Although this study will be concerned primarily with the Negro and legal issues involved in efforts to discriminate against the Negro race, a careful study of racial residential segregation will reveal that the imposed restrictions may be based on religion, nationality, or race.

A disturbing average of 600 Palestinian children are prosecuted by Israeli military courts every year. Three fourths of the children experience some form of physical violence during their arrest, interrogation, and/or detention. On the contrary, Jewish Israeli children never face the brutality of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate of Palestinian minors. The aim of this thesis is to examine the “legal” systems responsible for discriminatorily incarcerating an average of 200 children in military jails on a monthly basis. Central questions to my thesis ask: is this behavior legal and legitimate by Israeli legal standards? Can the same be said about the standards set by international law? What defines and distinguishes a legal system? Finally, how should we punish children, if at all? This thesis argues there is a severe lack of legality and legitimacy behind Israel’s rampant and unrestricted incarceration of Palestinian minors, be it by Israeli or international measures.

An understanding of the development of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from its beginnings in the Senate to its culmination in April necessitates a few brief statements concerning the condition of the nation and the relations between the President and Congress.

ABSTRACT STUDENT ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF LANDMARK SUPREME COURT CASES MISSOURI EX. REL. GAINES V. CANADA, REGISTRAR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, 1938, AND GRUTTER V. BOLLINGER, 2003 by Ansley Knox Daniel The purpose of this study is to identify primary themes related to student access to higher education and establishing diversity in higher education classrooms through a comparative analysis of the 1938 Gaines v. Canada case and the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case. Both of these Supreme Court opinions have significantly impacted student access to higher education. The landmark ruling in Gaines inaugurated a new and ground-breaking series of legal victories that opened minority student access to higher education and eventually to secondary education. In Grutter, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as one of many factors that can be used to consider in the student admissions process in higher education to encourage diversity in student populations and in leadership opportunities. Using a methodology of historiography of education law, the intention of this study is to expand the historical and legal implications of the Gaines and Grutter cases, focusing on the application of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the relationship between the outcomes of the cases and the judicial interpretation employed by the justices. In Grutter, while considering narrow-tailoring and strict scrutiny to check for the legal development and implementation of affirmative action policies, the justices prioritize providing equal access to higher education for all students and ensuring meaningful diversity in university classrooms for an extended, but still limited, time period. It is valuable for historians of the law and members of the legal profession to consider the notion of active liberty articulated by Justice Stephen Breyer (2005) when developing their interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause and how it should be applied.

Master of Arts / History / Lou F. Williams / During the course of Reconstruction both the Supreme Court and the lower level federal courts faced the task of interpreting Reconstruction legislation, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Enforcement Acts. By the end of Reconstruction the Supreme Court had defined these groundbreaking pieces of legislation in a conservative manner that negatively impacted the former slaves. The lower-level courts, however, had embraced earlier opportunities to broaden the nationalistic meaning of these Amendments. One such opportunity was United States v Hall. This trial level court case initially expanded the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of African Americans. The Hall Case was one of the great “might have beens” in U.S. Constitutional history. This study analyzes Ku Klux Klan violence leading up to the Eutaw riot and the subsequent court case, U.S. v Hall. Conflict broke out during a pre-election political rally when Democrats and Republicans met simultaneously at the Greene County, AL, Court House. The riot resulted in the federal government’s attempts to prosecute the rioters under the Enforcement Act of 1870. The Hall case was one of the first in which federal judges interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment. Federal prosecutors challenged the judges to make a broad, nationalistic interpretation, which would have enabled the federal government to protect the rights of the former slaves for the long haul. What—exactly—were the privileges and immunities of national citizenship? Did the Fourteenth Amendment apply the Bill of Rights to the states? Are these rights protected against the state governments? These are the issues Attorney General John P. Southworth and Circuit Court Judge William Woods tackled in the federal trial. Ultimately, the government failed to secure a conviction of the rioters but set a strong precedent in Judge Woods’ opinion for later federal courts to establish the Fourteenth Amendment’s connection to the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court failed to follow the precedent. This analysis provides historians a better understanding of the work of the lower level federal courts’ and their contribution to the constitutional issues of Reconstruction.

