disparate policing, the SSA presents an unrecognized path …

Forum

Gender-Identity Protection, Trade, and the Trump Administration: A Tale of Reluctant Progressivism

Jean Galbraith & Beatrix Lu

This Essay discusses the inclusion of gender-identity protections in the Trump Administration’s “new NAFTA,” hypothesizing that these provisions were initially included without consulting important executive-branch stakeholders. Intriguingly, these protections demonstrate that trade agreements can l…

Forum

While They Waited: Pre-Obergefell Lives and the Law of Nonmarriage

Michael J. Higdon

This Essay looks at married same-sex couples who, pre-Obergefell, spent time in nonmarital relationships while awaiting the right to wed. In discussing how courts now count those pre-equality years toward the length of couples’ relationships—a decision relevant to adjudicating many benefits—the Essa…

Article

Bias In, Bias Out

Sandra G. Mayson

The rise of criminal justice risk assessment has generated concerns about its disparate racial impact. Yet the prevailing responses to this problem, this Article contends, are inadequate. The real issue is the nature of prediction itself, and this demands a fundamental rethinking of risk assessment …

Comment

The Reverse-Entanglement Principle: Why Religious Arbitration of Federal Rights Is Unconstitutional

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld & Frank J. Costa, Jr.

Several courts have compelled religious arbitration of employment disputes even when the arbitration agreement explicitly states that holy text would trump federal law. This Comment articulates a “reverse-entanglement” principle that explains why courts violate the Establishment Clause when they enf…

Article

Disparate Impact, Unified Law

Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos

Lower federal courts have recently converged on a two-part test for vote denial claims under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this status quo is doctrinally incoherent and constitutionally vulnerable. Courts, this Article contends, should look to disparate impact law to address these problems…

Review

State Courts and Constitutional Structure

Goodwin Liu

Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court reviews Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book,  51 Imperfect Solutions: The Making of American Constitutional Law.

 

Review

The New Jim Crow Is the Old Jim Crow

Katie R. Eyer

A vast divide exists in the national imagination between the racial struggles of the civil rights era and those of the present. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Jeanne Theoharis, this Review argues that complexifying this oversimplified history is critical to contemporary racial …

Feature

GINA, Big Data, and the Future of Employee Privacy

Bradley A. Areheart & Jessica L. Roberts

Threats to privacy abound in modern society, but individuals currently enjoy little meaningful legal protection for their privacy interests. This Feature examines the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) and argues that it offers a blueprint for preventing employers from breaching employ…

Forum

Is Korematsu Good Law?

Jamal Greene

This Essay argues that the Supreme Court’s claim to overrule Korematsu in Hawaii is both empty and grotesque. It argues that a decision to overrule a prior case is not meaningful unless it specifies which propositions it is disavowing, and Hawaii’s emptiness means to conceal its disturbing affinity …

Forum

This Is (Not) Who We Are: Korematsu, Constitutional Interpretation, and National Identity

Mari J. Matsuda

Asserting the continued usefulness of legal claims, this Essay asks a critical question: what would it really take to overturn Korematsu and end structures of subordination? It argues that a true overruling of Korematsu requires a generative interpretation of our Constitution to uphold the inherent …

Forum

Masquerading Behind a Facade of National Security

Eric K. Yamamoto & Rachel Oyama

What will happen when those discriminated against in the name of national security turn to the courts for legal protection? This Essay refracts this question through the lens of Korematsu, examining how courts will—and should—respond to the dual needs to promote national security and protect fundame…

Forum

Religious Exemptions and Antidiscrimination Law in Masterpiece Cakeshop

Douglas NeJaime & Reva Siegel

Conversation about Masterpiece Cakeshop has focused on the Court’s holding that decisionmakers must treat those seeking religious exemptions with respect. This Essay brings to light the case’s broader guidance on religious exemptions under the Free Exercise Clause and what that means for judicial an…

Forum

Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment, Again

Vicki Schultz

The #MeToo movement has spurred a renewed focus on sexual harassment. But often, the narratives that emerge overemphasize sexualized forms of harassment at the expense of broader structural causes. This Essay builds on Schultz’s previous work to explore those institutional drivers of harassment.

Forum

Queering Sexual Harassment Law

Brian Soucek

Franchina v. City of Providence may be the first judicial opinion of the #MeToo movement. But it also points beyond the #MeToo movement, exemplifying harassment that is motivated by desires to enforce gender roles and why sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination under Title VII.

