Fair Housing After “Big Government”: How Tax Credits Are Reshaping the Legal Fight Against Racial Segregation

ABSTRACT

In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 split decision, that facially neutral state policies and practices that unintentionally segregated minorities could violate the Fair Housing Act. This article draws on the Texas fair housing litigation to engage broader debates on fair housing as a legal framework, and its potential for disrupting or transforming patterns of structural inequality. Specifically, it examines how shifts in the ways that society designs and implements housing policies may encourage courts, advocates, and legal actors to think about fair housing issues in new ways. Moving beyond the emphasis on disparate impact, my findings elaborate on two mostly overlooked ways that LIHTC reshapes the legal battleground in the fight for fair housing, by opening contentious debate on (a) the state level of government, and (b) passive government administration of policies. I interpret these effects as unintended consequences of the gradual shift toward market-driven policies that allow officials to govern at a distance.     

Welfare as Wrecking Ball: Constructing Public Responsibility in Legal Encounters Over Public Housing Demolition

Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low‐income tenants.     

Rhetorical Construction of Legal Arguments

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - This study examines the concept of argumentation empirically, to correct the normative...     

Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological Changes of the Pubic Symphyseal Face and the Auricular Surface and Implications for Age at Death Estimation

Age estimation methods are often based on the age‐related morphological changes of the auricular surface and the pubic bone. In this study, a mathematical approach to quantify these changes has been tested analyzing the curvature variation on 3D models from CT and laser scans. The sample consisted of the 24 Suchey–Brooks (SB) pubic bone casts, 19 auricular surfaces from the Buckberry and Chamberlain (BC) “recording kit” and 98 pelvic bones from the Terry Collection (Smithsonian Institution). Strong and moderate correlations between phases and curvature were found in SB casts (ρ 0.60–0.93) and BC “recording kit” (ρ 0.47–0.75), moderate and weak correlations in the Terry Collection bones (pubic bones: ρ 0.29–0.51, auricular surfaces: ρ 0.33–0.50) but associated with large individual variability and overlap of curvature values between adjacent decades. The new procedure, requiring no expert judgment from the operator, achieved similar correlations that can be found in the classic methods.     

It depends whose data are being shared: considerations for genomic data sharing policies

There is an urgent need for consistent data sharing policies that promote the advancement of science while respecting the values and interests of those providing their genetic data for research. Responding to the article of Jalayne J. Arias, Genevieve Pham-Kanter, and Eric G. Campbell, ‘The Growth and Gaps of Genetic Data Sharing Policies in the United States’, this commentary further explores the challenges of human subjects’ protection in existing data sharing policies. We will elaborate on the need for data sharing policies to accommodate variation in individual and group preferences around data sharing and privacy concerns by comparing our previously published data on patients’ and parents’ consent to data sharing and attitudes about privacy to data from focus groups with HIV-positive, underserved individuals who were asked about their willingness to participate in genetic research and share their data broadly. These studies support the observation of Arias, Pham-Kanter, and Campbell that researchers, and funding agencies will need to balance the privacy interests of groups as well as individuals in future genomic data sharing policies.     

Labor union involvement in occupational safety and health, 1957-1987

Right-to-know policies and related market-oriented occupational health policies require an institutionalized means through which workers can interpret and act on information about quality differences among jobs. In principle, labor unions could play this role. However, union coverage has been declining since the 1950s, and the decline has accelerated in recent years. This paper documents the growth in occupational health and safety activities in unionized workplaces from 1957 to 1987 and the decline in union representation in hazardous workplaces from 1971 to 1986. It also analyzes the relationship between right-to-know and right-to-refuse-hazardous-work guarantees under industrial relations and occupational health law.     

Death penalty attitudes and the tendency to convict or acquit

Three studies examined whether attitudes toward the death penalty were related to conviction or acquittal proneness. They were not, even in a case where it was clear that the prosecution was asking for death. Two questions asked whether attitudes toward the death penalty were related to changes in the threshold of guilt or in the amount of evidence required to find guilt when death as compared to life imprisonment was the potential sentence. They were so related, but answers to such questions were unrelated to verdicts in a death case. In one study, strong opponents of the death penalty were no different from others in attitudes toward attorneys and witnesses, in recollection of the facts of a trial, or in their subjective impressions about the trial. The basis of any attitude-behavior relation in this area is questioned.     

On the design of optimal mechanisms for the Arrow-Hahn-McKenzie economy

This essay presents necessary and sufficient first-order conditions for the general design of allocation mechanisms that decentralize Pareto optimal decisions in Arrow-Hahn-McKenzie (AHM) economies. An AHM economy is distinguished from the usual Arrow-Debreu private ownership economy since the consumption or production of any commodity may induce externalities, including initially endowed commodities. Because competitive markets will not generally internalize all externalities efficiently, the mechanism design must be generalized to include a rule that computes prices for commodities appearing as initial endowments so as to define consumers' individual budget sets. A natural design criterion for the generalized allocation mechanism is to have agents communicate both price and allocation messages to the center, enlarging the message space relative to that necessary for implementing mechanisms in Arrow-Debreu economies. The larger message spaces give agents increased flexibility, which has two significant consequences: (1) the dominant-strategy property of the Demand-Revealing Mechanism in economies with only public goods, a single pure private good, and quasilinear preferences, is lost unless the center adopts an enforcement structure that suitably restricts the allocation messages that agents may transmit; (2) if an endowed commodity is not a pure private good, then the Demand-Revealing Mechanism loses the dominant-strategy property, regardless of the enforcement structure adopted or of the nature of consumers' preferences, so that the problem is exacerbated in general AHM economies.