This Comment will argue that all classifications of legal aliens, including nonimmigrant aliens, should be subject to strict scrutiny, rather than rational basis review. Part II will discuss the Equal Protection Clause, the levels of scrutiny, and the criteria the Supreme Court uses to determine which classifications should be subject to each level of scrutiny. Part III will discuss Court precedent in relation to the Equal Protection Clause and how the Fifth and Sixth Circuits have contravened that precedent. Part IV will discuss why classifica-tions of nonimmigrant aliens, just like those of immigrant aliens, should be subject to strict scrutiny. Finally, Part V will discuss the implications of treating nonimmigrant aliens as a suspect class and subjecting laws that discriminate against them to strict scrutiny.
Sex Offender Treatment in the United States: The Current Climate and an Unexpected Opportunity for Change
While sex-offender laws and policies have garnished unquestioning support from a sector of the population largely uneducated about the specifics of their implementation and effects, they have frequently been criticized by scholars, mental health professionals, and others familiar with the realities of contemporary sex-offender treatment. This Comment explores many of these criticisms, from widespread societal implications and efficacy concerns to the frequently disproportional practical difficulties faced by individual offenders and their families. This Comment recognizes that because of the general population's lack of awareness about these issues, lawmakers who would otherwise support sensible and necessary modification of the existing system are often unable to do so without risking political suicide. As a result, this Comment suggests that legislators seize the opportunity presented by the current economic crisis and use the umbrella of budgetary constraints to restructure sex-offender laws and policies in order to inject into the system maximum financial economy, functionality, and justice.
Show Me the Money: The Applicability of Contract Law's Ratification and Tender-Back Doctrines to Title VII Releases
This Article seeks to remove this confusion and set forth the proper role (if any) for the common law contract doctrines of ratification and tender back with respect to a release of Title VII claims. Part II provides the background of these common law contract doctrines. Part III reviews the Supreme Court precedent on the application of the ratification and tender-back doctrines to the release of federal claims. Part IV reviews lower-court precedent on the application of these doctrines to the release of Title VII claims. Part V addresses whether Supreme Court precedent with respect to the application of the ratification and tender-back doctrines to other federal statutes compels a particular result regarding Title VII releases. Part VI discusses the competing policies and principles with respect to whether ratification and tender back should apply to Title VII releases. Lastly, Part VII demonstrates that ratification should apply to Title VII releases, but that the tender-back doctrine should be applied flexibly on a case-by-case basis.
This Field Is Our Field: Foreign Players, Domestic Leagues, and the Unlawful Racial Manipulation of American Sport
This Article argues that the MLS Policy restricting the numbers of international players on its teams' rosters does, in fact, perpetuate unlawful racial discrimination. While the Policy does not facially discriminate against prospective players on the basis of race, and while its drafters may not have intended racial exclusion, the MLS Policy disproportionately and negatively impacts players of color--particularly blacks and Latinos. In that the MLS Policy serves to racially exclude in violation of federal antidiscrimination law, it demands scrutiny. This Article provides that scrutiny, examines the implications the MLS Policy has for America's other premier professional sports leagues, and ultimately argues that MLS should abandon the Policy.
The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly
The freedom of assembly has been at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women's suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the labor movement in the Progressive Era and after the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement. Claims of assembly stood against the ideological tyranny that exploded during the first Red Scare in the years surrounding the First World War and the second Red Scare of 1950s' McCarthyism. Abraham Lincoln once called “the right of peaceable assembly” part of “the Constitutional substitute for revolution.” In 1939, the popular press heralded it as one of the “four freedoms” at the core of the Bill of Rights. And even as late as 1973, John Rawls characterized it as one of the “basic liberties.” But in the past thirty years, assembly has been reduced to a historical footnote in American law and political theory. Why has assembly so utterly disappeared from our democratic fabric? This Article explores the history of the freedom of assembly and what we may have lost in losing sight of that history.
Raising the Dead?: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
If applied literally, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (FPA) has the potential to radically change the landscape for claims under Title VII and other antidiscrimination laws. While limited to discrimination in compensation, as opposed to discrimination in other terms and conditions of employment, the FPA removes the statute of limitations not only for compensation decisions per se but for any “other practice” affecting compensation. Further, the new law is explicitly retroactive. Thus, a failure to promote a plaintiff twenty years ago would seem to be actionable today, as long as the nonpromotion has an effect on current compensation. While the statute has a liability-limiting provision (capping backpay at two years before the filing of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge), the potentially enormous financial costs of the new law are sure to trigger a variety of responses from employers, ranging from interpretation disputes about the scope of the statute, to constitutional challenges, to the applicability of laches--a defense that has been barely developed in this context. This Article analyzes the FPA and concludes that its most radical implications are in fact the correct interpretation of the law and that Congress acted well within its constitutional powers in making the FPA retroactive. Ironically, the Justices who read Title VII as it was originally enacted to impose a strict limitations period will be compelled by their own interpretative approach to read the FPA as an override. This Article does recognize, however, that laches may limit the impact of the new statute--most obviously where the plaintiff was aware both of the adverse employment action at the time it was taken and of the probability that the action was discriminatory.