Forum

Of Power and Process: Handling Harassers in an At-Will World

Rachel Arnow-Richman

Pressure is mounting on companies to take swift disciplinary action regarding alleged sexual harassment. But our employment law incentivizes employers to tolerate high-ranking harassers while cracking down on inappropriate behavior by the rank-and-file. This Essay suggests a better path forward.

Forum

Sexual Harassment Law After #MeToo: Looking to California as a Model

Ramit Mizrahi

The #MeToo movement has motivated people to speak out about sexual harassment, but many of those speaking remain vulnerable to retaliation. This Essay provides the perspective of an employment lawyer on the shortcomings of sexual harassment law and how state law can afford greater protection.

Forum

Was Sexual Harassment Law a Mistake? The Stories We Tell

Tristin K. Green

Does our sexual harassment law hinder the larger project of reducing harassment? This Essay demonstrates that the law constrains stories of harassment and hamstrings our calls for reform. Ultimately, the law, not just public perception, must change if this movement is to have a lasting effect.

Forum

What About #UsToo?: The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

The #MeToo movement has rightly been praised for breaking long-held silences about harassment. It has also rightly been critiqued for ignoring unique forms of harassment that women of color face. This Essay calls for a sexual harassment law that embraces intersectional, multidimensional identity.

Article

The Jurisprudence of Mixed Motives

Andrew Verstein

How do various domains of law deal with mixed motives? Are we condemned by our darkest motive, forgiven according to our noblest, or something in between? This Article develops a precise descriptive vocabulary for how courts analyze motives, concluding that there are only four motive standards in co…

Article

The Nature of Parenthood

Douglas NeJaime

This Article explores what it means to fully vindicate gender and sexual-orientation equality in the law of parental recognition. It does so by situating the treatment of families formed through ART within a longer history of parentage. Inequalities that persist in contemporary…

Article

Inside the Agency Class Action

Michael Sant'Ambrogio & Adam S. Zimmerman

Federal agencies in the United States hear almost twice as many cases each year as all the federal courts. But agencies routinely avoid using tools that courts rely on to efficiently resolve large groups of claims: class actions and other complex litigation procedures. As a re…

Note

Ban the Address: Combating Employment Discrimination Against the Homeless

Sarah Golabek-Goldman

This Note presents a study of obstacles to employment faced by homeless job applicants and offers potential solutions. Homeless job applicants confront discrimination when they provide the address of a shelter or do not have an address to provide on applications. Advocates shou…

Review

Systemic Triage: Implicit Racial Bias in the Criminal Courtroom

L. Song Richardson

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court By Nicole van cleve Stanford university press, april 2016 author. Professor of Law, U.C. Irvine School of Law. A.B. Harvard College, J.D. Yale Law School. I wish to thank Rick Banks, Erwin Chemerins…

Forum

The Implicit Racial Bias in Sentencing: The Next Frontier

Mark W. Bennett

A prominent life scientist recently declared that the Higgs boson particle, the Internet, and implicit bias are the three most important discoveries of the past half-century. In President Obama’s commencement address at Howard University last year, Obama stated: “And we knew . . . that even the good…

Forum

Systemic Implicit Bias

Justin D. Levinson & Robert J. Smith

Legal discourse on implicit bias has changed the way scholars and citizens think about race in the justice system. Ever-growing scholarship, much of it empirical, has identified, confronted, and sought to address how implicit bias operates in nearly every criminal justice context— especially in poli…

Forum

Community Policing as a Counter to Bias in Policing: A Personal Perspective

Dr. Cedric L. Alexander

Some forty years ago, I was a very young black man living in the Florida panhandle. My dream was to get into law enforcement, but I first needed to get into the state academy, which required the endorsement of a Florida police executive. The chief of the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical Universit…

Forum

A Trademark Defense of the Disparagement Bar

Michael Grynberg

The Supreme Court will soon hear argument over whetherCongress may forbid registering trademarks that consist of “matter which may disparage or falsely suggest aconnection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or nationalsymbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” The dispara…

Forum

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and Criminal Liability Under State HIV Laws

Graham White

Nick Rhoades was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 23. In 2005, he began anti-retroviral therapy (ART), an increasingly effective form of treatment that can reduce the amount of HIV in blood to undetectable levels. Three years later, the treatment had done just that. Rhoades’s risk of transmitting th…

Feature

Title IX: An Imperfect but Vital Tool To Stop Bullying of LGBT Students

Adele P. Kimmel

LGBT students are bullied at dramatically higher rates than other students. School bullying generally, and the targeting of LGBT students in particular, has recently garnered national attention as a serious problem that needs to be solved. Just as society is increasingly re…

