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The built environment is characterized by man-made physical features that make it difficult for certain individuals — often poor people and people of color—to access certain places. Bridges were designed to be so low that buses could not pass under them in order to prevent people of color from accessing a public beach. Walls, fences, and highways separate historically white neighborhoods from historically black ones. Wealthy communities have declined to be served by public transit so as to make it difficult for individuals from poorer areas to access their neighborhoods. Although the law has addressed the exclusionary impacts of racially restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, most legal scholars, courts, and legislatures have given little attention to the use of these less obvious exclusionary urban design tactics. Street grid layouts, one-way streets, the absence of sidewalks and crosswalks, and other design elements can shape the demographics of a city and isolate a neighborhood from those surrounding it. In this way, the exclusionary built environment — the architecture of a place — functions as a form of regulation; constrains the behavior of those who interact with it, often without their even realizing it. This Article suggests that there are two primary reasons that we fail to consider discriminatory exclusion through architecture in the same way that we consider functionally similar exclusion through law. First, potential challengers, courts, and lawmakers often fail to recognize architecture as a form of regulation at all, viewing it instead as functional, innocuous, and prepolitical. Second, even if decision makers and those who are excluded recognize architecture's regulatory power, existing jurisprudence is insufficient to address its harms.
The Yale Law Journal publishes original scholarly work in all fields of law and legal study. The journal contains articles, essays, and book reviews written by professors and legal practitioners throughout the world, and slightly shorter notes and comments written by individual journal staff members. The journal is published monthly from October through June with the exception of February.
For over a century, the Yale Law Journal has been at the forefront of legal scholarship, sparking conversation and encouraging reflection among scholars and students, as well as practicing lawyers and sitting judges and Justices. The Journal strives to shape discussion of the most important and relevant legal issues through a rigorous scholarship selection and editing process.
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