University of Richmond Law Review

Improving Lawyers’ Health by Addressing the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences

Karen Oehme *

Nat Stern **

Although the legal profession has recognized the importance of improving attorneys’ mental health, it has largely ignored recent social and scientific research on how adverse childhood experiences (“ACEs”) can harm attorneys’ long-term well-being. This article reviews the science of ACEs and argues that law schools and the legal profession should educate law students and attorneys about the impact of prior trauma on behavioral health. Without such education, law schools and the legal system are missing a crucial opportunity to help lawyers prevent and alleviate the maladaptive coping mechanisms that are associated with ACEs. Until such knowledge is widespread, many lawyers will be plagued by their own trauma histories—to the detriment of individuals, families, communities, and the legal system.

* Director, Institute for Family Violence Studies, and Distinguished University Scholar, Florida State University.

** John and Ashley E. Frost Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law.

Intellectual Property and Human Rights 2.0

Peter K. Yu *

Written in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this article calls for greater methodological engagement to refine existing human rights approaches to intellectual property and to devise new approaches to advance the promotion and protection of human rights in the intellectual property area. This article begins by briefly recapturing the past two decades of scholarship on intellectual property and human rights. It documents the progress scholars have made in this intersectional area. The article then draws on the latest research on human rights methods and methodology to explore whether and how we can take the academic discourse to the next level. It highlights three dominant research methods that have been used in this intersectional area: comparative methods, quantitative assessments, and contextual analyses. The second half of this article identifies the contributions a robust discourse on intellectual property and human rights can make to the future development of the intellectual property regime, the human rights regime, and the interface between these two regimes. Responding to critics and skeptics in the intellectual property field, the article concludes by explaining why human rights discussions in the intellectual property area will provide important benefits to the future development of the intellectual property regime, especially in relation to developing countries.

* Copyright © 2019 Peter K. Yu. Professor of Law, Professor of Communication, and Director, Center for Law and Intellectual Property, Texas A&M University. This article benefited from discussions with the participants of a number of events at which the author explored issues at the intersection of intellectual property and human rights, including the Annual Meeting of the Norwegian Copyright Society in Oslo, Norway, the Third Business and Human Rights Scholars Conference at Santa Clara University School of Law, the “Global Genes, Local Concerns” Symposium at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, a workshop organized by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development in Geneva, Switzerland, the 4th International Intellectual Property Scholars Roundtable at Duke University Law School, the International Law Weekend 2014 at Fordham University School of Law, the Workshop on “Patent Regimes and the Right to Science and Culture” at Yale Law School, and the “Intellectual Property and Human Rights” Conference at American University Washington College of Law. The author is grateful to the participants of these events for their valuable comments and suggestions

Acknowledgements

Carly M. Celestine – Symposium Editor, Volume 53

The University of Richmond Law Review is incredibly excited to present its 2019 Symposium Issue: The 50th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act–Past, Present, and Future. Each year, the Law Review hosts a Symposium which seeks to critically examine and debate a specific area of law. This year, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act (“FHA”). We were honored to host an outstanding assembly of scholars and practitioners to re- flect on the social and legal precursors to the FHA, evaluate its impact to date, and anticipate the role of the Act in providing equal access to housing in the future.

The Opportunity and the Danger of the New Urban Migration

Richard Sander*

Twenty-first century America is witnessing a broad and unprecedented migration of middle and upper-middle class families to old, dense, and often low-income urban neighborhoods. This “new urban migration” has the potential to create wholly gentrified neighborhoods that displace existing residents, or to engender racially and economically integrated neighborhoods that strengthen both neighborhoods and central cities. I argue that valuable lessons can be learned from the 1970s, when another large intraurban migration—the vast metropolitan movement of black households into white neighborhoods that followed passage of the Fair Housing Act—produced patterns of resegregation in many cities, but genuine housing integration in others. We now understand what conditions in the 1970s produced resegregative or integrative outcomes. I show that so far, the new urban migration has mostly fostered integration, but that careful, proactive policies that help to disperse this migration can make good long-term outcomes much more likely.

*Professor of Law, UCLA, and Director, UCLA-RAND Center for Law and Public Policy. Ph.D. (economics), Northwestern University, 1990; J.D., Northwestern University, 1988; B.A., Harvard University, 1978.

A New Home for Haters – Online Home Sharing Platforms: A Look at the Applicability of the Fair Housing Act to Home Shares

Allison K. Bethel*

In 2018, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act which outlawed discrimination in residential transactions. When the FHA was passed, the home search process was very different. Fifty years ago, most people searched for housing by viewing listings in newspapers and other printed publications or perhaps used a realtor. Today, most people use the internet to search for housing. Home sharing, where all or part of a home is rented on a short-term basis, has become very popular since 2008 when Airbnb entered the market. It has become a multimillion dollar business and proponents see great potential in it to ease housing and income shortages. As home sharing has grown in popularity, racism has reared its ugly head and reports of dis- crimination against minority guests have become all too frequent. Complaints of housing providers refusing to rent based on the race, sexual orientation, religion, or other protected characteristics of prospective guests have gained widespread attention through social media and threaten to undermine the future of the concept.

* Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the John Marshall Law School’s Fair Housing Legal Clinic, Chicago, Illinois. J.D., University of Florida; B.S., Northwestern University. Prior to joining JMLS in 2008, the author served as Director of Civil Rights for the Florida Attorney General’s office and litigated fair housing cases on behalf of the state. Prior to joining the Attorney General’s office, the author worked in private practice as a civil trial lawyer and defending fair housing cases.
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of John Marshall colleagues Professor Debra Stark, mentors Professors Michael P. Seng and F. Willis Caruso, Raizel Liebler, Head of Faculty Scholarship Initiatives, and research assistant Benjamin Lee.

