The Presidential Professor of Law at Penn Carey Law explores the civil rights’ implications of pervasive race, gender, and sex discrimination in bars, nightclubs, and restaurants.
In an article published in the Virginia Law Review, Presidential Professor of Law Shaun Ossei-Owusu pioneers the legal analysis of race, gender, and sex discrimination that social scientists have demonstrated to be pervasive in bars, nightclubs, and restaurants across the country. While tactics such as dress codes and gender-based pricing schemes have been litigated for decades, legal academics have devoted relatively little scholarly attention to the practices’ civil rights implications as Ossei-Owusu has done in “Velvet Rope Discrimination.”
Ossei-Owusu is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with expertise in legal history, criminal law and procedure, civil rights, and the legal profession. His work sits at the intersection of law, history, and sociology and focuses on how governments meet their legal obligations to provide protections and benefits to poor people and racial minorities.
“Throughout the twentieth century, courts wrestled with whether bars, restaurants, and dance halls counted as ‘public accommodations’ for the purposes of civil rights laws, Ossei-Owusu writes. “The first half of the century yielded a patchwork of different decisions and statutory approaches in the context of race; in the context of gender, social norms determined much of the country’s discrimination patterns.”
“Throughout the twentieth century, courts wrestled with whether bars, restaurants, and dance halls counted as ‘public accommodations’ for the purposes of civil rights laws, Ossei-Owusu writes. “The first half of the century yielded a patchwork of different decisions and statutory approaches in the context of race; in the context of gender, social norms determined much of the country’s discrimination patterns.”
“Following the passing of the Civil Rights Act, bars and nightclubs employed a host of schemes to discriminate against racial minorities. Racial minorities were commonly denied entry, overcharged, required to show excessive identification, or told there was a ‘private party’ using the facilities,” he writes. “In particular, the enforcement of “dress codes” emerged as a highly administrable means of discrimination, empowering nightclub personnel to cite “improper attire” as the reason they turned racial minorities away at the door.”
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