Feature

In Their Hands: Restoring Institutional Liability for Sexual Harassment in Education

Catharine A. MacKinnon

The treatment of sexual harassment victims by their schools, and of schools by courts, under the institutional liability standard of deliberate indifference for damages in private suits is inconsistent with Title IX’s guarantee of equal educational outcomes on the basis of sex.…

Forum

Griswold and the Public Dimension of the Right to Privacy

Cary Franklin

Fifty years ago, the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut1 invalidated Connecticut’s ban on birth control. The various opinions in Griswold were in many ways products of their time. For instance, none of the Justices focused on the implications of the Connecticut law for women’s equality. Con…

Forum

Roundup: Should We Treat Pregnant Workers Like Disabled Workers?

Claire Michelle Simonich

On December 3, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Young v. United Parcel Service, a case that asks if the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) entitles pregnant workers to receive the same accommodations as disabled workers.1 Already, the EEOC has issued Enforcement Guidance explaining that d…

Forum

Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Race Jurisprudence: “Fidelity to the Law”

Tanya Katerí Hernández

During the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concerns were persistently raised about her ability to be impartial. In this Essay, Professor Hernández argues that the Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence illuminates Justice Sotomayor’s continued commitment to her stated j…

Forum

Congress’s Authority To Enact the Violence Against Women Act: One More Pass at the Missing Argument

Lawrence G. Sager

My “missing argument” invokes the structure of the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. to explain congressional authority to enact the civil rights provisions of the Violence Against Women Act. Like the “relics” of slavery, patterns of violence against women trace to decades of …

Note

An Organic Law Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment: The Northwest Ordinance as the Source of Rights, Privileges, and Immunities

Matthew J. Hegreness

120 Yale L.J. 1820 (2011). 

Since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, judges and scholars have struggled to coherently identify the rights, privileges, and immunities that no state should abridge. Debates over the ambit of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, have consistently overl…

Article

From Colorblindness to Antibalkanization: An Emerging Ground of Decision in Race Equality Cases

Reva B. Siegel

120 Yale L.J. 1278 (2011). 

For decades, the Supreme Court has sharply divided in equal protection race discrimination cases. As commonly described, the Justices disagree about whether the Equal Protection Clause is properly interpreted through a colorblind anticlassification principle concerned wi…

Review

The Common School Before and After Brown: Democracy, Equality, and the Productivity Agenda

Rosemary C. Salomone

120 Yale L.J. 1455 (2011). 

In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark

By Martha Minow

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 320. $24.95.

Article

Discrimination by Comparison

Suzanne B. Goldberg

120 Yale L.J. 728 (2011). 

Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary’s dependence on comparators—those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic—as a favored heuristic fo…

Note

Created in Its Image: The Race Analogy, Gay Identity, and Gay Litigation in the 1950s-1970s

Craig J. Konnoth

119 Yale L.J. 316 (2009). 

Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism. This Note helps complicate these dynamics, arguing that gay identity was not just suppressed and then liberated, but substantially…

Note

Childbearing, Childrearing, and Title VII: Parental Leave Policies at Large American Law Firms

Christen Linke Young

118 Yale L.J. 1182 (2009).

In a fiercely competitive labor market, large American law firms universally offer some paid leave to attorneys after the birth of the child. This Note offers an empirical investigation of those policies, finding that all firms offer paid leave to new mothers, and many fi…

Note

Racial Classification in Assisted Reproduction

Dov Fox

118 Yale L.J. 1844 (2009). 

This Note considers the moral status of practices that facilitate parental selection of sperm donors according to race. Arguments about intentions and consequences cannot convincingly explain the race-conscious design of donor catalogs. This prompts us to examine the exp…

Note

When Parents Aren't Enough: External Advocacy in Special Education

Erin Phillips

117 Yale L.J. 1802 (2008).

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has been widely celebrated for providing millions of disabled children with broader educational and life opportunities. This Note seeks to improve the implementation of the IDEA by questioning one of its key assumptio…

Note

Weight Discrimination: One Size Fits All Remedy?