Racism Knocking at the Door: The Use of Criminal Background Checks in Rental Housing

Valerie Schneider*

One of the harshest collateral consequences of an arrest or conviction is the impact a criminal record can have on one’s ability to secure housing. Because racial bias permeates every aspect of the criminal justice system as well as the housing market, this collat- eral consequence—the inability to find a place to live after an arrest or conviction—disproportionately affects minorities.

In 2016, after decades of appearing to encourage local public housing providers to adopt harsh policies barring applicants with criminal records, the Office of General Counsel for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) issued guidance instructing public and private housing providers to take in to account the potentially disparate effects of such policies on racial minorities (the “HUD Guidance”). Recognizing that African Americans and Latinos are “arrested, convicted and in- carcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population,” HUD advised that any policy that “restricts access to housing on the basis of criminal history” may have an unlawful disparate impact based on race.

The HUD Guidance on the potentially disparate impact of the use of criminal background checks has remained in place, though it is expected to be rolled back like many other Obama-era policies; thus, the question has now become how municipalities and housing providers will interpret and give effect to the HUD Guidance. This article examines how one such municipality—the District of Columbia—has grappled with putting the HUD Guidance into effect via legislative changes.

* Associate Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law. J.D., 2006, George Washington University Law School; B.A., 1998, University of Pennsylvania.
The author expresses gratitude to Dean Holley-Walker and the Howard University School of Law, which funded her research through a summer stipend, and to the individual members of the Howard University School of Law faculty who provided feedback in the early stages of drafting. Additionally, the author would like to thank Professor Carol Brown and the University of Richmond Law Review for putting together a thought-provoking symposium on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. Finally, the author thanks her excellent research assistant, Candace Caruthers, for her thorough and thoughtful work.

Affordable Housing: Of Inefficiency, Market Distortion, and Government Failure

Michael Diamond*

In this essay, I examine the types of costs that are imposed on society as a whole due to the absence of a sufficient number of decent housing units that are affordable to the low-income population. These costs present themselves in relation to health care, education, employment, productivity, homelessness, and incarceration. Some of the costs are direct expenditures while others are the result of lost opportunities.

My hypothesis is that these costs are significant and offer, at the very least, a substantial offset to the cost of creating and subsidizing the operation of the necessary number of affordable housing units that are currently missing. I suggest a series of reasons why, in the face of this potentially inefficient outcome, the market/society does not produce the required units.

The essay is conceptual in nature, not empirical. I recognize the issues associated with the quantification of often opaque costs and with their causal relationship to the lack of affordable housing. It is clear, however, that the costs are sizable and the correlations are strong and therefore, I believe, the hypothesis requires empirical study.

Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. I would like to acknowledge the generous contributions of Josh Teitelbaum, David Hyman, and Gregg Bloche who, through several discussions with each, helped me to refine ideas presented here. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable research assistance of Gabriel Angelo Quevedo and the tremen- dous editing support of Betsy Kuhn.

Fifty Years of Fair Housing: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future

The Hon. L. Douglas Wilder*

I think sometimes you need to wonder where we were in 1968. It wasn’t just the Fair Housing Act that was passed in 1968. What happened in 1968? George Wallace was running for presi- dent. Hubert Humphrey was running for president, and Richard Nixon as well. It wasn’t just the assassination of Dr. King, we al- so had the assassination of Robert Kennedy. We likewise had the Vietnam War, and America was a mess. We had something else occurring in 1968. That was the Kerner Commission Report, that Dr. Crutcher mentioned had been instrumental in the fair hous- ing bill. And they made recommendations. I happened to have been a part of that last month in Minnesota, and had great occa- sion to talk with Fred Harris, who was the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, Senator from Oklahoma. And also, Walter Mondale and I had a long time to talk.

* Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1990–1994. Professor, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University. This Keynote Address was delivered by the author at the 2018 University of Richmond Law Review Symposium, The 50th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act—Past, Present, and Future, on October 5, 2018, at the University of Richmond School of Law.

Fair Housing Act at Fifty

Sara Pratt*

I am a Virginian by birth; I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. You may be asking yourself how a civil rights advocate grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. Living in Virginia provided formative experiences for me that brought me to a fair housing-oriented life, and career. I started out learning about civil rights in a Presbyterian youth camp, on the campus of Hampden-Sydney College. I was in high school and we were studying Will Campbell’s book, Race and the Renewal of the Church. And they brought over two young black students from Prince Edward County who had never been to public schools.

* Counsel, Relman, Dane and Colfax. This article was adapted from the Lunchtime Address that was delivered by the author at the 2018 University of Richmond Law Review Symposium, The 50th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act—Past, Present, and Future, on October 5, 2018, at the University of Richmond School of Law.

Housing Supply and the Common Wealth

The Rev. Benjamin P. Campbell *

It’s a powerful thing to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, something that actually happened and has actually had an effect. I grew up in segregated Virginia, so I have a pretty powerful sense of the passage of time here. It’s given us the opportunity today to review and mark human progress, to take stock of where we are and to identify the efforts and issues of our time. The victories here have changed the nation, and the task is still daunting.

* Pastor Emeritus of Richmond Hill. Pastoral Associate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Richmond. These Closing Remarks were delivered by the author at the 2018 University of Richmond Law Review Symposium, The 50th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act—Past, Present, and Future, on October 5, 2018, at the University of Richmond School of Law.

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