Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig A. Kaplowitz
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
Legal Defense

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Law School ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Limited Basis ◽  
Legal Defense

The epilogue examines the legacy of the efforts by Julius Chambers and his firm through the mid-1970s. In 1984, Chambers, widely acknowledged as an exceptionally skilled civil rights litigator and legal strategist, succeeded Jack Greenberg as director-counsel of Legal Defense and Education Fund. From that post Chambers coordinated the legal struggle for civil rights for nine years, mostly attempting to fend off the increasingly reactionary policies of the Reagan administration and of the legal positions on race advanced by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In 1993, Chambers resigned as LDF director-counsel and returned to North Carolina, where he was installed as chancellor of his undergraduate alma mater, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Chambers retired in 2001and, after an absence of nearly twenty years, returned to Charlotte where he rejoined the firm on a limited basis. He meanwhile served the inaugural director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, housed within the UNC Law School. Chambers, whose efforts advanced federal civil rights law to its apogee in the early to mid-1970s and who thus stands out as the most important African American civil rights attorney in the generation following Thurgood Marshall, died on August 2, 2013.

Day Laborers

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Construction Market ◽  
Home Improvement ◽  
Street Corner ◽  
Day Laborer ◽  
Legal Defense

Day laborers are immigrant men who seek daily employment on street corners, often next to home improvement stores and other venues trafficked by contractors and do-it-yourselfers. The combination of a strong construction market and rising undocumented immigration powered the growth of day labor through the 1990s. Although part of the underground economy, day laborers were some of the most visible immigrant workers, standing on the corners in affluent communities to find jobs. Over the next decade, they became the target of legal backlash, with more than forty cities in the greater L.A. area passing anti-solicitation ordinances making it a crime for day laborers to solicit work from the street corner. This chapter examines the coordinated legal and organizing campaign to challenge these ordinances led by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The campaign challenged local jurisdictions in the greater L.A. area that actively enforced anti-solicitation ordinances. The strategy developed by MALDEF and NDLON focused on organizing day laborers at enforcement hotspots into committees that served as plaintiffs in federal court lawsuits claiming that ordinances violated laborers’ First Amendment right to seek work. The campaign thus adopted a libertarian, rather than an anti-discrimination, legal frame. This frame was used to build precedent toward the end goal of invalidating the most aggressive ordinances: those modeled after Redondo Beach’s pioneering 1987 law banning solicitation in any public right-of-way, including sidewalks. The chapter charts the trajectory of this test-case strategy, which culminated in a seminal 2011 federal appellate court decision striking down Redondo Beach’s ordinance and thereby clearing the way for day laborer solicitation in public space regionwide.

Rape and the Law in the Late 1970s

2019 ◽  
pp. 160-186
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet
Keyword(s):  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
Reform Strategies ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Legal Defense

By the end of the 1970s, racial justice and feminist activists had gained significant ground in the legal arena. This chapter charts some of the major legal successes of those movements. Most notably from the feminist perspective was Michigan’s 1974 Criminal Sexual Conduct bill, the first complete overhaul of a state rape law in the nation. Hailed as a major feminist victory, the new law served as a model for other states nationwide. Feminist law reform strategies faced major opposition from opponents across the political spectrum, with debates often centering on contrasting beliefs of what constituted a fair trial. One reform which satisfied both racial and gender justice goals was the abolition of the death penalty as punishment for rape. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund brought the question of appropriate punishment in cases of rape before the Supreme Court in Coker v. Georgia (1977). The Court ruled in favor of Coker, and deemed capital punishment a disproportionate punishment in cases of adult rape. In the end, rape law reforms ultimately proved to be quite limited. The legal system was deeply steeped in pervasive racist and sexist cultural norms, creating significant barriers to effective change in the legal arena.

Julius Chambers in New York

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American South ◽  
Law School ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
Clear Vision ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Defense ◽  
Charles Hamilton Houston

Chapter 3 describes Chambers's two years in New York 1962-1964, the first at Columbia Law School and the second as the first-ever civil rights intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund ("LDF"). Earlier the LDF, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, pioneered systematic strategic litigation for social change and led the legal campaign that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which signalled the beginning of the end of state-sponsored apartheid in the American South. In 1963 LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg selected Chambers as the first intern for a new program designed to offer prospective civil rights attorneys front-line experience at LDF headquarters in New York City plus three years of subsequent modest funding to support the establishment of new Southern law practices as allies in civil rights litigation. Chambers found the year at LDF exhilarating. Working with LDF's highly-motivated and exceptionally talented staff attorneys, Chambers traveled the South to assist with LDF cases, gaining experience and a clear vision of his professional future.

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