Lucy Wang

117 Yale L.J. 1900 (2008).

Being fat is one of the most devastating social stigmas today. In seeking a legal remedy, commentators and advocates appeal to existing models of employment discrimination: disability, race, sex, and more recently, appearance. Fat people do face discrimination along these…

Article

Just Semantics: The Lost Readings of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Jill C. Anderson

117 Yale L.J. 992 (2008).

Disability rights advocates and commentators agree that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has veered far off course from the Act’s mandate of protecting people with actual or perceived disabilities from discrimination. They likewise agree that the fault lies in the…

Note

Realizing the Potential of the Joint Harassment/Retaliation Claim

Eisha Jain

117 Yale L.J. 120 (2007).

This Note assesses the relationship between hostile work environment harassment and retaliatory harassment claims by reviewing several cases in which both claims were brought. It argues that courts have unjustifiably narrowed the reach of both claims by disaggregating hara…

Article

Education, Equality, and National Citizenship

Goodwin Liu

116 Yale L.J. 330 (2006)

For disadvantaged children in substandard schools, the recent success of educational adequacy lawsuits in state courts is a welcome development. But the potential of this legal strategy to advance a national goal of equal educational opportunity is limited by a sobering and l…

Note

From Employment to Contract: Section 1981 and Antidiscrimination Law for the Independent Contractor Workforce

Danielle Tarantolo

116 Yale L.J. 170 (2006)

The American workplace has undergone a fundamental transformation as businesses increasingly have replaced traditional employees with independent contractors. Yet many of these individuals fall outside federal employment law, including Title VII's antidiscrimination protectio…

Article

Beyond Lawrence: Metaprivacy and Punishment

Jamal Greene

115 Yale L.J. 1862 (2006)

Lawrence v. Texas remains, after three years of precedential life, an opinion in search of a principle. It is both libertarian–Randy Barnett has called it the constitutionalization of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty–and communitarian–William Eskridge has described it as the ga…

Note

The Unforeseen Effects of Georgia v. Ashcroft on the Latino Community

Alvaro Bedoya

115 Yale L.J. 2112 (2006)

In Georgia v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court weakened the protections afforded to minority voters in jurisdictions covered by the section 5 preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This Note highlights the fact that Georgia v. Ashcroft--a decision applicable to a…

Article

Income Tax Discrimination and the Political and Economic Integration of Europe

Michael J. Graetz & Alvin C. Warren Jr.

115 Yale L.J. 1186 (2006)

In recent years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has invalidated many income tax law provisions of European Union (EU) member states as violating European constitutional treaty guarantees of freedom of movement for goods, services, persons, and capital. These decisions h…

Note

Grutter at Work: A Title VII Critique of Constitutional Affirmative Action

Jessica Bulman-Pozen

115 Yale L.J. 1408 (2006)

This Note argues that Title VII doctrine both illuminates internal contradictions of Grutter v. Bollinger and provides a framework for reading the opinion. Grutter's diversity rationale is a broad endorsement of integration that hinges on the quantitative concept of critical…

Note

Civil Rights, Antitrust, and Early Decision Programs

Ruby Z. Afram

115 Yale L.J. 880 (2006)

Early decision admission programs--which allow a student to receive early notification of admission in return for a commitment to attend a particular institution--enjoyed explosive popularity at America's institutions of higher education in the 1990s. Schools use the programs…

Comment

Affirmative Action's Affirmative Actions: A Reply to Sander

Daniel E. Ho

114 Yale L.J. 2011 (2005)

I am grateful to Professor Sander for his interest in my work and his willingness to pursue a valid answer to the critical question of the effects of law school tier on bar performance. Sander's readiness to respond to my Comment demonstrates the importance of the questions…

Comment

Why Affirmative Action Does Not Cause Black Students To Fail the Bar

Daniel E. Ho

114 Yale L.J. 1997 (2005)

In a widely discussed empirical study, Richard Sander concludes that affirmative action at U.S. law schools causes blacks to fail the bar. If correct, this conclusion would turn the jurisprudence, policy, and law of affirmative action on its head. But the article misapplie…

Response

Mismeasuring the Mismatch: A Response to Ho

Richard H. Sander

114 Yale L.J. 2005 (2005)

Daniel Ho claims that if one tugs at a single strand of my analysis of affirmative action, A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, the entire structure collapses. As I explain briefly in this Response, Ho is wrong. Ho seems to miss the central an…

Essay

To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping

Ian Ayres, Fredrick E. Vars, & Nasser Zakariya

114 Yale L.J. 1613 (2005)

Many studies have documented seller discrimination against consumers, but this Essay tests and finds that consumers discriminate based on the seller's race.

