Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Nash on the Origins of Fair Lending LItigation

Andrew Nash, Washington University-St. Louis School of Law, has posted what appeares to be a very useful piece of student work, The Origins of Fair Lending Litigation. Here is the abstract:
This paper describes the origins of fair lending litigation in the 1970s. It documents two litigation strategies, one aimed at discriminatory lenders in local communities and a second at the federal lending regulators. Together, these two litigation strategies helped to establish the basic anti-lending discrimination framework that remains in place today. Rather than view these two strategies as distinct, however, this paper argues that they represented complementary efforts to establish an effective anti-discrimination strategy at local and national levels.
The research for this paper was conducted in a law school seminar at Washington University taught by Professor Margo Schlanger. The research for this paper drew on dozens of fair lending cases from the 1970s to the present; summaries for all of these cases can be found at the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, located on the Washington University School of Law's website.