Category Archives: Discrimination
Sabine Tsuruda, ‘Race, Unconscionability, and Contractual Equality’
ABSTRACT Racially discriminatory contracts should be paradigmatically unconscionable in contract law. The unconscionability doctrine permits a court to refuse to enforce an unfair contract. Classically interpreted, the doctrine narrowly conceptualizes an unfair contract as an extremely nonstandard contract obtained by manipulating or circumventing the disadvantaged party’s decision-making abilities. But racial discrimination can be the market […]
Sophia Moreau, ‘Beyond Discrimination Law: Realizing Equality Through Other Laws, Such as Tort Law’
INTRODUCTION Social hierarchies based upon traits such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and disability currently affect people’s access to many basic goods – for instance, housing, medical care, education, and secure and meaningful employment. Such hierarchies also affect people’s ability to exercise their basic legal and political rights, such as the right to legal counsel […]
‘How the “Legal Capacity” of Persons with Disabilities May Serve as a Tool for Social Justice in Europe?’
Self-determination, employment, housing, and access to credit are essential aspects of social justice insofar as they are necessary to satisfy citizens’ fundamental needs and ensure a range of basic entitlements (Caruso 2013). All these central traits of the human condition are closely connected with (and dependent on) one of the basic and traditional concepts of […]
Clare Williams, ‘Ability Capitalism: Law’s Constitutive Role in Constructing Disability’
ABSTRACT In proposing a theory of ability capitalism, this paper considers how, where, when, and why law plays a constitutive role in labour market constructions of disability. In problematising typical or mainstream accounts that see markets as ‘natural’ social orderings, the paper suggests a constitutive economic sociology of law lens that shifts beyond the embeddedness […]
‘Report on Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability’
INTRODUCTORY NOTE … The Report on Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability addresses the potential for artificial intelligence to cause harm to persons, property, and other interests protected by the current law of torts and offers answers to the questions ‘Who is, or should be, liable for choices made by intelligent machines operating autonomously, and when?’ […]
Erik Encarnacion, ‘Section 1981 as Contract Law’
ABSTRACT A civil rights secret hides in plain sight: a federal antidiscrimination statute, 42 USC § 1981, is a foundational part of contract law in the United States. Originating in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and amended by the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Section 1981 prohibits racially discriminatory formation, performance, modification, termination, and […]
‘BC Supreme Court orders will variation due to gender bias’
The Supreme Court of British Columbia varied a will to address the gender-based discrimination that influenced the distribution of an estate, most of which went to the son, to increase the daughter’s share in the estate. The testator in this case had two children, a daughter and a son. Her 2018 will bequeathed the majority […]
‘Civil Rights meets Corporate Governance’
Gina-Gail S Fletcher and H Timothy Lovelace, Jr, ‘Corporate Racial Responsibility’, 124 Columbia Law Review 361 (2023). Are corporations responsible for addressing racial inequality? In a timely and compelling examination of corporate race relations during the civil rights movement and current corporate processes and decision-making on race, Gina-Gail S Fletcher and H Timothy Lovelace, Jr […]
Tristin Green, ‘Collective Complaint’
ABSTRACT This Essay puts the popular idea of collective action together with the law of complaint to tell a cautionary tale. Calls for collective action in modern progressive circles tend to promote a vision of collective as group-based activity, of people physically, intellectually, and emotionally working together. As captivating as this vision is, it misses […]
Madeleine Gyory, ‘The Reasonable Pregnant Worker’
ABSTRACT Pregnant workers often need changes to their work responsibilities to stay healthy during pregnancy while earning a needed paycheck. Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) in December 2022, entitling many workers for the first time to ‘reasonable accommodations’ for their pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, so long as they do not […]