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Public Justice is a national public interest law firm dedicated to preserving access to justice, remedying government and corporate wrongdoing, and holding the powerful accountable in courts. As part of its access-to-justice work, Public Justice created an Iqbal Project in 2009 to combat misuse of the Supreme Court's decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009). The Project tracks developments in the case law and provides assistance to counsel facing Iqbal-based motions. Public Justice is concerned that overbroad readings of Iqbal threaten to deny justice to many injured plaintiffs with meritorious claims. In addition to Public Justice's Iqbal-related interest in this case, the firm also represents prisoners, arrestees, other detainees, their family members, and other plaintiffs in a variety of cases involving constitutional claims. See, e.g., Hui v. Castaneda, 130 S. Ct. 1845 (2010); Dillon v. Rogers, 596 F.3d 260 (5th Cir. 2010); Menotti v. City of Seattle, 409 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2005); Everett v. Cherry, No. 08-00622 (E.D. Va.) (case pending). Public Justice is concerned that Appellants' arguments regarding supervisory liability will, if accepted, prevent many plaintiffs with constitutional claims from obtaining a full remedy. The Legal Aid Society of the City of New York is a private organization that has provided free legal assistance to indigent persons in New York City for over 125 years. Through its Prisoners' Rights Project, the Society seeks to ensure that 2 prisoners' constitutional and statutory rights are protected. The Society advocates on behalf of prisoners in the New York City jails and New York state prisons, and conducts litigation on prison conditions. The Society often litigates claims of supervisory liability. The Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project is a private not-for-profit organization created to ensure equal access to justice for indigent institutionalized persons. Part of the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network, the Institutional Law Project provides direct representation services, self-help and other legal materials, and class representation to eligible low-income residents of Pennsylvania's prisons, jails, state hospitals, and state centers. The Project also takes part in advocacy and legislative initiatives concerning institutional reform in Pennsylvania.

The almost twenty years that followed Brown showed real progress toward a color-blind society. That progress, however, lost momentum in the 1970s as many civil rights leaders advanced well-intended, but poorly conceived, policies with the all-too-familiar consequence of dividing people along color lines. In that decade, the bright future of race relations began to dim as discriminatory techniques--mislabelled as"benign" or "affirmative"-reemerged to work their destruction on the hopes of a public anxious to find harmonious, goodwilled solutions to the problems of the past.Today, the struggle continues for a national heritage blind to skin color or ethnic background. The challenge for the present generation, as for its predecessors, is to reset our sights on the nondiscriminatory ideal that guided our forefathers down the path of greater civil equality. During the past eight years the Reagan Justice Department resolutely charted such a course, and by daring to challenge the liberal orthodoxy that invariably zigzags down the road of political favoritism, has assumed an important and central role in the ongoing national debate.

The Harlow Court both altered the substantive law of qualified immunity and established a procedural goal for implementing the defense. This Note will focus primarily on the procedural aspects of the decision. In the three years that have elapsed since Harlow, lower courts have struggled to carry out the Supreme Court's directive to resolve the qualified immunity issue, if possible, on summary judgment. As a consequence, three distinct but First, what are the outer bounds of the ban on factual inquiry into an official's subjective state of mind? Second, which party, plaintiff or defendant, should bear the burden of proof on the issue of qualified immunity? Last, if the district court denies summary judgment to officials claiming qualified immunity, should officials be able to appeal the adverse decision immediately? In addressing these areas of uncertainty, this Note will focus on Harlow's stated goal of the quick termination of insubstantial claims. This Note will emphasize that this procedural goal is not merely a logical consequence of Harlow's substantive holding, but also a means to maintain a fair balance between Harlow's competing substantive policies of (1) providing for the vindication of meritorious constitutional claims and (2) protecting governmental and judicial efficiency. In part 2 this Note will present in greater detail the key holdings of the Harlow opinion and its overall policy orientation. Part III will identify the ways in which lower courts have differed in their reading of Harlow on these three procedural questions; it will reexamine the questions in light of the policies underlying both the Harlow opinion and the relevant procedural vehicles-summary judgment, discovery, burdens of proof, and appeal ability of decisions. Part III, section A will focus on the scope of subjective discovery permissible before summary judgment," section B on the allocation of the burden of proof, and section C on the appeal ability of summary judgment denial.' The Note also will analyze the effect of the ...

Is the future of civil rights subnational? If one is looking for civil rights innovation, much of this innovation might be happening through legislation, regulatory frameworks, and policies adopted by state and local governments. In recent years, states and cities have adopted legislation banning discrimination in housing based on the source of an individual's income, regulating the consideration of arrest or conviction in employment decisions, and prohibiting discrimination in employment based on an applicant's credit history. While the deployment of subnational power is not new to civil rights, what does appear novel is the number of these initiatives in recent years alongside the possibility that these state and local measures might not end inevitably with national civil rights legislation. Many of these innovations build on recent movements to use local regulatory frameworks to increase wages and work conditions for lower income workers, and these innovations address not just identity exclusion based on race or ethnicity but also exclusions based on socioeconomic status. The political economy that sustains their emergence and implementation depends on demographics and political cultures that are largely centered on cities and large metropolitan regions. In addition, some of the innovations proliferating at the state and local levels such as local first-source hiring, community-benefits agreements (CBAs), and inclusionary zoning depend on regulatory powers exclusive to subnational governments. This article explores whether this "local turn" in civil rights law can ever be a satisfactory equilibrium for those interested in advancing civil rights and equality, and offers a cautiously hopeful account of how these subnational innovations might succeed and even spread beyond particular localities.

