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by pstuart 4095 days ago
> The US was founded on principles of freedom of expression and association. The freedom to associate is also the freedom to not associate, only Tim skips over all that.

So freedom for a business to not associate with anybody who is not white is ok?
1 comments
xnull2guest 4095 days ago
It is not okay.

But it's also not something that is (ought to be) under the juris prudence of the law.

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ubernostrum 4095 days ago
Fun story:

There's a thing you can do with real estate called a "restrictive covenant". Basically this means that as part of the agreement to sell a piece of property, you attach a rider like "but the purchaser isn't allowed to do X with the property, and must pass this restriction on to future purchasers".

This is pretty basic and pretty well established to be legal. For example, people sometimes use restrictive covenants on land they want to ensure is preserved/undeveloped.

Back in the day, though, many people used this to enforce racial segregation. There would be a restrictive covenant along the lines of "Purchaser agrees never to sell the property to a black person, and to pass this restriction on to future purchasers".

This came up in court eventually during the era of the civil rights movement, and the US Supreme Court took an interesting approach (Shelley v. Kraemer, for anyone interested in the full details): restrictive covenants which restrict sale according to race are legal, but unenforceable. Private individuals are free to discriminate as much as they want, but the government, which is legally bound not to discriminate, cannot intervene to enforce it, since doing so would require the government to take part in the discrimination (which is illegal/unconstitutional).

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xnull2guest 4095 days ago
That is a fun story, and a great example of a deeper analysis of the sort you aren't going to get from Cook. Thank you for sharing it. :) It would be interesting to see whether there is an application of this to hiring practices (I don't see a clear way this could be done).
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kimdouglasmason 4095 days ago
"a deeper analysis of the sort you aren't going to get from Cook"

It's nice to see that you're now putting words into (or removing them from) people's mouths. How presumptuous.

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xnull2guest 4095 days ago
This is a prediction - Cook can prove the statement wrong. I did not add nor remove words from anyone's mouth.
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