Discrimination

Scholars, policymakers, and the media acknowledge that surveillance can threaten privacy and increase the risk of discrimination. Surveillance of people with disabilities, however, is positioned as being a convenient way of averting a host of problems: It can be seen as a way to protect people with disabilities from abuse and neglect, to prevent Medicaid fraud, and to proactively protect school communities from mass shootings. Increasingly, as...

The foundational faith of disability law is the proposition that we can reduce disability discrimination if we can foster interactions between disabled and nondisabled people. This central faith, which is rooted in contact theory, has encouraged integration of people with and without disabilities, with the expectation that contact will reduce preju­dicial atti­tudes and shift societal norms. However, neither the scholarship nor disa­bility law...

Since it was decided in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas has under­written the effort to expand access to marriage to same-sex couples. It is curious that Lawrence has served as a foundation for same-sex marriage. After all, Lawrence was not a case about marriage—same-sex or otherwise. Instead, Lawrence was a case about criminal sex and more specifically about limiting the state’s authority to regulate and...

Introduction At the end of June 2014, the Supreme Court decided one of the most publicized controversies of decades. In a decision covering two cases, widely referred to as Hobby Lobby, the Court held that closely held for-profit corporations, based on their owners’ religious convictions, have a right under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) […]

As presently constructed, equal protection doctrine is an identity-based jurisprudence, meaning that the level of scrutiny applied to an alleged act of discrimination turns on the identity category at issue. In that sense, equal protection relies on identity as a proxy, standing in to signify the types of discrimination we find most troubling.

Equal protection’s current use of identity as proxy leads to a number of problems, including...

  On June 25, 2015, the Supreme Court held in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (Inclusive Communities or ICP ) that parts of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) include a disparate-impact standard of liability. This standard allows liability without a showing of illegal intent and traces back to the […]

Data on school discipline reveals significant numbers of students are being suspended and expelled from public schools for a variety of low-level offenses, the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. Additionally, troubling disparities have emerged: Students with disabilities, poor students, and nonwhite students are removed from school at greater rates, and for less significant actions, than are white students. Due process requires a short, informal...