Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
The truism that history matters can hide complexities. Consider the idea of problematic policy lineages. When may we call a policy the progeny of an earlier, discriminatory policy, especially if the policies diverge in design and designer? Does such a relationship condemn the later policy for all times and purposes, or can a later decisionmaker escape the past? It is an old problem, but its resolution hardly seems impending. Just recently, Supreme Court cases have confronted this fact pattern across subject matters as diverse as entry restrictions, nonunanimous juries, and redistricting, among others. Majority opinions seem unsure whether or why “discriminatory predecessors” matter, and individual Justices who agree that they do squabble over methodology.
One could answer these questions by banish ing them. Thus, some would simply treat any nonidentical policy predecessor as minimally relevant, and only relevant insofar as it suggests present-day bad intent. Anything else, they suggest, risks an unmoored original sin jurisprudence, with courts claiming to know guilt when they see it. Simple is not always better, however, especially if it risks eliding information material to a policy’s validity. But again: how do we divine materiality?
Better approaches are possible. While our law broadly appreciates that continuity matters to legal meaning and responsibility, constitutional law has undertheorized it. Deploying continuity here helps conceptualize, and craft guideposts for, “discriminatory taint”: an objectively ascertainable relationship between an earlier policy and a later, similar policy. Thus defined, taint can impugn some policies that might otherwise have passed constitutional muster. Yet it also facilitates realistic approaches – judicial and nonjudicial - to distinguishing genuine purging of taint from its laundering. And it supplements debates on the nature of wrongful discrimination by underscoring how continuity can help identify persistent constitutional problems even absent subjective bad intent.
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Constitutional Law | Law
Recommended Citation
Kerrel Murray,
Discriminatory Taint,
135
Harv. L. Rev.
1190
(2022).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3240