The Civil Rights Juggernaut David C. Baum Memorial Lecture on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights

It is a great honor and pleasure to give the annual David Baum lecture on the topic of civil rights.Mr. Baum had an untimely death in 1973, when the set of issues that defined the civil rights movement was very different from what it is today.In 1973, the civil rights movement was still coping with the aftereffects of segregation.It was a period when there was strenuous opposition to the civil rights laws, and a situation in which their defenders, most notably Senator Hubert Humphrey, beat many a strategic retreat in order to secure passage of the law.It was a time at which the decision to include sex as a forbidden category in the law was met with much skepticism, even derision, and which resulted in the inclusion of a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) Standard for sex, but not for race.'It was a time when the question of whether or not to integrate Mrs. Murphy's boarding house raised genuine concern, 2 and the use of disparate impact tests to measure civil rights violations was a highly contested issue.3 Even the principle of nondiscrimination in public accommodation was resisted at times.But as the cases came down, the civil rights laws were given expanded purpose.Here are some of the landmark cases, listed in historical order, dealing with major issues such as the consideration of disparate impact, 4 the role of busing to deal with school integration, 5 the identification of protected classes in disparate treatment cases, 6 the narrow construction of the BFOQ sex exception, 7 the elimination of sex-based tables for calculating pensions, 8 the role t This article was originally presented on April 2, 2019, as a lecture in the David C.