Rewriting Racial Inequality: The State of Civil Rights Law under Trump documents the second Trump administration’s blueprint for radically transforming how the federal government views and enforces civil rights. The new legal order taking shape upends Reconstruction-era understandings of equal protection and related federal statutes while recasting the modern Civil Rights Movement as a defense against anti-white race discrimination. Our close and comprehensive examination of executive orders, enforcement activity and litigation since January 20, 2025, organizes the Trump administration’s approach into four pillars: (1) Redefining racial discrimination, (2) Dismantling the institutional framework for government support of racial equity and cancelling existing investigations, (3) Enforcing policy priorities through defunding and fining institutions, and (4) Encouraging racial gerrymandering of congressional districts in the guise of political gerrymandering.

Under this framework, we explore how the Trump administration has built on prior conservative doctrinal developments in civil rights law to:

• Offer a new interpretation of anti-discrimination based solely on an exaggerated application of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that paints Black and brown people as the grantees of unmeritocratic preference and white people as the victims of discrimination;

• Fire tens of thousands of federal employees and shuttered or incapacitated most federal agencies, offices, and programs focused on civil rights or equity;

• Halt or cancel thousands of civil rights investigations, particularly claims of race discrimination, while prioritizing and opening new investigations for discrimination against white people and antisemitism;

• Terminate, condition or freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to states, universities, rural and low-income schools, nonprofits supporting vulnerable populations, groundbreaking scientific research, and programs explicitly created by Congress, all because they were identified as DEI-related and thus no longer effectuated Trump’s priorities; 

• Present an erroneous legal finding of voter discrimination in order to force a hesitant state legislature to redistrict, resulting in a racial gerrymander.  

As a result, affected individuals, states, organizations, law firms and universities either sought resolution with the administration, hoping to avoid the public and financial costs of litigation, or fought the administration in court. Hundreds of challenges are ongoing in federal district courts throughout the country, with some claims successful in winning back their positions, grants, or constitutional protections, while others, denied relief often because of the Supreme Court, face the long-haul litigation battle. We chronicle these struggles for policymakers, researchers, students and the public at large.

The societal implications of these developments include the stereotyping of Black identity and the abandonment of racial remediation efforts; turmoil in the federal courts and a lack of consistent legal standards; a diminished federal rights infrastructure; and more culture war.

Rewriting Racial Inequality offers a rare focus on issues of racial equality as a fundamental interest, anti-Black racism and the Trump administration’s civil rights playbook at the crossroads of antidiscrimination law. This critical evaluation is intended as a resource and will be updated in six months.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard reshaped the constitutional landscape of higher education while leaving important questions of educational mission unanswered. By undermining diversity as a compelling interest under strict scrutiny judicial review, the Court dismantled the decades-long framework under which universities adopted admissions practices in pursuit of self-defined institutional goals. That model may fit elite private institutions like Harvard or UNC, but it fails to capture the full spectrum of American higher education.

This brief proposes that land-grant universities possess a distinct institutional interest in cultivating a diverse student body. This interest is grounded in their statutory mission, the historical purpose of the Morrill Acts, and the judicial deference traditionally afforded to congressional mandates that create and continue to govern land-grant institutions.

SFFA’s reasoning may be too rigid to accommodate the genuine diversity of institutional missions in American higher education. Recognizing this doctrinal blind spot is only the beginning of a broader scholarly conversation.

Metropolitan areas in New Jersey need to dramatically lower their building emissions to combat climate change and protect local health. However, metropolitan New Jersey faces several major challenges. First, federal and state law preempt New Jersey municipalities from adopting some stricter laws that could lower building emissions. Second, competition between municipalities creates a collective action problem that disincentivizes legal reform. Third, building emission reduction strategies can create unintended harm such as worsened indoor air quality and gentrification. To avoid these challenges, individual New Jersey municipalities can utilize metropolitan equity strategies to cooperate efficiently. However, the most impactful way New Jersey can decarbonize buildings may be for the state legislature to amend its building emissions benchmarking law to enable the state government to decarbonize buildings more effectively.

This report explores investor activity in Philadelphia, where corporate buyers are most active in parts of the city which are predominantly home to Black and Hispanic residents in West, North and Northeast Philadelphia. For this report, CLiME teamed up with the Reinvestment Fund and Housing Initiative at Penn, who are based in Philadelphia.

We identify the largest investors who are buying up the most single family homes, and who operate primarily as large-scale corporate landlords. The companies doing the purchasing changed during the pandemic, shifting from more local investors to those entering the market already active in other places.

We analyzed purchases of residential buildings before and during the pandemic, looking at sheriff sales, rental licensing, renovation permits, evictions, and code violations to determine the impact of these pur­chases on Philadelphia housing markets. We found that:

• Larger corporate landlords were much more likely to evict tenants than smaller investors.

• Larger in­vestors more often took out permits to alter or improve their properties than smaller inves­tors.

• Investors large and small were much more likely to amass code violations than individual homebuyers

• The largest corporate investors obtained rental licenses on 67% of the properties they acquired, compared to just 43% among smaller investors

• The character of the highest-volume investors changed with the pandemic. From 2017 through 2019, eight of the top ten largest investors by volume were locally based. From 2020 through 2022, the four highest volume investors were either new to Philadelphia or had scaled up dramatically from the earlier period.

Philadelphia is a city with a proud legacy of affordable homeownership opportunities and an expanding set of tenant protec­tions. In recent years, concerns about the impact of corporate investors purchasing single fam­ily homes in the city have grown, even as there is an evident need for capital investment in its aging housing stock. This report aims to inform policy interventions to promote stable neigh­borhoods, affordability, and high-quality housing options for all Philadelphians.

A few years ago, CLiME published Who Owns Newark? which showed that corporations were buying half of all 1-4 unit homes in the city. We continue to investigate and explore these issues throughout the region.

New Jersey homeowners are sinking in monthly bills. In this brief, we explore the sky-high and rapidly rising costs of being a homeowner in New Jersey. This includes both mortgage and non-mortgage housing costs. New Jersey has the property taxes, and among the most expensive housing prices in the country. In addition, New Jersey homeowners pay 20 percent more in utility costs than the national average, and are now facing soaring electricity bills related to supply challenges and the new demands of AI data centers. New Jersey’s homeowners’ insurance premiums are also going up much faster than other states, related to private companies’ responses to more extreme weather and construction and labor costs. As these various costs add up, more homeowners – especially those with lower incomes – are sinking into debt and many are deferring home repairs and maintenance.