Fourth Amendment Accommodations: (UN)Compelling Public Needs, Balancing Acts, and the Fiction of Consent

The problems of public housing-including crime, drugs, and gun violence- have received an enormous amount of national attention. Much attention has also focused on warrantless searches and consent searches as solutions to these problems. This Note addresses the constitutionality of these proposals and asserts that if the Supreme Court\u27s current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is taken to its logical extremes, warrantless searches in public housing can be found constitutional. The author argues, however, that such an interpretation fails to strike the proper balance between public need and privacy in the public housing context. The Note concludes by proposing alternative consent-based regimes that would pass constitutional muster

Fourth Amendment Accommodations: (UN)Compelling Public Needs, Balancing Acts, and the Fiction of Consent

The problems of public housing-including crime, drugs, and gun violence- have received an enormous amount of national attention. Much attention has also focused on warrantless searches and consent searches as solutions to these problems. This Note addresses the constitutionality of these proposals and asserts that if the Supreme Court\u27s current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is taken to its logical extremes, warrantless searches in public housing can be found constitutional. The author argues, however, that such an interpretation fails to strike the proper balance between public need and privacy in the public housing context. The Note concludes by proposing alternative consent-based regimes that would pass constitutional muster

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

Color/Identity/Justice: Chicano Trials

This Book Review seeks to rectify in small measure the omission of color from American documents of black/white legal and political struggle. Enlarging the spectrum of struggle beyond the black/white paradigm not only works to correct the historical record of color in law, but also helps to advance the progress of color in society. As a starting point for this revision, the review turns to Ian F. Haney Lopez's new book, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Racism on Trial broadens and deepens the study of indigenous and immigrant legal and political struggle by documenting the defense of the Chicano movement in its rise out of the East Los Angeles Mexican community of California amid the turmoil of the 1960s

Murdering the Spirit: Racism, Rights, and Commerce

Patricia Williams\u27 The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor, is an eloquent, profoundly original, and often brilliant collection of interdisciplinary essays and stories concerning the impact of racism and poverty on the human spirit; the historic and continuing role of law and legal institutions in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating those harms; and the possibilities and dangers imminent in the attempt to use law to effect a remedy for them. This is a book that we should celebrate: it reminds us that books are occasionally very, very important, that reading can be transformative, and that writing sometimes can be and should always strive to be a moral act of the highest order. In the first Part of this review, I will briefly discuss just three of the substantive and disciplinary accomplishments of this book, and then I will present two possible objections (and possible responses) to some of the implicit and explicit theses the book defends. It is my view, however, that the greatness of this book lies neither in its disciplinary breakthroughs nor in its explicit analysis of race and law. The book\u27s importance and uniqueness is in what it shows about the nature of private racism, which Williams provocatively calls a form of spirit-murder -- the generic disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard. Much of Williams\u27 book is given over to rich personal depictions of both the nature of the act of spirit murder thus defined and, more importantly, perhaps, the nature of the injury its victims experience. Thus, in the second and major Part of this review, I will try to describe spirit-murder, the depiction of which I take to be the heart of Williams\u27 contribution to our modem understanding of race relations in this country. In the concluding Part, I will review the two possible legal paths toward compensating or correcting the multiple injuries of spirit-murder that Williams describes. The first, toward which Williams is deeply ambivalent, consists in the related worlds of commerce and contract. If spirit-murder is, in its legal sense, that injury that results from being the object rather than the subject of property, contract, and commerce -- a legal disregard felt most dramatically by the slave -- then inclusion as subjects rather than objects in the world of commerce might be thought an adequate remedy. The promise, however, that the injuries sustained from the legacy of slavery would be eradicated simply through the legally mandated inclusion of African Americans in this country\u27s commerce has turned out to be at least somewhat illusory. Consequently, both commerce and the law of commercial relations play a pivotal but deeply ambiguous role in Williams\u27 book. The second route of recovery, about which Williams is less equivocal and far more hopeful, is through an expansive and avowedly utopian conception of rights

Comment: Desegregation -- The Times They Are A-Changin\u27

Courts are currently concerned over the extent of their powers to integrate racially separate housing and schools within metropolitan areas containing black inner cities and white suburbs. This Comment reviews the jurisprudence addressing when it is a proper exercise of a court\u27s equity jurisdiction to fashion a metropolitan or interdistrict remedial order in which the city and its surrounding suburbs are treated as one system. The Comment focuses on the recent Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley, in which the Court reversed a decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the district court\u27s power to order enforcement of a plan that would have integrated the schools of up to fifty-four school districts in Detroit. The Court held that an interdistrict remedy is dependent on finding an interdistrict constitutional violation, which it found was not present in the Milliken case. The Comment observes that Milliken was the first time since Brown I that the Court had reversed a lower court order which sought to promote the integration of the races after finding unconstitutional segregation. It thus concludes that the history of the Supreme Court as an instrument of reversing the separation of the races has entered a new phase

The Ugly Truth About Appearance Discrimination and the Beauty of Our Employment Discrimination Law

The keynote speaker for the conference begins by reminding the audience that a mere quarter of a century earlier there was no federal law that expressly prohibited discrimination in employment based on physical appearance. Considering the difficulty of crafting and enacting an appearance-based employment discrimination law should lead to a fuller appreciation of not only our employment discrimination laws generally, but also the Americans with Disabilities Act specifically

From Registration to Recounts Revisited: Developments in the Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States

As a follow-up to a study of problems during the 2006 elections, examines the states' continuing adjustments to institutional arrangements, voter registration databases, convenience voting, and post-election processes in the 2008 elections