This article investigates how the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 (commonly referred to as Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) has been enforced in northeastern states. Using data obtained from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the Freedom of Information Act, it measures the extent to which the thirteen northeastern states—from Maine to Virginia—decided Fair Housing Act complaints in favor of Black and Latino Americans from 1989 to 2010. First, the analysis reveals considerable variations in favorable outcomes across the northeast, even between adjacent states with similar demographic traits. This suggests that governmental jurisdictions in the country’s various regions can differ noticeably in terms of their support for Title VIII complainants and that it makes a difference in what region, state, or locality a Title VIII complaint is filed in by a person alleging housing discrimination. Second, the analysis demonstrates that Black complainants are most likely to win their Title VIII claims in federal Region I, whereas Latinos are most likely to obtain favorable outcomes in federal Region III. Third, Black and Latino complainants are both least likely to win Title VIII claims in federal Region II, New York and New Jersey. This is surprising given these states’ general reputations as liberal and pioneering. As a result, we explore in greater detail aspects of law, race relations, and public policy in New York and New Jersey to help explain their low rates of favorable outcomes in Fair Housing Act complaints. Four fundamental facts about New York and New Jersey are considered: their high levels of (1) residential, (2) school, and (3) economic segregation, as well as (4) their lack of local jurisdictions participating in HUD’s Fair Housing Assistance Program. Our results cannot prove that Region II’s low favorability rates in Title VIII cases are caused by one or more of these four factors, yet they do strongly suggest that such a causal link is plausible.

The impact of the carceral system and policing on youth led to the development of a separate juvenile system recognizing the special needs of young people. However, policing-based harm remains at the forefront of legal scholarship not just for its continued prevalence in the country as a whole, but also because of the disproportionate impact on Black and Brown people. This impact is compounded when the targets of police violence are youth, who are subjected to extreme force by police at higher rates in comparison to adults and their white youth counterparts. Legal protections that purport to protect citizens’ rights inhibit victims from obtaining any meaningful recourse or compensation after experiencing the most heinous forms of police misconduct or violence. Individual police officers are protected by qualified immunity, and institutional liability is an illusory concept due to the flawed and extremely high bars created by the Monell framework. States have obligations to protect children under the parens patriae doctrine but are shielded from liability both because policing falls under municipal control and because the Eleventh Amendment provides states with sovereign immunity. Municipalities responsible for police conduct and discipline lack a similar common law obligation to their vulnerable citizens. This Note explores how the existing Monell and parens patriae doctrines can be reformed and adapted to ensure that institutions not only have a duty to protect youth from policing-based harm, but also that this duty is enforced with mechanisms for finding liability. Only with a meaningful pathway to liability for harm caused to youth at the hands of police can any real police accountability or long-term reform in policing be expected and racial disparities in this harm be addressed.

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is infamous for the obvious: ending affirmative action. Yes, its wrapping of the diversity rationale for race-conscious admissions in a bow before discarding it is monumental in and of itself. But to accomplish this disposal, the opinion took an approach to suspect classification and strict scrutiny that has gone unprobed. In SFFA, the Roberts Court took advantage of American jurisprudence’s sinuous development of race’s legal conceptualization and strict scrutiny’s formulaic nature to distort suspect classification. Prong by prong, the opinion widened the gap in access to suspect classification for white and non-white people, offering the former group an increased path to “suspicion” and leaving the latter group with a constricted path to “suspicion.” In effect, the opinion has manufactured a dual system of classification that blocks non-white people’s access to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in the affirmative action context. SFFA’s barricading of equality by way of diluting suspect classification is a destination of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence’s increasing insistence on a one-size-fits-all approach in race-related challenges. Truly, it is the Supreme Court’s myopic demand for parity that has allowed a “Whites Only” sign to be placed on the door to equal protection. Accordingly, the dismembering of compelling interests and narrow tailoring in SFFA are technical fractures that create a need for a new approach to class-based protection outside of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Note will analyze these fractures to reveal the Court’s strategy, present suspect classification’s bifurcation in practice, and present a solution to SFFA’s establishment of a racialized Fourteenth Amendment access gap.

