Invisible Walls: An Examination of the Legal Strategy of the Restrictive Covenant Cases

On May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court issued two decisions in four cases that are now remembered as Shelley v. Kraemer. The conflict which caused the litigation arose from a dramatic population shift that occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. The great migration of black families from rural areas to urban industrial centers prompted various efforts to establish and maintain racial segregation in housing. After legislated segregation failed, private covenants became the primary vehicle for maintaining segregated housing. The forces against restrictive covenants consisted of black families in search of adequate housing, the NAACP, and the lawyers who served on that organization\u27s legal committee. Charles Hamilton Houston, who served at various times as counsel to the NAACP and was dean of Howard University Law School and the architect of the NAACP\u27s school desegregation strategy, devised the restrictive covenant strategy. The covenant strategy involved an evidentiary demonstration of the relationship of crime and disease to overcrowded conditions in urban ghettoes, and the role of restrictive covenants in the perpetuation of those problems. This strategy, which made the victory in Shelley possible, also had a profound influence on the Supreme Court\u27s attitude toward civil rights litigation. This Article will explore the origin and development of the covenants, and examine urban housing conditions in the 1930s and 1940s. It will review the NAACP\u27s legal strategy and that organization\u27s coordination of the covenant litigation, and it will analyze each of the four cases that eventually reached the Supreme Court

Turning Back the Clock: The Assault on Affirmative Action

This Article considers the legal and policy issues presented by affirmative action in higher education

Transient dynamics of a superconducting nonlinear oscillator

We investigate the transient dynamics of a lumped-element oscillator based on a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The SQUID is shunted with a capacitor forming a nonlinear oscillator with resonance frequency in the range of several GHz. The resonance frequency is varied by tuning the Josephson inductance of the SQUID with on-chip flux lines. We report measurements of decaying oscillations in the time domain following a brief excitation with a microwave pulse. The nonlinearity of the SQUID oscillator is probed by observing the ringdown response for different excitation amplitudes while the SQUID potential is varied by adjusting the flux bias. Simulations are performed on a model circuit by numerically solving the corresponding Langevin equations incorporating the SQUID potential at the experimental temperature and using parameters obtained from separate measurements characterizing the SQUID oscillator. Simulations are in good agreement with the experimental observations of the ringdowns as a function of applied magnetic flux and pulse amplitude. We observe a crossover between the occurrence of ringdowns close to resonance and adiabatic following at larger detuning from the resonance. We also discuss the occurrence of phase jumps at large amplitude drive. Finally, we briefly outline prospects for a readout scheme for superconducting flux qubits based on the discrimination between ringdown signals for different levels of magnetic flux coupled to the SQUID.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure