Search

When the Modern Games began in 1896, women did not compete.5 The founder of the modern Games adamantly opposed female competition on the basis of a natural law principle it believed governed the role of women. Its leadership held that female competition would violate "the laws of nature" and would be "the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate."6 "It seems to me therefore that is those sports and games which are suitable for men be modified and reduced so that they cannot anyway injure the woman, and if we can create organizations which will enforce these modified regulations stringently, we will have gone a long way towards achieving our objects."7 Today, the role of women is still limited by policies that echo these outdated assumptions about female capacity, now justified by scientific and fair completion rationales. In this article I posit that the history. of sport is plagued by a commitment to a feminine ideal. In part one, I argue that achievement of gender equality in Olympic Sport is limited by a feminine ideal. That ideal embodies women as stereotypically feminine and weak, males as stereotypically masculine and stronger, and males as decision-makers over the scope of women's competitive destiny.8

President Trump's border wall has evolved from an ambitious campaign promise into a real opportunity to explore presidential versus Congressional authority to determine how the president spends Congressionally appropriatedfu nds. The president's arguments that he has the power to build the wall under either the National Emergencies Act or the funding provisions of10 U. S.C. § 9705 or 10 U. S.C. § 284 lack merit-the cited nonemergency-tied statutes do not provide funding for the wall. The former authorizes the utilization of Treasury Forfeiture funds tied to specific law enforcement activities but excludes the ambitious and broad construction project the president proposed; the latter authorizes support only for counterdrug activities. The wall constitutes an unprecedented appropriation for a project without mooring in statutory language permitting only unspecified minor military construction projects. Nor does The National Emergencies Act authorize the president to use Congressionally appropriated funds to build a wall that congress has expressly declined to fund. Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act after Executive abuses during the Vietnam War and to curb-not encourage-presidential usurpation of Congressional spending power based on emergency rationales. Although the National Emergencies Act imposes scant substantive and procedural limitations on a president's ability to declare a national emergency and divert funds to address such an emergency, the Act does not allow the president to manufacture a basis for such a declaration where none exists. Even so, the chronology of events leading up to the emergency declaration demonstrates that the president's invocation of an emergency is a ruse.

In this Article, I will focus on the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court as a significant landmark in the history of the federal judiciary. I explore this topic initially through a comparison of President Woodrow Wilson's 1916 appointment of Louis Brandeis with President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of Thurgood Marshall as a symbolic opening of the federal bench to African-American lawyers. Both Brandeis and Marshall were well-known nationally prior to their appointments, with Brandeis engaged in significant domestic and international activities, including his embrace of Zionism, and Marshall engaged in almost a four-decade long assault on racial segregation and Plessy v. Ferguson.' Perhaps not ironically, both endured abnormally long waits between nomination and confirmation while their opponents raised substantive objections that thinly veiled the opposition to the placement of a member of their respective groups on the highest court.

This article contends that the battle to preserve and place the principles of Brown v. Board of Education' at the center of the quest for educational equality is more important than ever before. Initially, this article notes that the United States Supreme Court's stewardship of Brown has been uneven, and the decision's precedential force has been much diminished in the hands of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. But as the Court has withdrawn from vigorous enforcement of Brown's desegregation mandate, segregation in public education persists, and other factors such as class, housing segregation, hypercriminalization, and employment discrimination intersect with race to condemn black and brown children to disparities in educational attainment. While Court partisans2 and the nation debate whether we are a post-racial America, 3 many sobering realities, including disparate educational outcomes, demonstrate that racial disparity and discrimination in America remain as resilient as ever.

Darren Wilson's shooting of an unarmed nineteen-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was the tip of an iceberg of racial subordination and despair. The deep outrage over that shooting displayed in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri,6 the nation,7 and all over the world8 suggests that the shooting of Michael Brown was more than an isolated police killing of a Black teenager. The backstory involved the role of police departments and the criminal system in the lives of poor Blacks-the harassment, the violence, the hyper-criminalization, and the revolving door of mass incarceration-in combination with a racial and economic structure that systematically provides under-education, unemployment, and housing segregation. 9 This Article posits that individual instances of police deadly force against unarmed Black men are enabled by a legal jurisprudence of structural violence which provides no accountability for the societal marginalization and stigmatization of young Black men, as well as by a jurisprudence of actual violence, which permits police officers to decide whom to target and whom to kill with virtually no threat of criminal sanction or institutional civil liability.