The critique of the non-profit industrial complex has spread from movement groups and movement-aligned scholars in fields like race, gender, and ethnic studies to influence scholars in other fields, including legal scholars. Despite this growing influence, studies of the non-profit industrial complex devote almost no attention to the importance of the Community Action Program (“CAP”), part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to its development. When CAP was created, the Johnson Administration sought to capitalize on the rhetoric of “participatory democracy” at a moment when that phrase had great cultural cachet but a deeply ambiguous meaning. The implementation of CAP exposed a rift between the Administration’s expectations of limited participation and the hopes of activists in many low-income communities of color, who had been inspired by a collectivist approach to participatory democracy, one that had grown out of John Dewey, the Christian pacifist movement, and the Highlander Folk School to be embraced by the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. As low-income communities of color began to utilize CAP as a tool to support grassroots efforts for social change, the Johnson Administration and Congress developed new restrictions on CAP to rein in what it accidentally unleashed without suffering the political costs of repealing one of the central components of the War on Poverty just months after it had launched. The tactics it developed—stripping funding, influencing board selection, new emphases on quantitative outcomes, reporting, and eligibility for services, and splitting funding for community organizing from funding for service provision—would become core tactics of the non-profit industrial complex.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump claimed that the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza would not have occurred had he been reelected in 2020. However, during his first presidency, President Trump faced another significant adversary—the COVID-19 pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—and many contend that Trump’s inadequate response to this viral enemy contributed significantly to his 2020 election loss. Central to the pandemic response was the Defense Production Act, a Cold War–era statute granting broad emergency powers. This Article argues that the Trump administration fundamentally misunderstood the Defense Production Act, initially by failing to invoke it promptly to secure critical medical supplies, and later by misapplying it via Executive Order 13,917 to compel meat-processing operations in a manner that ultimately prioritized corporate profits over worker safety. With the notable exception of Operation Warp Speed and a few less noteworthy instances, the Trump administration’s use of the Defense Production Act largely failed to safeguard the nation’s public health and harmed vulnerable workers in the meatpacking industry. Compounding these failures, the meatpacking industry, USDA, and OSHA also largely failed to meaningfully protect these workers, many of whom are members of communities suffering the impacts of marginalization. Meat-processing workers labored in the shadows of public concern under conditions that paralleled the industry’s treatment of animals—both denied meaningful protection, both ultimately treated as disposable. In either case, the underlying assumption seems clear: some lives matter less than money. This Article ultimately serves as a resource for policymakers and attorneys, highlighting how the Defense Production Act, when judiciously deployed, can effectively safeguard public health, protect worker rights, and affirm the nation’s commitment to valuing human life.

Amid growing political polarization, human trafficking remains one of the few social causes that retains universal bipartisan support. Nowhere was this clearer than Florida in the spring of 2023, when Governor Ron DeSantis passed widely popular human trafficking reforms. Despite a legislative session marked by national controversy over the state’s extreme anti-immigrant proposals that year, DeSantis’ rhetoric on human trafficking specifically called for the protection of immigrant victims. The story behind the 2023 reforms reveals not a benevolent change of heart or momentary hypocrisy, but an ominous call towards racist tropes plaguing human trafficking and immigration reform for centuries. This Article conducts an extensive legislative history and argues that DeSantis’ legislative efforts tap into theories popularized by QAnon, a far-right decentralized web of conspiracies. In doing so, Florida echoes historical racial narratives and utilizes dog whistles to further justify an expansion of its immigration enforcement powers. The strategy behind Florida’s efforts to generate anti-immigrant hysteria has extended to other states and is now being carried out on a national stage under the new Trump administration. This Article contends that advocates must meet this growing threat by crafting multidisciplinary counter-narratives that directly confront the role of race and reject the respectability politics dominating mainstream trafficking discourse.

