Federal Law & Legal System – Page 109 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Housing Discrimination in New Berlin?

Post author:David R. Papke
Post published:August 17, 2010
Post category:Federal Law & Legal System Milwaukee

The current controversy regarding “affordable housing” in New Berlin illustrates the weakness of federal law regarding housing discrimination based on socioeconomic class.

By way of backdrop, New Berlin is a suburb southwest of Milwaukee on the eastern edge of Waukesha County. When a developer came forward with plans for low-cost rental housing in New Berlin, some members of the City’s largely white, bourgeois population expressed opposition. New Berlin’s Plan Commission then hastily nixed the affordable housing idea. This led in turn to an investigation by the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

I anticipate the investigation will not lead to legal action. No information has emerged suggesting New Berlin’s actions were explicitly aimed at racial or ethnic minorities, and this is significant when federal law is applied. The federal Fair Housing Act, for example, was enacted with race and ethnicity rather than socioeconomic class in mind. In addition, while race is surely a viable basis for an equal protection argument under the Fourteenth Amendment, socioeconomic classifications are not “suspect” and therefore can be justified with a conventional claim of rationality.

Has New Berlin engaged in housing discrimination by excluding affordable housing and the poor and working-class people who might rent such housing? It appears that the dominant ideology as re-packaged by the federal law offers little help when facing exclusionary practices geared to socioeconomic status. Under the law, the United States has no class.

Legal Legitimization: Recent Court Cases and the LGBTQ Reality

Post author:Taylor Barnes
Post published:August 13, 2010
Post category:Family Law Federal Law & Legal System

Lately, courts all across the country have been standing up to religious (or sometimes what’s called “moral”) bias against the LGBTQ community. In one way, it is not surprising that there have been so many recent cases, because such bias is a pervasive part of the legal reality members of LGBTQ community face on an everyday basis. Nonetheless, theses sorts of court decisions seem to be, at this particular moment in time, flying out the doors of courthouses all over the country. I’ll take a moment to hit some of the high points before getting down to the real question: does it even matter?

In March of this year, a federal judge held that a lesbian teen’s First Amendment rights had been violated when the Itawamba County School District refused to allow her to bring a female date to the prom. The district had banned same-sex couples at the prom in the past, but Constance McMillen implored them to make an exception. The district refused, and McMillen, represented by the ACLU, sued them on First Amendment grounds. The federal judge agreed that her rights had been violated but refused to grant her request that the school still sponsor a prom to which she could bring a female date.

In another federal case, in July, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. Section 3 reads as follows:

Seventh Circuit Cleans Up the “Other Bad Acts” Mess (a Little)

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:August 11, 2010
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Evidence Federal Criminal Law & Process Seventh Circuit

I’ve blogged on a number of occasions about the messy state of the law relating to the admissibility of “other bad acts” evidence (e.g., here and here). Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) indicates that other bad acts may not be used against a criminal defendant to show bad character or a propensity to commit crime. However, the Rule includes a number of exceptions, and courts have not only tended to interpret those exceptions expansively, but have also recognized an additional exception for evidence that is “inextricably intertwined” with proof of a charged offense.

Given the expansively interpreted exceptions set forth in Rule 404(b) itself, the inextricable intertwinement exception seemed to me an unnecessary and confusing addition to the law. The Seventh Circuit has now indicated its agreement with that view.