Touro College: Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center
Not a member yet
3484 research outputs found
Sort by
20 Ways to Fight Housing Discrimination
Get PDFWhen looking at the continuing size of the problem of discrimination it is easy to be paralyzed into inaction by the sweeping scope of the undertaking. A good remedy is to find actions that an individual can take to move toward justice. Though Dr. King is often quoted as stating that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that bend in the arc is caused by legions of activists pulling the future toward justice. Robert Kennedy noted in his opposition to apartheid in South Africa that “a million different centers of energy and daring . . . can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Pleading and Antiracism
No full textDespite the persistence of U.S. racism, African Americans consistently have pursued the promise of equality through the courts. However, calls for equality have increasingly been supplemented by demands for antiracist policies and institutions. Antiracism goes beyond focusing on intentional bad behavior and requires reckoning with high institutions and policies help maintain White supremacy and contribute to passive racism. Passive racism is “an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems exist.” This evolution in thought is occurring at the same time that federal courts are raising the bar for plaintiffs. Recent United States Supreme Court decisions on how to sufficiently establish discrimination claims raise questions about the role federal courts play in the pursuit of racial justice and antiracist institutions
Was Yosef on the Spectrum? Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources: A Review
Get PDF
Equality and Access to Credit: A Social Contract Framework
Get PDFThe problems governments face in regulating consumer finance fall into two categories: normative and cognitive. The normative problems have to do with the way that some governments, particularly those adhering to an American model of household finance, have financed social mobility and intergenerational welfare through debt, a tenuous and socially risky policy choice. Credit has a substantial social aspect to it in the United States, where the federal government has in some way engaged in subsidizing about 1/3 of consumer credit, particularly in the residential mortgage market, feeding into a substantial capital markets dimension through government-guaranteed securitization. Most Americans think they “choose” and “earn” their wealth only through their own efforts, but in fact a substantial institutional apparatus of government assistance supports wealth creation, particularly for higher income households, including substantial disguised subsidies supporting home mortgage credit. Access to credit in such a system becomes a social primary good in need of regulation to ensure compliance with equality principles appropriate to the society in question. Governments have poor records in regulating access to credit and in some cases enact law or support social structures going in the opposite direction, towards injustice, substantially impairing the life chances of persons and families in historically disadvantaged groups, compounding status and material inequality. No government has as yet developed appropriate policy tools to evaluate the effects of financial regulation on equality. Rather, most policies have historically entrenched and even promoted inequality. The cognitive problems have to do with the dilemma of trading off between paternalism and autonomy in consumer financial regulation. Disclosure approaches fail because they do not adequately take the cognitive limitations of persons into account. Debtors do not read or understand terms and conditions. Paternalism can fail because capital can freely exit a market and engage in regulatory arbitrage in seeking out the best returns. If credit is what in a Rawlsian framework can be understood as a social primary good in a society then all of these problems are all the more serious. The solutions to these twin normative-cognitive problems are in either taking the distributive justice of access to credit seriously or in decoupling debt from its role in producing social mobility when this cannot be done. Debt can be ill-suited for allocating basic means to a good life in a society. It converts collective duties of justice owed to individuals to private duties of contract owed by individuals, aggravating power and domination dynamics in a society and worsening inequality