Child welfare agencies are tasked with protecting children, and in so doing, with investigating allegations of abuse and neglect. If done properly, such investigations can promote child safety. But the data suggests that New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (“ACS”) subjects far more children and families to intrusive investigations than is necessary. Nearly 100,000 children in New York City are investigated by the ACS each year, and ACS only seeks entry or body-search warrants in 0.4% of investigations. Moreover, the vast majority of these investigations are executed in homes where ACS ultimately decides that it is unlikely any abuse or neglect occurred. Such investigations come at a high cost to children: they are aggressive, traumatic, and coercive. This piece argues that ACS’ investigative apparatus not only harms more children than it protects, but the tactics it employs violate the state and federal constitutional rights of children and their families. Using ACS’ own statistics, this piece demonstrates that New York unnecessarily investigates far too many, primarily Black and brown families; examines the harmful, and often unlawful reporting and investigation process in New York City; and enumerates reforms critical to protect both the safety and privacy rights of New York City’s children and families.

This article reconsiders the life and record of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was smart, hardworking, and talented, serving as a great activist lawyer and important law professor in his early career. When nominated to the court, there were high hopes he would follow Holmes and Brandeis in leading a progressive Court that would protect civil liberties and minority rights. However, it was not to be. On the Court Frankfurter became increasingly conservative and ultimately reactionary. In his opinions, he upheld persecution and discrimination of religious and racial minorities, occasionally hindered racial justice and civil liberties efforts, and opposed due process in criminal trials and fairness in elections. Arrogant and dismissive, he constantly fought with his brethren, alienating almost all of them. In the end Frankfurter was far too often on the wrong side of history, liberty and the law, and even legal ethics. The tragedy of Frankfurter is that he abandoned the constitutional rights and protections that he supported from his graduation from law school until he donned his robes. He could have been a great justice. Sadly, he was not.

They don’t want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles. - James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2017) This article explores the jurisprudential underpinnings of the so-called “diversity rationale” that until recently had been considered a powerful vehicle for fostering racial diversity on elite college campuses. As the national debate around diversity, equity, and inclusion measures—both their legitimacy and practice—will only intensify in the current sociopolitical climate, this writing attempts to provide a chronology of how the nation’s High Court has shaped the contours of that discourse, arguing that the Court’s juridical trepidation in this area of the law led to an unworkable framework that was doomed from inception. This article further examines the rapidly changing norms of race and identity—including the inherent tensions and complexities that such concepts engender before concluding with a recommendation for how to achieve the supposed aims of the affirmative action regime in American society.

The United States cash bail system unconstitutionally hinders protest rights enshrined in the First Amendment. Protesting on controversial issues, while protected activity, often risks arrests and other interactions with police. Unfortunately, studies show that protesters of color are arrested at higher rates than white protesters. Cash bail, in turn, increases the cost associated with the arrests related to protests, further disincentivizing protesters from engaging in lawful activity. Although the overwhelming majority of these protests and demonstrations are peaceful, and many of the charges in these arrests are eventually dropped, arrested protesters are still required to put up hundreds––sometimes even thousands––of dollars to be released pretrial. If they cannot, they must remain in jail until their trial, until the charges are dropped, or until they are able to raise enough money to be released. This pretrial detention, even if it only lasts a few days, has significant consequences. Furthermore, these consequences are not shared evenly: the cash bail system disparately impacts people of color, who are imposed bail at higher rates and at higher amounts, meaning they will also experience negative consequences at a disproportionate rate. Because states are criminalizing more conduct, elevating charges from misdemeanors to felonies, and continuing to impose bail amounts on protesters, the intersection between cash bail and protests is unavoidable. In turn, many people could be afraid to protest because they do not have enough money to afford their bail if they are arrested at the protest, and because they cannot afford the negative consequences of awaiting their trial in jail. This Article discusses how cash bail dissuades First Amendment expression by compounding existing consequences created by government action that also curtails lawful protests. Furthermore, the disparate rates at which protesters of color are arrested and later imposed bail raises an equal protection concern, deterring people of color from expressing constitutional rights. Removing cash bail in limited circumstances associated with otherwise lawful protesting, measured reform may help alleviate some of the disparate risks involved with protected activity. While eliminating bail altogether is the ultimate goal, this measured reform would be an incremental step towards broader change, building public support for holistic reform.