Vocab:

1. Civil rights - Policies designed to protect people against arbitrary or discriminatory treatment by government officials or individuals.

2. Fourteenth Amendment - The constitutional amendment adopted after the Civil War that declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the US; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

3. equal protection of the law - Part of the Fourteenth amendment emphasizing that the laws must provide equivalent “protection” to all people.

4. Thirteenth Amendment - The constitutional amendment ratified after the Civil War that forbade slavery and involuntary servitude.

5. Jim Crow Laws - Law segregating all public facilities.

6. Civil Rights Act of 1964 - The law making racial discrimination in public accommodations illegal. It forbade many forms of job discrimination. It also strengthened voting rights.

7. suffrage - The legal right to vote, extended to African Americans by the Fifteenth Amendment, to women by the Nineteenth Amendment, and to 18- to 20-year olds by the Twenty-sixth Amendment.

8. Fifteenth Amendment - The constitutional amendment adopted in 1870 to extend suffrage to African Americans.

9. Poll taxes - Small taxes levied on the right to vote. Poll taxes were used by most Southern states to exclude Africacn Americans from voting.

10. white primary: Primary elections from which African Americans were excluded, an exclusion that, in the heavily Democratic South, deprived African Americans of a voice in the real contests. The Supreme Court declared white primaries unconstitutional in 1944.

11. Voting Rights Act of 1965 - A law designed to help end formal and informal barriers to African American suffrage. Under the law, hundreds of thousands of African Americans registered to vote, and the number of African American elected officials increased dramatically

12. Nineteenth Amendment - The constitutional amendment adopted in 1920 that guarantees women the right to vote.

13. Equal Rights Amendment - A constitutional amendment passed by Congress in 1972, stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by an state on account of sex.” The amendment failed to acquire the necessary support from three-fourths of the state legislatures.

14. Americans with Disabilites Act of 1990 - A law passed in 1990 that requires employers and public facilities to make “reasonable accomodations” for people with disabilities and prohibits discrimination against these individuals in employment.

15. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 - added people with disabilities to the list of Americans protected from discrimination and allowed for the addition of accessible tools such as Braille signs and handicap ramps.

16. Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 - entitled all children to a free public education appropriate to their needs.

17. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996 - States did not have to legally recognize same-sex marriage even if they were legal everywhere else in the US.

18. Affirmative action - A policy designed to give special attention to or compensatory treatment for members of some previously disadvantaged group.

Cases:

1. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth (2000) - If a university determines that its mission is well served when students have the means to engage in a dynamic discussion on a broad range of issues, it may impose a mandatory fee to sustain such dialogue.

2. Barron v. Baltimore (1833)- The Bill of Rights restrained only the national government, not the states or cities.

3. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) - A slave who had escaped to a free state enjoyed no rights as a citizen and that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories.

4. Strauder v. West Virginia (1880) - Voided a law barring African Americans from serving on juries.

5. Civil Rights Cases (1883) - The Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses and individuals.

6. Pless v. Ferguson (1896) - Provided a constitutional justification of segregation by ruling that a Louisiana law requiring “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” was constitutional.

7. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) - A public institution of higher learning may not provide different treatment to a student solely because of his or her race.

8. Sweatt v. Painter (1950) - Found the separate but equal formula generally unacceptable for professional schools.

9. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) - Segregation is inherently unconstitutional because it violates the Fourteenth Amendent’s guarantee of equal protection. This case marked the end of legal segregation in the United States.

10. Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969) - Delays in desegregating school systems are no longer tolerable.

11. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg County Schools (1971) - Ordered busing of students to achieve racially balanced schools.

12. Jones v. Mayer (1968) - To prevent racial discrimination Congress could regulate the sale of private property, and Congress passed the Fair Housing Act oof 1968 to forbid discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.

13. Loving v. Virginia (1967) - struck down laws prohibiting interracial marraiges.

14. Guinn v. United States (1915) - Deemed the grandfather clause unconstitutional.

15. Smith v. Allwright (1944) - declared White primaries unconstitutional.

16. Harper v. Virginia State Board of Election (1966) - Voided poll taxes in state elections.

17. Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) - governments at all levels had to draw district boundaries to avoid discriminatory results and not just discriminatory intent.

18. Shaw v. Reno (1993) - Decried the creation of districts based solely on racial composition and the district drawers’ abandonment of traditional redistricting standards such as compactness and contiguity.

19. Hunt v. Cromartie (1999) - Concious consideration of race is not automatically unconstitutional if the state’s primary motivation is potentially political rather than racial.

20. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) - Stregnthened the tribal power of individual tribe members and furthered self-government by Indian tribes.

21. Hernandez v. Texas (1954) - Extended protection against discrimination to Latinos.

22. Plyer v. Doe (1982) - Declared that the law banning undocumented children from attending public schools as unconstitutional.

23. Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) - Voided a law requiring all laundries in wooden buildings to obtain permit from the city because 90% of laundries were owned by Asians.

24. Korematsu v. United States (1944) - Upheld as constitutional the internment of more than 100,000 Americans of Japnese descent in encampments during WWII. It was overturned by the Court in 2018.

25. Reed v. Reed (1971) - The landmark case in 1971 in which the Supreme Court for the first time upheld a claim of gender discrimination.

26. Craig v. Boren (1976) - Established the “intermediate scrutiny” standard for determining gender discrimination.

27. Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977) - Voided laws and rules barring women from jobs through arbitrary height and weight requirements unless it was necessary for the job.

28. Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993) - Reinforced the broad principle that sexual harassment that is so pervasive as to create a hostile or abusive work environment is a form of gender discrimination which is forbidden by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

29. Reeves v. Sanderson (2000) - A plaintiff’s evidence of an employer’s bias, combined with sufficient evidence to find that the employer’s asserted justification is false, may permit juries and judges to conclude that an employer unlawfully discriminated.

30. Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Labroatory (2008) - It is up to the employer to show that action against a worker stems from reasonable factors other than age.

31. Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) - states could ban homosexual relations.

32. Romer v. Evans (1996) - Voided a state constitutional amendment approved the voters of Colorado that denied gay men and lesbians protection against discrimination, finding that the Colorado amendment violated the US Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the law.

33. Lawrence v. Texas (2003) - overturned Bowers v. Hardwick when it voided a Texas anti-sodomy law on the grounds that such laws are unconstitutional intrusions on the right to privacy.

34. Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020) - held that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of discrimination “because of sex” includes LGBTQ+ employees.

35. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) - Requires states to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state.

36. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke - A 1978 Supreme Court decision holding that a state university may weight race or ethnic background as one element in admissions but may not set aside places for members of particular racial groups.

37. Adarand Constructors v. Pena (1995) - Federal programs that classify people by race, even for an ostensibly benign purpose such as expanding opportunities for minorities, should be presumed to be unconstitutional.

38. Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) - held that if an emplyes uses a hiring or promoting test, it generally has to accept the test results unless the employer has strong evidence that the test was flawed and improperly favored a particular group.

39. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) - upheld the UMich’s law school’s use of race as one of many factors in admission.

40. Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) - struck down UMich’s system of undergraduate admissions in which every applicant from an underrepresented racial or ethnic minority group was awarded 20/100 points needed to guarantee admission.

41. Fisher v. UT Austin (2016) - upheld the system where UTA offers admission to the top 10% then fills the rest by combining an applicant’s academic performance with the applicant’s “Personal Achievement Index,” a holistic review containing numerous factors, including race.

42. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) - the school districts’ use of race in their voluntary integration plans, even for the purpose of preventing resegregation, violated the equal protection guarantee and therefore was unconstitutional.