Episodes

  • The Meaning of Sex in Federal Law

    The Meaning of Sex in Federal Law
    May 6 2021
    In our final episode for the course, we conclude our section on Equal Protection by considering ongoing legal and political debates about the meaning "sex" in federal anti-discrimination statutes including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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    10 mins
  • A Quasi-Suspect Classification

    A Quasi-Suspect Classification
    May 5 2021
    This episode explores how the Supreme Court has addressed sex-based discrimination claims in Equal Protection analysis.
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    16 mins
  • Gratz and Grutter

    Gratz and Grutter
    Apr 29 2021
    This episode gives a brief overview of the 2003 cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, the first major Supreme Court cases about the use of race in university admissions since the 1968 Bakke case.
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    9 mins
  • Equal Protection in University Admissions

    Equal Protection in University Admissions
    Apr 27 2021
    This episode takes a close look at the case of University of California v. Bakke (1978), which sets the general analytic framework for the Supreme Court's subsequent series of cases on the use of race as a factor in university admissions decisions.
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    28 mins
  • Civil Rights and State Action

    Civil Rights and State Action
    Apr 22 2021
    In the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Congress sought to prevent discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, but the Supreme Court declared that to be beyond the scope of Congress' power under Section V of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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    11 mins
  • Separate But Equal

    Separate But Equal
    Apr 20 2021
    Turning now to the Equal Protection Clause, we consider in this episode the background that lead to the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the way the Supreme Court addressed that precedent in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
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    15 mins
  • RFRA and the Contraception Mandate

    RFRA and the Contraception Mandate
    Apr 16 2021
    In this episode, we go back to the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014 to consider the structure of some of the arguments about the application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in specific cases.
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    13 mins
  • Religious Freedom Restored

    Religious Freedom Restored
    Apr 13 2021
    This episode gives an overview of the back-and-forth between the Supreme Court and Congress over the issue of religious free exercise that led to the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993 and the Supreme Court's limiting of the application of RFRA only to federal law in the case of City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).
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    13 mins