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Fair Housing’s Third Act: American Tragedy or Triumph?
Get PDFFifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.
The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic racism’s many forms. In this moment of racial awakening, it is critical to revisit how neighborhood segregation affects nearly all aspects of American life. We live in a racist ecosystem, and racial segregation is its defining feature. Segregation’s profound influence reinforces the importance of the AFFH mandate as a remedial tool.
Drawing on recent events as a case study, this article examines the AFFH mandate’s potential to be our country’s most effective anti-segregation tool. First, this article accounts for the mandate’s historic failures. Second, it demonstrates why the Act must be amended to instill a durable compliance process at the local level.
As currently configured in statute, the mandate is profoundly inadequate to meaningfully reduce segregation. But if amended, it has the unleashed power to reduce segregation at the local level. This has critical real-world implications—new studies reveal that even incremental reduction of neighborhood segregation decidedly improves quality-of-life outcomes, from education to health to life expectancy.
Decades after Congress declared the government’s affirmative duty to undo it, housing segregation remains a profound collective problem that merits the resources necessary to systematically dismantle it. The stage is set for fair housing’s third act
Mayor Pete, \u3cem\u3eObergefell\u3c/em\u3e Gays, and White Male Privilege
Get PDFThis Article argues that Mayor Pete Buttigieg seized the national imagination and a substantial number of Democratic delegates through the combination of his gay identity and his alignment with masculinity norms generally assigned to heterosexual men, and by taking aim at more senior and qualified women candidates, namely Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Buttigieg’s unprecedented success suggests that some White gay men now enjoy a unique pathway to reclaiming their status as men and asserting White male privilege. In short, contrary to pervasive media claims, Buttigieg’s success should be read as a breakthrough for certain White gay men, but not for the LGBTQ community more generally. Indeed, Buttigieg’s appeal to White heterosexuals may signify a growing chasm between the “G” and everyone else who identifies with a term included in that acronym. The lack of enthusiasm for Buttigieg’s candidacy—and in some cases outright repudiation of Buttigieg—among LGBTQ folks who are women, people of color, queer, transgender, and/or younger reflects an objection to the “respectability politics” that have fueled the movement since the 1990s. The Mayor Pete backlash, which was closely followed by the convergence of a historic racial uprising and a remixed Pride Month, suggests that the future of LGBTQ rights is intersectionality
Modify State “Piracy” After \u3cem\u3eAllen\u3c/em\u3e: Introducing Apology to the U.S. Copyright Regime
Get PDFCopyright protection from state offenders is onerous because of the imbalanced bargaining power between states and authors, which is increased by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Cooper. This decision clarifies that state sovereign immunity is not abrogated by the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (“CRCA”). It secures states’ constitutional rights, the public interest, and the efficiency of copyright infringement litigations against states. However, a paradox of this decision is that it may harm innovation incentives or spirits of creativity due to the increased imbalanced bargaining power to prevent authors from being repaired for their economic or non-economic losses. This Article reviews the law and psychology literature and proposes to adopt compelled and voluntary state apologies in the copyright regime. It suggests that the apologies do not conflict with Allen’s benefits but can rebuild the reputation of authors and repair relationships between the authority and authors to promote or sustain their innovation incentives
Devonya Havis discusses the nature of truth and community practices for resistance
No full textEpisode 23 features Devonya Havis, PhD, a 2021-2022 UB Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Scholar, and, associate professor in Philosophy at Canisius College. Dr. Havis discusses her research examining the nature of truth and the importance of broadening the field of philosophy to include the ways in which people encountering struggle engage in critical engagement about their condition. Havis specifically explores community practices, black ancestral practices, as an archive or guide for practice on how to push back
Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel
Get PDFThis article examines the underlying biopolitical premises of wildlife management in Palestine/Israel that make, remake, and unmake this region\u27s settler colonial landscape. Drawing on interviews with Israeli nature officials and observations of their work, the article tells several animal stories that illuminate the hierarchies and slippages between wild and domestic, nature and culture, native and settler, and human and nonhuman life in Palestine/Israel. Animal bodies are especially apt technologies of settler colonialism, I show here. They naturalize and normalize settler modes of existence, while criminalizing native livelihoods and relations. Utilizing the terra nullius doctrine, creating biblical landscapes by reintroducing extirpated wild animals, controlling the movement of Palestinians and their animals while letting Jewish settlers and their animals roam unhindered, criminalizing the Palestinians’ more-than-human relations, and introducing restrictions on native engagement with animals are all an inherent part of nature administration in Palestine/Israel. But while they serve as tools for advancing colonial practices, nonhuman animals are also subject to the same violence that afflicts humans. Understanding the more-than-human dimensions of the settler colonial order is instrumental for thinking about how to subvert this order and redirect its violence toward decolonized, or “wild,” legalities
One Man’s Trash: Constitutional Principles of Federalism and Privacy Implicated in San Francisco’s Mandatory Recycling Ordinance and Future Similar Legislation
Get PDFMisappropriation Theory: How the World’s Two Largest Economies Regulate Insider Trading
Get PDFPrior to the government adopting policies of economic reform in the late 1970s, the People’s Republic of China (“the PRC” or “China”) did not have a formal securities market or an accompanying regulatory scheme. For the most part, it was not operationally feasible for a market to develop and flourish in China because the PRC had a centrally planned economy with state-owned enterprises as the primary form of business ownership. However, economic reform brokered conditions where stock trades casually began in markets located in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and several other cities in the early 1980s. This informal trading persisted until the formal establishment of modern stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen in December 1990.
