Tag: Civil Rights

Religious Institutionalism, Implied Consent, and the Value of Voluntarism – Article by Michael A. Helfand

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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Increasingly, clashes between the demands of law and aspirations of religion center on the legal status and treatment of religious institutions. Much of the rising tensions revolving around religious institutions stem from conflicts between the religious objectives of those institutions and their impact on third parties who do not necessarily share those same objectives. Indeed, these persisting tensions have pressed two fundamental questions to the forefront of legal debate: what institutions count as religious institutions and to what extent should these institutions be excused from complying with otherwise valid laws?

 

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A Confident Pluralism – Article by John D. Inazu

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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In February 2014, the Kansas House of Representatives proposed a bill that would have permitted business owners with religious objections to deny some customers services and accommodations. Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Kansas legislators would have allowed citizens of Topeka to refuse restrooms, restaurants, and water fountains to other citizens.

Across the state of California today, conservative religious student groups are no longer welcome on public school campuses like Hastings College of the Law. And it’s not just the West Coast. Vanderbilt University, Bowdoin College, and a number of other schools have also kicked out conservative religious groups. These schools rely on “all-comers” policies that require student groups to accept any student who wants to join, irrespective of a student’s beliefs or actions. Conservative religious groups with creedal membership or leadership requirements are unable to comply.

 

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Gay Rights, Religious Accommodations, and the Purposes of Antidiscrimination Law – Article by Andrew Koppelman

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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In 2006, an Albuquerque photographer declined to photograph a same-sex wedding, citing religious objections. The couple sued her for discrimination and won. Cases like this one present a conflict between gay rights and religious liberty. Religious conservatives feel that it would be sinful for them to personally facilitate same-sex marriages, and they have sought to amend the laws to accommodate their objections. These efforts have met fierce resistance. In Arizona, the only state where a legislature has passed a religious accommodation law, the governor vetoed it in response to enormous national public pressure.

The resistance is largely unnecessary. Gay rights advocates have misconceived the tort of discrimination as a particularized injury to the person, rather than the artifact of social engineering that it really is. Religious conservatives likewise have failed to grasp the purposes of antidiscrimination law, and so have demanded accommodations that would be massively overbroad.

 

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Accommodating Nonmarriage – Article by Melissa Murray

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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When Vanessa Willock emailed Elane Photography seeking information about photography services for her upcoming commitment ceremony, she was likely expecting a run-of-the-mill response—pricing information, samples of prior work, a discussion of the photographer’s availability for the date in question. She was not expecting Elaine Huguenin, a co-owner of Elane Photography, to refuse the commission outright on the ground that she “[did] not photograph same-sex weddings.” Likewise, when Charlie Craig and David Mullins entered Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado to order a cake for a party celebrating their Massachusetts marriage, they probably were not expecting the owner, Jack Phillips, to refuse their business because his religious convictions prevented him from making cakes for same-sex weddings.

 

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Die and Let Live? The Asymmetry of Accommodation – Article by Steven D. Smith

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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The increasingly apt term “culture wars” refers to a polarizing tendency in which Americans are coming to coalesce around opposing political agendas that themselves murkily reflect divergent conceptions and evaluations of individualism, community, equality, authority, tradition, sexuality, Christianity, and the meaning and mission (if any) of America. At the moment, the controversy over same-sex marriage is the most fiercely contested political and cultural battle, but the intensity of that particular battle is likely due in part to the fact that same-sex marriage is only one salient issue within a larger struggle.

 

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It’s About Money: The Fundamental Contradiction of Hobby Lobby – Article by Nomi Maya Stolzenberg

From Volume 88, Number 3 (March 2015)
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In late November, shortly after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Linda Greenhouse published a perceptive op-ed arguing that the contraceptive mandate cases “aren’t about the day-in, day-out stuff of jurisprudence under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause,” and they aren’t about the rights of corporations either. Instead, she said, “They are about sex.”

In response to which I want to say yes, they’re about sex. And they’re about religion. But they’re also about money. They’re about sex, God, and money. Since sex and God have both gotten a lot of attention already, I’m going to focus on the money.

 

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Stereotype Threat and Antidiscrimination Law: Affirmative Steps to Promote Meritocracy and Racial Equality in Education – Article by Sam Erman & Gregory M. Walton

From Volume 88, Number 2 (January 2015)
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A new generation of social science research creates new opportunities to increase fairness and reduce racial inequality in education. This research raises important questions for antidiscrimination law.

Over the past twenty years, research conducted around the world has established that for students subject to pervasive negative intellectual stereotypes, such as African American and Latino students (and many other groups, including, in math and science, girls and women), school contexts that call to mind these stereotypes can produce distraction and anxiety that impede school achievement and contribute to racial disparities. This “stereotype threat” is the default in evaluative, challenging academic environments. Hence, common measures of intellectual ability typically underestimate minority students’ potential. But stereotype threat is not inevitable. Brief exercises can reduce its effects, causing lasting improvements in minority student achievement.

 

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Black and White or Red All Over? The Impropriety of Using Crime Scene DNA to Construct Racial Profiles of Suspects – Note by Natalie Quan

From Volume 84, Number 6 (September 2011)
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When the body of a deceased woman was found near the Mississippi River close to Baton Rouge in July 2002, DNA retrieved from the crime scene was linked to the murders of two other women in the area, and multiple law enforcement agencies subsequently began an aggressive search for the serial killer. Using witness statements and an FBI profile, the FBI, the Louisiana State Police, and the police and sheriff’s departments of Baton Rouge determined that their suspect was a young white man. After a fourth murder believed to have been committed by the same perpetrator occurred in December 2002, officials intensified their hunt for the killer by spending over one million dollars to collect and test the DNA of some 1200 white men in the area, but they made no matches and consequently had no leads.

In March 2003, the investigators crossed paths with molecular biologist Tony Frudakis of the company DNAPrint Genomics, who claimed that he could ascertain the suspect’s social race by testing the crime scene DNA for 176 specific genetic markers that disclose information about physical traits. Frudakis said that because certain markers are found predominantly in people of African, Indo-European, Native American, or South Asian roots, he could analyze their frequencies and predict the suspect’s ancestry with 99 percent accuracy, and then infer social race from this ancestry finding. Initially skeptical of the science, officials sent Frudakis DNA samples from twenty individuals with known racial designations—and upon blind testing the samples, Frudakis correctly identified the race of each individual.

Even more intriguing were the results of Frudakis’s analysis of the Baton Rouge serial killer’s DNA. Using a test he called DNAWitness, Frudakis concluded that the suspect’s “biogeographical ancestry” was 85 percent Sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American, which left, in his words, “no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all.”

 

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