Au Revoir To Kill a Mockingbird

A photo of the cover of "To Kill a Mockingbird"My oldest daughter teaches bilingual English in a City of Milwaukee high school, and I greatly enjoy our conversations regarding the literary works she assigns.  However, I was surprised when she told me recently that she and her fellow teachers no longer felt comfortable assigning Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird.

Published in 1960, Lee’s novel has for over sixty years garnered great admiration and respect as an American literary work.  Many have considered the novel’s Atticus Finch to be an inspiring lawyer hero and taken the novel’s law-related narrative to be one of courageous resistance to racial injustice.  As recently as ten years ago, virtually every American high schooler was expected to have read To Kill a Mockingbird Bird.

Why has the novel fallen so precipitously?  I can think of at least three developments that have hurt its standing:

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Legal Challenges to Race-Based Scholarships in Wisconsin

Since the early 2000s, the validity of the use of race in many scholarship applications has been questioned. States have been left rolling in a deep pool of uncertainty regarding what to do. Race-based scholarship programs have provided invaluable aid to minority students seeking to obtain a higher education. Without these programs, many qualified minority students would be unable to attend higher-learning institutions. As a result, the institution would be denied a diverse learning community and many valuable students would have to prematurely abandon their education goals.

Each scholarship serves its own purpose. There are scholarships that are offered to people of certain religious background. Others focus on providing economic aid to students who are pursuing certain degrees – such as engineering, medicine, or law. The purpose of race-based grants or scholarships is to increase the number of diverse students for the benefit of each institution. This purpose has been challenged by complaints alleging that race-based scholarships only further race discrimination.

The Supreme Court has established precedent regarding this debate. The Court held that when applying rights found in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment regarding this matter, a society is a collection of “knowing individuals” who are seen as autonomous and independent, and thus should be treated as individuals without regard to race. The Court further stated that when a program acknowledges individuals as being part of a group or classification, the program should be strictly scrutinized. Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003); Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

As one commentator has noted, “[t]o pass strict scrutiny review, a race-conscious program must first have a compelling state interest. Diversity is the compelling interest most often used to defend affirmative action.” Andrija Samardzich, Note, Protecting Race-Exclusive Scholarships from Extinction with an Alternative Compelling State Interest, 81 Ind. L.J. 1121, 1124 (2006). In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), Justice O’Connor stated:

The Law School’s interest is not simply ‘to assure within its student body some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin.’ That would amount to outright racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional. Rather, the Law School’s concept of critical mass is defined by reference to the educational benefits that diversity is designed to produce.

Grutter, 539 U.S. at 330.

In recent months, this debate has hit close to home.

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Problem-Solving Courts Can Produce Better Outcomes for Participants, But Do White Defendants Benefit More Than Black?

The emergence of drug-treatment courts and other specialized “problem-solving courts” (PSCs) has been among the most important developments in American criminal justice over the past three decades. Founded in 1989, Miami’s drug-treatment court is often credited as the nation’s first PSC. The court was developed out of a sense of frustration that conventional criminal-justice responses to drug crime failed to address underlying addiction problems, resulting in a seemingly never-ending cycle of arrest, incarceration, return to use, and rearrest for many individuals. Treatment might be offered, or even required, within the conventional system, but the results were often disappointing. However, the drug-treatment court aimed to provide treatment within a different framework. The judge kept close tabs on the defendant’s progress, working with a team of court personnel and treatment providers to ensure adequate support for the defendant’s rehabilitation and appropriate accountability for backsliding.

The drug-treatment court concept spread rapidly. Hundreds of such courts were created by the late 1990’s, and thousands exist today. Moreover, the drug-treatment court model—specialized caseload handled by an interdisciplinary team, provision of social services to address underlying causes of criminal behavior, close judicial supervision, and use of carrots and sticks to keep defendants progressing through treatment—has been adapted to handle a wide range of other offender groups. The PSCs now in operation in many jurisdictions include mental health courts, homelessness courts, DUI courts, prisoner reentry courts, and veterans courts.

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