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105 Cornell L. Rev. Online 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/clro105 and id is 1 raw text is: ESSAY CONDITIONALITY AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE Felix B. Changt INTRODUCTION The burgeoning field of Critical Romani Studies explores the persistent subjugation of Europe's largest minority: the Roma. Within this field, it has become fashionable to draw parallels to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. ' Yet the comparisons are often one-sided; lessons tend to flow from Civil Rights to Roma Rights more than the other way around. It is an all-too-common hagiography of Civil Rights, where our history becomes a blueprint for other movements for racial equality. To correct this trend, this Essay reveals what American scholars can learn from Roma Rights. Specifically, this Essay argues that the European Union's Roma integration policies illuminate a relatively unexplored dynamic of America's post- Civil War Reconstruction: the influence of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 upon the Fifteenth Amendment. The Reconstruction Act imposed conditions upon the readmission of former Confederate states that were out of step with laws governing incumbent states within the Union. Most prominently, Southern states had to uphold the suffrage rights of freedmen, even though Northern states denied African Americans the vote at almost every opportunity. Similarly, when the European Union (EU) expanded into post- t Professor, University of Cincinnati College of Law. E-mail: felix.chang)uc.edu. I thank Rebecca Zietlow and Chris Bryant for their insightful comments and Devin Kasinki, Ben Rodd, and the rest of the Cornell Law Review team for their careful editing. This Essay benefited from presentations at Central European University, Duke, University of Wisconsin, and University of Toledo. For a fuller treatment of this topic, see FELIX B. CHANG & SUNNIE RUCKER-CHANG, ROMA RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS: A TRANSATLANTIC COMPARISON (2020). 1 See generally James A. Goldston, The Unfulfilled Promise of Educational Opportunity in the United States and Europe: From Brown v. Board to D.H. and Beyond, in REALIZING ROMA RIGHTS 163-84 (Jacqueline Bhabha et al. eds., 2017) (comparing the fight for equal justice for Roma children with the civil rights movement in the United States).

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