The system just doesn't change" through court and prison justice, she insists.
Department lawyers can sue and try to force change through court order, but each step of the process triggers additional periods of review that can prolong the initial effort by months and even years.
Although he's somewhat hopeful that the protest movement is going to inspire the "changing social conditions" needed to help civil rights lawyers bring about change through courts, the Civil Rights Division under Trump will not be the same.
With a few exceptions, New York City's most sweeping political changes have come through court action, or after at least a generation of persistent political lobbying, not at the public's initiative.
"Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts," Mr. Obama added, "I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it".
The net effect is that it's virtually impossible to effect lasting change through the courts.
But many other proposals could be adopted through changes in court rules or administrative procedures, said John D. Feerick, the chairman of the panel and a former dean of the Fordham University School of Law.
Instead of aggressively pursuing convictions of the perpetrators of white-collar crime, regulators adopted guidelines around deferred prosecutions, which would allow companies to investigate themselves, and change their behavior, without getting dragged through court, The New York Times reports.
There are currently some cases winding their way through court, however, which may change this.
The major shift toward treating physician testimony and subjective evidence of pain was thus introduced by various legislative changes and court rulings in 1984, and continued through 1996.
