SEGREGATION ON-DEMAND: LIMITING DISCRIMINATORY MUNICIPAL INCORPORATIONS.

The American space discriminates against and excludes various social groups. This discrimination, whether on a racial, economic, or religious basis, threatens the social equality promised by the Supreme Court when it rejected the "separate but equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education--the same social equality which is supposedly enshrined in subsequent years of civil rights laws. The persistence, and even expansion, of racial, economic, and religious discrimination in the American space necessitates a re-examination of longestablished legal presumptions and their effects on attaining equality. One of those legal presumptions is that separation between social groups is inherently discriminatory, making attempts to separate population groups in a given community unconstitutional. However, while segregation within the community is prohibited, nothing prevents separation seekers from achieving separation by altering community boundaries through municipal incorporation. While municipal incorporation may serve essential economic and social needs, it may also become a device for spatial discrimination, as it allows separation seekers to easily bypass long-established segregation bans. Therefore, municipal incorporation may pose a significant challenge to achieving equality in American society. This Article argues that the potential discriminatory use of municipal incorporation requires the assimilation of a mandatory examination of its racial and socioeconomic implications within the incorporation approval processes. Such an examination should consider the justifications and objections for spatial separation, as well as the incorporation's effects on the communities involved, on the autonomy of the communities' members, and on society as a whole. This Article provides a nuanced roadmap that serves to guide the political or judicial entities responsible for approving the incorporation. It also provides an in-depth study implementing the proposed roadmap to two recent municipal incorporation cases: the case of St. George, Louisiana, and the case of Kiryas Joel, New York. The analysis of these cases will illustrate how the proposed roadmap makes it possible to distinguish between incidences where separation is merely a device for otherwise unlawful discrimination and those cases in which separation may contribute to spatial equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]