Civil Rights

This week offered quite the spectacle in Alabama. Relying on a recent ruling from United States District Court Judge Callie Granade, based in Mobile, that struck down the provision in the Alabama state constitution that prohibits recognition of same-sex marriage, many gay and lesbian couples around the state began getting marriage licenses.

Faculty members at UC Davis School of Law publish truly unique scholarship that advances the legal profession. You can view their scholarly works via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network. An archive can be found on this web page.

What follows here is the most recent collection of papers:

As 2014 draws to a close, we thought it appropriate to reflect on some of the most significant constitutional developments of the past year. Recognizing that any short-list requires difficult choices, we present our catalog of five noteworthy constitutional events or trends (in no specific order) below.

When the Supreme Court in Schuette v.

More than a century after a New York lawyer was denied the opportunity to practice law in California because of state laws that barred Chinese immigrants from most careers and opportunities, UC Davis law students are seeking his posthumous admission to the California State Bar.

The students in the UC Davis School of Law Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA) are asking the State Bar of California, and eventually the California Supreme Court, to admit Hong Yen Chang, who was denied a license to practice law in California in 1890.

Last Friday, Professors Jack Chin and Rose Villazor organized a day-long roundtable discussion at UC Davis School of Law of chapters of their forthcoming book, "Legislating a New America," on the 50th Anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1965. The book is under contract with Cambridge University Press and scheduled for release in 2015. 

The Immigration Act, which came on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, represented a monumental change to U.S. immigration law and, among other reforms, eliminated a discriminatory quotas system. 

In Part One of this series, we began to analyze the recent decision from the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories. The three-judge panel there held that, in light of the Supreme Court's decision last summer in United States v.

Professor Angela Harris's former colleagues at Berkeley Law are celebrating her incredible work with a daylong conference today.

Professor Harris is one of the nation's foremost scholars in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and civil rights. She joined the King Hall faculty from UC Berkeley School of Law in 2011.

Here is the program for today's Festschrift:

Welcome / Opening Remarks

As Americans reflect on events a half century in the past, I hope they will consider how it might guide our actions now. In particular, I hope people will think about what Americans still owe the African American community.

In the same-sex marriage cases that were heard and decided by the U.S.