Prerequisites: 1L Constitutional Law or Constitutional Law: Separation of Powers, Federalism, and Fourteenth Amendment

Exam: No Exam

Anti-discrimination law is in flux. This seminar explores those dynamics from several vantage points. After a brief review of bedrock concepts (e.g., tiers of scrutiny, disparate treatment versus disparate impact), the seminar will consider several normative accounts of the purposes and limits of anti-discrimination law. It will then cover doctrinal, normative, and theoretical issues arising in recent substantive areas of anti-discrimination law; the relationship between trans-substantive procedural doctrines and anti-discrimination norms; and ways in which non-judicial governmental actors may advance (or constrain) the aims of anti-discrimination law. The seminar is not a survey of anti-discrimination law and does not attempt to provide the comprehensive grounding in the various constitutional, statutory, and doctrinal terrains that such a survey would entail. The aim, instead, is to wrestle with problems and debates that emerge throughout the law’s attempts to define and remedy discrimination.