A Few Random Thoughts About Socio-Economic Rights in the United States in Light of the 2008 Financial Meltdown

Socio-economic rights, first articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) sixty years ago, are regaining currency. Legal practitioners around the world, emboldened by emerging constitutional democracies in Eastern Europe and South Africa that constitutionalized socio-economic rights, are actively seeking to enforce these rights. The UDHR reaffirm [ed] faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and served as the basis for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Among those rights included in the Covenant are housing, food, and healthcare

What Documentary Films Teach Us About the Criminal Justice System - Introduction

Film . . . has been used effectively to shape public perceptions about the criminal justice system. . . . [and] the documentary form has power to convict or release a defendant, as well as to disclose the positive and negative aspects of the criminal justice system. . . . Three articles on this subject appear in this issue of the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, RELIGION, GENDER AND CLASS and add to this body of scholarship. . . .Our goal was to foster a series of dialogues among and between a number of individuals: filmmakers...

\u3cem\u3eBrown\u3c/em\u3e at 50: Reconstructing \u3cem\u3eBrown\u3c/em\u3e\u27s Promise

Today the measure of equal education for black children often is the racial composition of the school population rather than the quality of education received. Increasingly educational achievement for children of all races is tied to socioeconomic status. Since whites as a group are more affluent than non-whites, race and class tend to get conflated leaving uninformed people to conclude that racial integration alone is the measure of equal educational opportunities for black and other non-white children. Legal scholars writing about equal educational opportunities tend to focus either on ways to achieve racial integration or funding equality. Few scholars explore how to structure new theories of educational equality that acknowledge and squarely address the twin tensions inherent in Brown—racial integration and equal educational opportunity for all children. This country’s experience over the past fifty years illustrates how you can have one without the other. This essay explains how these goals got conflated and why unlinking and more clearly articulating the rationale for each may ultimately lead to the achievement of both goals

Multiracial Malaise: Multiracial as a Legal Racial Category

The focus of this Article is the underlying assumption of the Brookings Institution report that multiracial individuals constitute a separate racial category. My discussion of legal racial categories focuses only ongovernment “racial” definitions. Multiracial individuals should enjoy thefreedom to self-identify as they wish—and, like others, be afforded theprotections of antidiscrimination law.The question is whether a separate legal racial category is needed to provide that protection. Race in this country has been “crafted from the point of view of [white] race protection” protecting the interests of white Americans from usurpation by non whites and, unless the creation of a separate multiracial legal category advances this goal, change will be resisted. Commentaries grounded in Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and federal statutory antidiscrimination jurisprudence shape the construction of racial categories in U.S.law. This jurisprudence influences the racial categories and definitions used for the census. The next Part briefly discusses the attempt to get a multiracial category on the U.S. census

Balancing Competing Individual Constitutional Rights: Raising Some Questions

Despite increasing support for global human rights ..., some scholars and constitutional democracies, like the United States, continue to resist constitutionalizing socio-economic rights. Socio-economic rights, unlike political and civil constitutional rights that usually prohibit government actions, are thought to impose positive obligations on government. As a result, constitutionalizing socio-economic rights raises questions about separation of powers and the competence of courts to decide traditionally legislative and executive matters. ... [W]hen transitional democracies, like South Africa, choose to constitutionalize socio-economic rights, courts inevitably must grapple with their role in the realization of those rights.... Two questions immediately come to mind: (1) whether it is possible to treat conflicting constitutional rights equally, or whether a hierarchy of rights, either formal or informal, is an inevitable result; and (2) whether in a true participatory democracy courts should be placed in the position of determining this hierarchy of constitutional rights, or whether the ordering of rights is an inherently political task. A related question is whether when vast socio-economic inequities exists among the citizenry a judicial approach is more appropriate until that society has reduced those inequities.... [and when courts] declare these rights justiciable, judicial enforcement is an issue. This chapter argues that some hierarchy of rights that privileges one set of rights over another is inevitable, especially where neither the state constitution nor the court clearly creates a formal hierarchy of rights. It uses the right to housing cases decided during the Constitutional Court’s first decade to explore this question