In celebrating the monumental accomplishments of the new form of public law litigation that Constance Baker Motley and her colleagues pioneered, this Essay reinterprets their paradigm-shifting body of work in a manner that obliges the current generation of civil rights advocates to change direction. In the hopes of reengaging the affirmative force of constitutional litigation after decades in which it has waned, this Essay argues that the central...
Education Rights
Introduction Constance Baker Motley, the first female attorney of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), was dedicated to reimagining the nature and scope of civil rights protections in American jurisprudence. Motley’s legal career chronicles the ways in which litigation served to bring about revolutionary social changes in our society. Motley, a staunch believer in the […]
With recent rejections of plaintiff challenges in Colorado, Texas, and California, and continued battles over implementation of court orders in Kansas and Washington, state court judges may be sounding a cautious note on the limitations of the almost half-century-old educational finance reform litigation movement. Undeterred, advocates for economically disadvantaged schoolchildren have not abandoned the judiciary as an institution for advancing...