Call for Submissions: Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties (Volume XXIII)

Dear Rachel Broun,

I am completing an article entitled “Empirically Analyzing Fair Housing Enforcement in Jim Crow West.” Located at the intersection of law, policy, and bureaucratic outcomes, it quantitatively investigates how the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) has been carried out. Specifically, relying on two unique, comprehensive HUD data sets, obtained through FOIA requests, I empirically explore the incidence of favorable outcomes in Title VIII complaints from 1989 to 2010 in 13 Western states. My approach spotlights how diverse government agencies frequently exercise discretion in civil rights decision-making; some bestow high supportive outcomes for people of color, but others do not.

Measuring favorable outcomes is a reliable way to evaluate the effectiveness of federal, state, and local Fair Housing Act enforcement because the lower supportive outcome rates are, the more likely Title VIII is not being vigorously implemented. Given this, I discover major variations in favorable outcomes across the West. This reveals that governmental jurisdictions vary noticeably in their support for Fair Housing Act complainants and that it makes a statistically significant difference in what state a complaint is filed.

I find that Jim Crow North is a concept that applies in practice to states and cities in the West, although Jim Crow is normally associated with the South. Jim Crow existed in Western states, predominantly in a de facto form, but that approach was successful in establishing and maintaining a system of residential segregation deeply rooted in racial and ethnic discrimination. This finding is important because in the past, even though Southern states lagged far behind the remainder of the country in protecting civil rights, Jim Crow discrimination and segregation was not restricted to the South in housing; it existed in Western states normally thought of as more liberal than their Southern counterparts.

This study concludes that law and politics help explain variations in fair housing enforcement in the United States—but so does geography. For instance, unlike the Midwest and Northeast, local Western Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) agencies do not decide the highest proportion of Title VIII cases in favor of Blacks and Latinos—or even play a meaningful role in enforcement generally; a Western state’s ethnic makeup does not affect the likelihood of a favorable outcome for Latinos, and racial composition has little effect on outcomes for Black Americans; and Latinos are not more likely to receive favorable outcomes in Western states where they constitute a higher percentage of the total population. The analysis also reveals another trait about Fair Housing Act enforcement in the West: Black complainants are more likely to obtain favorable outcomes in Democratic states, but Latinos do so in Republican states.

Finally, please note that this article is the third in a series: the first was “Jim Crow North and Fair Housing Enforcement,”15 Columbia Journal of Race and Law 1193 (2025); the second is “The Relics of Jim Crow: Fair Housing Enforcement in the North and Midwest,” 35 Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice ___ (forthcoming 2026), both coauthored by Charles S. Bullock III of the University of Georgia. I hope that SJCRCL will the interested in the current project, and I would appreciate hearing from you. The final draft will be available for submission no later than July 1, 2026, and initially I would be willing to exclusively submit it to you if there is an advantage in taking that approach.        

All best,

Charles

Charles M. Lamb, Ph. D.

Research Professor

Department of Political Science

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Buffalo, NY 14260

clamb@buffalo.edu