TIMOTHY P. O'NEILL, John Marshall Law School
Email: 7oneill@jmls.edu

Vagrancy laws provided a way of controlling the movement of former slaves in the South after the Civil War. The traffic code is the new way of controlling the movements of minorities in America. Aided by U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Whren, Atwater, and Caballes, police have almost unlimited discretion to stop any driver. But the use of traffic stops on minority drivers - for the purpose of obtaining consent to search the car without any probable cause or reasonable suspicion - is particularly pernicious. This article suggests ways to curb this police practice.

CHRISTOPHER W. SCHMIDT, Chicago-Kent College of Law, American Bar Foundation
Email: cschmidt@kentlaw.edu

From the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century, civil rights reformers fought, with little success, against the argument that law was powerless to change prejudicial attitudes and customs. It was widely assumed during the Jim Crow era that forcing the principle of racial equality on resistant southern whites might turn desegregation into yet another failed experiment in social reform by legal fiat — another Reconstruction or Prohibition. In the 1940s and 1950s, these assumptions began to give way because of the efforts of liberal scholars and activists who made the case that legal reform could be particularly effective at combating prejudice, and thereby improving race relations. Yet this struggle to overcome prevalent skepticism toward law’s capacity has been largely lost in historical scholarship. In this article I examine a generation of social scientists, historians, lawyers, and activists who made the case that race relations were more malleable than had been previously assumed and that properly conceived laws could affect not only outward behavior, but personal attitudes. Nowhere were these arguments more consequential than in the NAACP’s litigation campaign against segregated education. They provided an effective response to the fears of Supreme Court justices that a desegregation ruling would be ignored or, worse, rejected. I argue that the triumph of the idea that legal reform could reshape race relations was a critical factor in making possible the emergence of civil rights as a viable national issue in the early post-World War II period — and the great civil rights achievement of that era, Brown v. Board of Education.

LORRAINE A. SCHMALL, Northern Illinois University - College of Law
Email: l10las1@wpo.cso.niu.edu

The most recent guardians of public morals are the local druggist, who may refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives, and state legislators, who wish to reverse the long-standing and hard-won privilege to plan a family. Governor Rod Blagojevich, after being told that a Chicago pharmacist refused to fill an order because of moral opposition to contraception, had reacted quickly with the new rule: Our regulation says that if a woman goes to a pharmacy with a prescription for birth control, the pharmacy or the pharmacist is not allowed to discriminate or to choose who he sells it to, Blagojevich said, no delays. By late 2003, emergency contraception was expected to be approved as a non-prescription contingency technique for preventing pregnancy after unprotected sex or the failure of regular contraception. Importantly, especially for anti-abortion activists who may also oppose birth control, 50% of unintended pregnancies could be avoided if women had the information and timely-access to emergency contraception. Specifically, plaintiffs contended that "the statutes impose a substantive obligation on those health carriers that provide a general prescription benefit to also specifically include all FDA approved contraceptive drugs and devices."

ERIN MURPHY, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall)
Email: eemurphy@berkeley.edu

As DNA databases have grown in size, a search method known as familial or kinship matching has also become more prevalent. Familial searches use databases to locate possible relatives of the source of a crime-scene sample in cases in which no exact match was found. Because this kind of searching focuses attention only upon possible matches to innocent persons with relatives in a DNA database, while ignoring possible matches to innocent persons without such relatives, it raises serious concerns. This Article argues against familial search practices on a variety of grounds, including claims related to equality, accuracy, privacy, racial discrimination, and democratic accountability. Should such arguments not prove persuasive, however, it then sets forth recommendations for restrictions on familial searching aimed at ameliorating their possible iniquitous effects.