The purposes of the following thesis is to research United States Supreme Court sex-discrimination jurisprudence and ascertain if Fourteenth Amendment legislative history was used, referred to, cited to, or quoted from, by the Supreme Court Justices in their opinions regarding sex-discrimination cases since the Amendment was ratified in 1868. Legislative history is a window into the drafting, debating, and intricate crafting of laws and amendments. When words and phrases that are used in the statutes, codes, and amendments are ambiguous or unclear, judges and justices should use the legislative history to ascertain the intent of the framers of the legislation. The methodology that was employed for this thesis was through the researching of all relevant United States Supreme Court cases as to what was written by the Justices in their opinions. Research was conducted into the relevant law review articles on the subject of legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, Supreme Court sex-discrimination jurisprudence, and the historical impact of Court decisions on the law relative to sex-discrimination. After extensive research, it was discovered that the United States Supreme Court has established over 144 years' worth of sex-discrimination jurisprudence. The law review article research revealed that the lack of legislative history research by the Court has not gone unnoticed by the legal community or the women's rights community since the Fourteenth Amendment was originally drafted. The research and analysis of the sources of sex-discrimination from cases, law review articles, and books on the subject, led to the conclusion that no Fourteenth Amendment legislative history was ever used by the Supreme Court of the United States as part of its development of sex-discrimination jurisprudence.

Substantive due process has been of great importance to the decision of many Supreme Court cases since its beginning. Since its inception in Lochner v. New York,[1] the Supreme Court has used the theory of substantive due process in order to grant numerous rights to individuals and this theory has been interpreted differently by each Justice that has crossed its path. This thesis will explain how recent changes in the composition of the United States Supreme Court make it likely that judicial opinions involving substantive due process will be decided differently. The United States Supreme Court’s future substantive due process jurisprudence will narrow the reach of Substantive Due Process. Justices and their past opinions as well as statements on their analysis of substantive due process will be scrutinized in order to come to this conclusion. This thesis will examine the evolution of substantive due process as well as how each Justice’s distinct views affect it within the Supreme Court’s composition. By determining how the Supreme Court is most likely to proceed and examining the rights already granted through substantive due process this thesis will come to a determination on whether the protection of the rights granted to individuals would be maintained. [1] Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S. Ct. 539, 49 L. Ed. 937 (1905)

This paper examines the causes of the rise in vacancies on the federal courts in recent decades. Under President Barack Obama, the number of vacancies on the federal courts has sharply jumped. This is due to firm opposition by Senate Republicans, who have used the various procedural tools of that body to make it difficult for nominees to get confirmation. This antagonism is the result of a shift in how the parties view the courts and their role in the American political process. The Warren Court's expansion of substantive due process rights increased the Court's powers to the chagrin of conservatives. Republicans responded by blocking the nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice; Democrats retaliated by defeating several of Richard Nixon's nominees to replace Fortas. These battles, and the prominence of legal issues such as abortion, would culminate in the vicious fight over Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Court, which influenced increasingly bitter fights in recent decades. I also propose a possible solution to the obstruction problem, inspired by procedures used in jury selection.

Much has been written in the literature of higher education on the history and current role of presidents, provosts, and deans. However, higher education scholars have, for the most part ignored the role of institutional in-house attorneys on college and university campuses. Those who have written on the subject of institutional counsel have proffered the idea that in-house general counsel offices were established as a result of the increased regulation of higher education by state and federal governments, and litigation resulting from the faculty and student rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This project seeks to provide a detailed justification for the rationale for the proliferation of counsel offices, and to provide a base-line qualitative, interview-based approach to the current role of college and university attorneys. Using a historical, document based approach this dissertation provides a comprehensive exploration of the argument that the establishment and growth of offices of the general counsel on college and university campuses was rooted in litigation. This dissertation further builds on the notion that as colleges and universities became larger and more complex, federal and state governments increased regulatory and reporting demands and accountability on institutions. A second issue that this dissertation covers is the way in which modern day institutional counsel view their roles within a college or university. Using Oral History Methodology, three attorneys were interviewed about their perceptions of their roles. Based on those interviews, this dissertation proffers the idea that an institutional counsel’s view of his or her role is linked to the nature of the individual campus and its leadership, and the structure of the office in which the attorney works. This dissertation also puts the role of the institutional counsel into the context of institutional actors by comparing it with the role of the academic dean. In addition to showing that the role of the institutional counsel is institution dependent, the results of this project indicate that the role of the institutional general counsel is an area ripe for additional study.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the evolution of its influence as a result of judicial interpretation Abstract The thesis analyzes the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the changes in its understanding resulting from its interpretation by the Supreme Court of the United States throughout the years since the ratification of the Amendment. The thesis discusses every section of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the highest attention is dedicated to its most significant first section and the clauses contained in it; the citizenship clause, the privileges or immunities clause, the due process clause and the equal protection clause. The debates of the 39th Congress are discussed as well, as they offer an insight to the original understanding of the terms used in the text of the Amendment and allow to understand the context of its origin. The evolution of the Amendment's influence is then analyzed through a number of historical eras that reflect the ever-changing composition of the Court and the decisions stemming from it. The thesis tries to outline the most likely original meaning of the Amendment's clauses and compare it to their interpretation by the Supreme Court which makes it possible to observe the Amendment's gradually growing influence on american...