No Class Friday Feb. 15

I am such a softee! In light of the intense lobbying from some of you, I have decided to use one of our 7 class cancellations for Friday February 15.

I am celebrating Mike Huckabee Day! You are free to designate this as the holiday of your choice.

Have a great weekend,

Rick Duncan

Handout 9

Its a-comin'!

I thought I had already distributed this one, but I haven't.

It should be in the Handout Racks near the South Side faculty suite by Monday afternoon.

Have a great weekend.

"Fair Housing, Free Speech and Choosy Roommates"

Adam Liptak has this article in the NYT. If that link doesn't work, try the link in How Appealing. Here is an excerpt:

Gene Kavenoki wanted to rent out a spare bedroom in his West Hollywood apartment and he had a few requirements.

“I am not looking for freaks, geeks, prostitutes (male or female), druggies, pet cobras, drama, black Muslims or mortgage brokers,” he wrote on Roommates.com.

Other users of the Web site were more adamant about their desires. “Must be a black gay male!” one said. “Please no flakes, deadbeats or white trash!” another said.

And some were a little creepy. A 57-year-old man said he was offering “free rent for the right woman” in exchange for “quiet companionship in an intimate place.” He preferred, he wrote, “a Hispanic female roommate so she can make me fluent in Spanish or an Asian female roommate just because I love Asian females.”

Those postings are part of a lawsuit by a fair housing group against Roommates.com, a matching service that does pretty much what its name suggests. The suit says the site violated fair housing laws, which forbid publishing real estate ads that indicate preferences based on race, religion or sex.

Fair housing is important, but so is free speech and so is the right to choose who is puttering around in your living room. Congress has taken two stabs at striking the right legal balance, but what it has created is a tangle of contradictions.

This article highlights the tension that sometimes exists between liberty and government-mandated equality rules. How should this tension be resolved? Do people have a right to choose their roommates? Or should the law forbid housing discrimination in roommate selection?

Spring Semester Schedule

UPDATE:

As I announced in class today, there will be no class on Friday January 25--I will be down at the Legislature testifying.


Property class will meet this semester on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 1 PM until 2 PM in Room 113.

Notice that this class meets for a full 60-minute hour. Therefore, we will meet 35 times (as opposed to the 42 class sessions for a 50-minute class). Thus, I will need to cancel 7 classes this semester to get down to 35 days of class.

Right now, the only class I have decided to cancel is Wednesday February 6, President Reagan's birthday.

I will probably cancel a few other Wednesday classes and we may finish up a week early. As I said, I need to cancel a total of 7 classes to get down to 35.