Harvard CRCL

By Lori Turner I. INTRODUCTION “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” -Louis L’Amour As civil rights lawyers, we try to get the biggest bang for our buck by aiming impact litigation to bring about the institutional reforms that will affect the greatest number of people [...]

By Bennett L. Gershman Introduction: Imbler v. Pachtman Thirty-Four Years Later For those of us who teach and write about the conduct of prosecutors, reading Imbler v. Pachtman thirty-four years later is a profoundly disturbing experience. Imbler is the linchpin for the doctrine that affords prosecutors absolute immunity from civil liability for actions that violate [...]

It is the height of folly to make hard and fast predictions about the impact of freshly minted Supreme Court decisions, especially when the Court announces a new standard. Yet it is safe to predict that Ricci v. DeStefano, while not as devastating as some advocates have feared, will discourage some employers from voluntarily eliminating [...]

When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, it was heralded as a long-overdue measure to eradicate discrimination. The law has had a profound effect on the workplace, both by helping to establish a public ethic against discrimination and by providing a mechanism by which victims of discrimination can seek redress. Both [...]

When he left Congress in 1901, George White, an African American Republican from Tarboro, North Carolina, announced that it was “perhaps the Negro’s temporary farewell to Congress.” Mr. White’s premonition was right. Voters from North Carolina would not send another African American to Congress until 1992, nearly a century later, when Melvin Watt and Eva [...]

Digital environments are becoming the most important public spaces of the twenty-first century. These digital spaces are where many young people—and many older people, too—spend enormous amounts of time. These spaces are akin to the public parks, schoolyards, malls, and lecture halls of the physical world.1 These are places where social lives take place, where [...]