The Inadequate Police Protection of Battered Wives: Can a city and its police be held liable under the equal protection clause?

The police strive to settle the vast majority of wife battering cases without arrest or through mediation, often leading to terrible results for the abused wife. This Note supports holding a city and its police liable under the equal protection clause for the inadequate police protection of battered wives. The Note finds the best legal strategy under the equal protection clause would involve showing impermissible gender-based discrimination

Problem of Equality in Takings, The

The Supreme Court is finally beginning to bring clarity to the law of regulatory takings and in the process is bringing to the fore a previously submerged theme in the jurisprudence: regulatory takings as a question of distributional justice and horizontal equity. This Article argues that this equality dimension is fundamentally problematic. On a theoretical level, privileging norms of equality engrafts political process rationales for heightened scrutiny onto groups defined solely by the differential burden of a regulation, an exercise in circularity. Equally troubling is the inverted political economy of regulatory takings claims that is likely to result: the greatest judicial protection is provided to those most able to navigate the political system. And from a doctrinal perspective, an overly robust equality inquiry housed in the Takings Clause is inherently indeterminate, warping not only the fabric of takings but also of equal protection jurisprudence. Accordingly, this Article argues that concerns about the uneven distribution of regulatory burdens should sound not under the Takings Clause but rather under the Equal Protection Clause, with its deferential standards for the review of ordinary economic and social regulation. Excising the equality dimension of regulatory takings would properly leave the Takings Clause as a guard against those rare regulatory actions that are functionally equivalent to the direct exercise of eminent domain. The result would be a simpler, clearer, and ultimately more egalitarian law of takings

Basic Themes For Regulatory Takings Litigation

There is probably no area of law that is as fraught with confusion and inconsistencies as the regulatory takings doctrine. In this Article, Professor Byrne summarizes arguments, called litigation themes, that can be made to help circumnavigate the many pitfalls and quagmires that await takings liti-gators as a result of this confusion. The Article argues that the Fifth Amend-ment\u27s Takings Clause was never meant to apply to the regulation of property, but only to physical or legal appropriations. Professor Byrne suggests that the Due Process Clauses or the Equal Protection Clause are equally capable of resolving the conflicts that result from the regulation of property that have traditionally been examined under the Takings Clause. The litigation themes discussed in this Article are a means to shift regulatory takings arguments away from the Takings Clause toward the Due Process Clauses or the Equal Protection Clause

Hollingsworth v. Perry: Expressive Harm and the Stakes of Marriage

This commentary previews an upcoming Supreme Court case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, in which the Court may decide whether Proposition 8 violates either the Equal Protection Clause or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution

A Bridge Too Far: The Limits of the Political Process Doctrine in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action

This commentary previews an upcoming Supreme Court case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, in which the Court will consider whether Michigan violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by amending its constitution to prohibit race-based preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions

Shifting the Burden: Potential Applicability of Bush v. Gore to Hazardous Waste Facility Siting

Since its inception in the 1980s, advocates of the environmental justice movement have attempted to remedy the disproportionate siting of hazardous waste facilities in minority neighborhoods by employing the Equal Protection Clause. These lawsuits have thus far been largely unsuccessful because of litigants’ inability to prove intentional discrimination by government actors in such siting decisions. However, in the 2000 decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, the mere potential for discriminate impact of a decision made by government actors was sufficient to trigger a strict scrutiny analysis under the Equal Protection Clause. While the decision was declared to have little precedential value outside the voting rights context, this Note examines the potential for application of this novel approach to the Equal Protection Clause in future environmental justice claims arising under the Fourteenth Amendment

Ruth Bader Ginsburg\u27s Equal Protection Clause: 1970-80

Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg of Columbia Law School was the leading Supreme Court litigator for gender equality in the crucial decade, 1970-80. In addition to teaching her classes, producing academic articles, and co-authoring the first casebook on sex discrimination and the law, she worked on some sixty cases (depending on how one counts), including over two dozen cases in the Supreme Court. Rumor has it she did not sleep for ten years; her prodigious output gives the rumor some credence. Her impact on the law during that critical decade earned her the title the Thurgood Marshall of the women\u27s movement and secured her place in history-even before she became a federal appellate judge and Supreme Court justice. The author devotes her allotted space to two, intimately intertwined, topics: first, Ruth Ginsburg and the Supreme Court\u27s standard of review in sex discrimination cases, and second, the substance of Ruth Ginsburg\u27s concept of gender equality in law

The Ninth Circuit\u27s \u3ci\u3ePerry\u3c/i\u3e Decision and the Constitutional Politics of Marriage Equality

In Perry v. Brown, the Ninth Circuit ruled that California’s Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause. Reacting to the state supreme court’s recognition of marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples, Proposition 8 was a 2008 voter initiative that altered the state constitution to “restore” the “traditional” understanding of civil marriage to exclude same-sex couples. The major theme of the Yes-on-Eight campaign was that the state should not deem lesbian and gay unions to be “marriages” because schoolchildren would then think that lesbian and gay relationships are just as good as straight “marriages.” Proposition 8 intended that gay and lesbian couples be carved out of civil marriage and relegated to a separate institution, domestic partnerships. The court properly viewed this official status segregation with suspicion—a suspicion that was confirmed by the proponents’ open denigration of lesbian and gay marriages and their inability to tie taking away marriage rights to a genuine public interest. The original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause was that the Constitution does not tolerate class legislation—namely, laws that separate one class of citizens from the rest and bestow upon its members a less esteemed legal regime and, with it, an inferior status. This is exactly what Proposition 8 did. Hence, Judge Reinhardt was strictly enforcing the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, as applied to the facts before him

How the Diversity Rationale Lays the Groundwork for New Discrimination: Examining the Trajectory of Equal Protection Doctrine

This Article advocates differentiating between two distinct categories of equal protection cases. The first-what I have termed indicator cases-are instances where courts consider whether there are sufficient factual indications to demonstrate the existence of aprimafacie equal protection violation. The second-violation casesare instances where courts consider, having already determined the existence of an equal protection violation, whether there is a good enough justification for a prima facie equal protection violation. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not differentiated between these two different types of cases. This has led to a string of decisions where the Supreme Court has erroneously looked for justifications for non-existent Equal Protection Clause violations, when in fact it should have been looking for indications to determine whether there actually had been an Equal Protection Clause violation. But even more troubling are some of the suggestions on the horizon; for example, the diversity rationale adopted by the Court as sufficient to survive strict scrutiny could serve to justify discriminatory police tactics such as racial profiling. By clearly outlining the above distinction and its analytic ramifications, this Article hopes to undermine such arguments built on the diversity rationale as wholly unfounded