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A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For a Community Reinvestment Bind
Get PDFThe Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ( CRA ) primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy— it must not allocate credit. This essay considers how a different pedagogical approach in law schools could better equip legal thinkers to address racial economic harms. Coupling critical legal studies with a Jeffersonian approach to legal education would foster more ambitious remedies. Those remedies would be better informed regarding the power structures and human costs at play. A Critical Jeffersonian mind would be poised to not only know what the law is, but prepared to determine what the law should be. Using the CRA as an example, the essay provides a glimpse into how to better tackle historical harms
Wisconsin\u27s 2011 Act 108, Legislative Inaction, and Severe Racial Disparity: A Recipe for a Fair Housing Violation
Get PDFWhen individuals are released from prison, the biggest predictor of whether they will reoffend or successfully reenter society is whether the recently released individual has access to stable housing. Unfortunately, nearly every avenue to housing requires passing a criminal background check. Recognizing this as posing a nearly insurmountable barrier to accessing stable housing upon release from prison, Seattle, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and San Francisco, California have all enacted ordinances regulating the use of background checks to help ensure access to stable housing for formerly incarcerated individuals. Madison, Wisconsin, and other Wisconsin cities had similar ordinances that regulated the use of background checks in housing. Those ordinances were abrogated in 2011 through Act 108, which prohibited localities from regulating landlords and instead reserved that power to the state government. In the eleven years that have passed since Act 108, the state legislature has not passed any legislation that would alleviate the burden of finding stable housing for recently released convicts. This Comment suggests that, in light of guidance issued in 2016 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development which explained that pretextual use of criminal background checks to deny housing may be actionable under the Fair Housing Act, the inability of localities to regulate the use of criminal records in housing prevents Wisconsin localities from “affirmatively further[ing] fair access to housing for all.
Incessant Influence: Social Networking Sites are Utilizing Patented Technology to Commandeer Human Emotion and Behavior
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\u3ci\u3eHolmes v. Walton\u3c/i\u3e and its Enduring Lessons for Originalism
Get PDFOriginalism is nothing new. And the New Jersey Supreme Court’s 1780 decision in Holmes v. Walton shows it. In that case, the New Jersey Supreme Court disallowed a state law as repugnant to the state constitution because the law permitted a jury of only six to render a judgment. To reach that result, the court looked to the fixed, original meaning of the jury trial guarantee embedded in the state constitution, and it then constrained its interpretive latitude in conformity with that fixed meaning. Holmes thus cuts against the common misconception that originalism as an interpretive methodology is a modern development
