Congress’s Authority To Enact the Violence Against Women Act: Reasoning from Race & History by Lawrence Sager

Read Lawrence Sager's (Texas-Law) take on the relationship between Jones v. Mayer (1968), the important civil rights-era race discrimination precedent, and the Violence Against Women Act, the subject of a re-authorization debate, in 121 Yale Journal Online 629 (2012). Sager summarizes his argument as follows:

My “missing argument” invokes the structure of the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. to explain congressional authority to enact the civil rights provisions of the Violence Against Women Act. Like the “relics” of slavery, patterns of violence against women trace to decades of state-sponsored discrimination against women, and Congress has the authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to take steps to repair that unhappy legacy.