During its 1949 session, the legislature of the state of Washington enacted Chapter 183, a law known as "The Law against Discrimination in Employment." That law follows in a general way the form and the substance of the New York law entitled, "Law against Discrimination," enacted in 1945, but the authors of the Washington Act adopted some of the provisions of the Connecticut Act relating to procedure. Note will be taken of differences between the Washington law and the law of other states having similar legislation. The Washington law declares that practices of discrimnation because of race, creed, color, or national origin are matters of state concern and menace the foundations of a free democratic state. It also declares that the opportunity to obtain employment without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin is recognized as a civil right.

Bias and discrimination continue to limit opportunities and outcomes for racial minorities in American institutions in the twenty-first century. The diversity rationale, touting the broad benefits of inclusion, has become widely accepted by corporate employers, courts, and universities. At the same time, many view a focus on antidiscrimination law and the threat of legal enforcement as outmoded and ineffective. Thus, many organizations talk less in terms of the mandates of laws such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or a "legal case," and more in terms of a "business case" where benefits of inclusion seem to accrue to everyone. It is easy to explain the appeal of the business case for diversity: it merges the goals of racial inclusion with business profitability and corporate interests. Antidiscrimination law, by contrast, is viewed as top down and coercive. But there is one major problem: there is little-to-no evidence that the business case for diversity actually reduces bias and promotes racial inclusion. In this Article, I present experimental research findings that for the first time test the relative efficacy of the business case rationale versus a legal case for equity and inclusion. I find that inclusion efforts grounded in antidiscrimination law, or the legal case, are the most likely to curb widely held biases and promote equitable behavior. These findings challenge emerging scholarship that suggests legal justifications for integration are no longer effective. Despite the appeal of the business case for diversity, emphasis on corporate interests actually generate negative beliefs about inclusion and more biased decision making. Civil rights law, with a deeper historical, political, and moral grounding, appears to exert a stronger normative influence. Based on these findings, this Article argues that antidiscrimination law is still needed, not only for its exogenous pressure on organizations to promote inclusion but also for its normative effect on individual values, beliefs about inequality, and behavior.

Fifty years after the passage of Civil Rights Act, minority healthcare remains separate and unequal. We combine insights from Civil Rights Law and research on racial-disparities to understand whether stronger enforcement of existing Civil Rights laws would improve minority healthcare today, or whether complementary approaches are also necessary. Despite earlier success, modern challenges to improving minority healthcare are different than those confronted during de jure segregation. We review these challenges and the potential effectiveness of existing Civil Rights legislation in overcoming them. We conclude that enforcement could be strengthened by executive orders that strengthen existing laws, but Congressional action would be required to allow private individuals to bring suits against discriminatory providers. We contrast the relative benefits of this approach to wider non-litigation-based solutions. We conclude that a combination of the two approaches would better address the challenge of improving minority healthcare in the 21st century.

Labor and civil rights movements in the United States share the aspiration of empowering workers to attain economic and social justice in the workplace. From their inception, both movements have articulated goals that link individual dignity and group empowerment, economic access and fair treatment, legal entitlements and political mobilization. They proceed on the premise that the workplace is a site where vital economic interests and possibilities for self-development come together. Put otherwise, both forms of advocacy strive for a regime that links these concerns to do justice to the workplace as a site for the expression of democratic citizenship.

"Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594 - a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this 'passive nullification' consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement"--Provided by publisher.

This Article suggests that the Court's current confusion derives in part from its failure to distinguish between two categories of discriminatory intent, which may be termed goal discrimination and means discrimination. Goal discrimination involves the invidious consideration of race in the selection of the objective which a government policy seeks to achieve. Means discrimination occurs when there is an invidious consideration of race in selecting or weighing the method to be used in achieving that objective. Both forms of discrimination fall within the equal protection clause's prohibition against discriminatory government action, but they involve different circumstances and thus must be proved in somewhat different ways. Recognition of the distinction between the two categories leads to a more objective method of analyzing evidence of intentional discrimination and contributes to a greater understanding of the meaning of the equal protection clause.

This article purports to investigate state legislation which prohibits discrimination in public accommodations and some of the more important administrative efforts which have been undertaken to implement these statutes. More specifically, the article attempts to: (1) summarize legislation currently in effect which prohibits discrimination in public accommodations; (2) investigate litigation, which has contested public accommodations statutes in order to determine whether the statutes threaten wider and more fundamental liberties; and (3) review some of the main activities of anti-discrimination commissions—agencies which have undertaken to execute or apply public accommodation laws.

These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics.

The Supreme Court has failed to clarify this important procedural exception to the clear error standard. More than this, the Court has failed to explain why it refuses to apply independent judgment to all constitutional facts. The results of the differential treatment of these two legal concepts are: 1) Rule 52, and the Supreme Court's approach to its constitutional fact exception is another type of denial of structural due process, preventing the legal norming of intentional discrimination jurisprudence; 2) institutional interests of doctrinal coherence and decisional accuracy are minimized in favor of reducing direct costs to the judicial system; 3) whether working inside or outside the intentionalist framework of discrimination, it makes sense to apply the independent appellate judgment standard to intentional discrimination findings, and; 4) the persistent application of Rule 52's clear error standard to findings of intentional discrimination is yet another example of the Supreme Court's narrowed approach to Equal Protection violations.