Historically, the securities market in China has been prone to fraud and corruption. In fact, there have been occasions where Chinese officials have been openly involved in the fraud and corruption that has taken place. To address these issues in its securities market, Chinese regulators sought assistance from abroad. Specifically, in April of 1994, China’s securities regulatory authority, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (“CSRC”), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in a move designed to obtain access to technical and enforcement assistance from its American counterpart. Pursuant to the guidance it received under the Memorandum of Understanding (“1994 MOU”), China implemented many of the policies used by the SEC in its securities regulation efforts. One example of such implementation was China’s revamping of its regulatory configuration from two independent levels (the CSRC and the Securities Commission of the State Council or “SCSC”) to a single-level structure in which the CSRC is subordinate to the SCSC. Another example is the Securities Law of the People’s Republic of China (“1998 Securities Law”), which implements many securities laws that are also used in America.
China is the world’s second-largest economy in terms of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) and has the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world in terms of market capitalization. The United States is the largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP with the two largest stock exchanges in the world in terms of market capitalization. Because of these facts and China’s obtainment of significant technical and enforcement assistance from the United States in the area of securities law, this paper will address the issue of misappropriation of inside information from a comparative perspective by discussing the issue under both Chinese and American securities laws. After a general introduction to insider trading theories in Part I of this paper, Part II will discuss the American approach to regulating misappropriation and Part III will discuss China’s basic approach to the issue. Part IV will consider and answer the question of whether a breach of fiduciary duty requirement is the proper approach for regulating misappropriation or whether applying misappropriation liability without a fiduciary duty requirement is the better approach. Part V will provide suggested solutions for addressing the problems with both the American and Chinese approaches to regulating misappropriation
When Provocation Is No Excuse: Making Gun Owners Bear the Risks of Carrying in Public
Get PDFMarkeis McGlockton, an unarmed 28-year-old African-American father of three, was shot to death in front of his five-year-old son by “wannabe police officer” Michael Drejka during an argument over parking. Because McGlockton had shoved Drejka before Drejka shot him, Drejka was convicted only of heat-of-passion manslaughter, not murder. This Article argues that the heat-of-passion defense shouldn’t be available in cases like Drejka’s—cases where the defendant was carrying a loaded gun in public at the time of the provocation and used the gun to kill his provoker. The heat-of-passion defense is a concession to the difficulty of complying with the law’s demands in moments of passion. In cases like Drejka’s, however, the defendant’s difficulty in complying with the homicide law is of his own making. If he had taken the same precaution that most people take against such difficulties—namely, not carrying a loaded gun in public—he wouldn’t have had any trouble not killing his provoker.
In defending the proposed limit on the heat-of-passion defense, this Article will advance three novel claims about the criminal law: (1) that self-mediated risk—risk that is mediated by the actor’s own future volitional conduct—sometimes suffices to make conduct morally blameworthy; (2) that even decisions by an actor that appear to represent core exercises of protected individual liberties—the decision to form racist beliefs, for example, or the decision to carry a gun outside the home—sometimes can supply the locus of moral blame in criminal prosecutions; and (3) that in cases where the actor’s fault inheres in self-mediated risk, the law’s usual reluctance to impute moral blame doesn’t apply