Seminar: Civil Rights Enforcement

Catalog description

Explores the challenges that arise when government entities and legal actors must implement or enforce laws that mandate equality. Among the topics addressed are: competing definitions of equality and the application of doctrines developed as correctives to racial injustice to other protected classes; dynamics of structuralism, federalism and local control that influence and sometimes restrict civil rights enforcement; the limitations of legal and administrative remedies for inequality; and dynamics of equality between civil rights lawyers and their clients. Throughout the term, the Wisconsin's school civil rights enforcement regime is used as a case study to ground the discussion of these big-picture questions.