The authors collected data on more than 1000 taxicab rides in New Haven, Connecticut in 2001. After controlling for a …

Feature

Forbidden Conversations: On Race, Privacy, and Community (A Continuing Conversation with John Ely on Racism and Democracy)

Charles R. Lawrence III

114 Yale L.J. 1353 (2005)

More than ever, urban school systems are segregated by race and class. While a chief cause of this segregation is the flight of white and upper-middle-class black families from predominantly black public schools, there is little discussion of white flight in contemporary edu…

Note

The Character of Discrimination Law: The Incompatibility of Rule 404 and Employment Discrimination Suits

Lisa Marshall

114 Yale L.J. 1063 (2005)

Disregarding the dictates of Federal Rule of Evidence 404, plaintiffs in discrimination suits routinely prevail on the basis of propensity proofs. Yet neither the parties nor the courts are to blame for these rampant violations. It is, instead, the dearth of evidence availab…

Article

The Future of Disability Law

Samuel R. Bagenstos

114 Yale L.J. 1 (2004)

Since its enactment in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has dominated discussions of disability law in the legal academy. While the ADA's achievements must be celebrated, the statute's limitations have become increasingly apparent. In particular, the statute appe…

Essay

Juries and Race in the Nineteenth Century

James Forman Jr.

113 Yale L.J. 895 (2004)

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence on criminal juries has overlooked an important piece of history. This is most notable in the context of its jury discrimination jurisprudence over the past twenty years. In Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Equal Protection Clause p…

Note

Private Voucher Schools and the First Amendment Right To Discriminate

Michael Kavey

113 Yale L.J. 743 (2003)

At the end of its 2001 Term, the Supreme Court settled one of the most contentious educational debates in recent history, ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that the inclusion of religious schools in a state school voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause of t…

Article

The Sanitized Workplace

Vicki Schultz

112 Yale L.J. 2061 (2003)

One of American society's most cherished beliefs is that the workplace is, or should be, asexual. This ethic is a legacy of our historic commitment to a conception of organizational rationality that treats sexuality as irrational and unproductive--a conception that had come …

Note

Same-Sex Privacy and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law

Amy Kapczynski

112 Yale L.J. 1257 (2003)

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as it has been interpreted by the courts, is an uncompromising statute. It bars adverse employment actions taken on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, with only one exception: in cases where an employer can …

Comment

Queer Brinksmanship: Citizenship and the Solomon Wars

Amy Kapczynski

112 Yale L.J. 673 (2002)

In 1994, Congress passed a law commonly known as the Solomon Amendment, threatening universities and law schools with loss of federal funding if they deny or effectively prevent military recruiters from accessing campuses and directory information about students. It was the …

Comment

Section 1983, Statutes, and Sovereign Immunity

Nick Daum

112 Yale L.J. 353 (2002)

This Comment argues that a significant, but unnoticed, way around state sovereign immunity has become available under current law. Although sovereign immunity now generally prohibits actions against states for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a plaint…

Article

The Political Economy of School Choice

James E. Ryan & Michael Heise

111 Yale L.J. 2043 (2002)

This Article examines the political economy of school choice and focuses on the role of suburbanites. This group has re- ceived little attention in the commentary but is probably the most important and powerful stakeholder in choice debates. Suburbanites generally do not sup…

Article

The Anti-Antidiscrimination Agenda

Jed Rubenfeld

111 Yale L.J. 1141 (2002)

For a brief historical moment, a shadow overhung constitutional law--the shadow of Bush v. Gore. Many people consider the five-Justice majority opinion in that case to have been, legally speaking, a kind of joke. Obviously, those who hold this view wonder whether that case …

Article

Covering

Kenji Yoshino

111 Yale L.J. 769 (2002)

In this article, Professor Yoshino considers how the gay civil rights movement might enright the American civil rights paradigm, which he takes to be predicated on the paradigm classifications of race and sex. He posits that gays may be able to contribute a more robust theory…

Note

Abolition Without Deliverance: The Law of Connecticut Slavery 1784-1848

David Menschel

111 Yale L.J. 183 (2001)

According to American public memory, slavery in the United States was peculiar to the South. Unless explicitly reminded of the North's history of slavery, most Americans associate the North with abolitionists rather than slaveholders. Alongside this public memory is the work …

Comment

Low Riding

Geoffrey Christopher Rapp

110 Yale L.J. 1089 (2001)

Essay

Equal Protection by Law: Federal Antidiscrimination Legislation After Morrison and Kimel

Robert C. Post & Reva B. Siegel

110 Yale L.J. 441 (2000)

Last Term, the Supreme Court sent ominous signals about the future of federal antidiscrimination law. The Court twice ruled that Congress lacked power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to enact laws prohibiting discrimination. In Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, …

Comment

Measuring Language Rights Along a Spectrum

Christian A. Garza

110 Yale L.J. 379 (2000)