Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education

Oral Argument Audio Release for Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, December 4.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What did Trump’s 2nd impeachment accomplish?

  That’s happening Former President Donald Trump was  acquitted  by the Senate on Saturday of the charge that he incited the insurrection on Jan. 6. The impeachment trial ended with 57 senators, including  seven Republicans , finding Trump guilty — well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict. Over the course of a  week of testimony , House impeachment managers laid out the case that Trump was directly responsible for the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol carried out by a mob of his supporters. Trump’s attorneys countered by arguing that his baseless claims of election fraud were protected by the First Amendment and that the Senate lacked the constitutional authority to convict a president who was no longer in office. Several GOP senators cited the latter argument in explaining their decision to acquit. Senate Minority Leader  Mitch McConnell  said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the violence at the Capitol in a scathing speech following the final vote,
Read more

Mildred Loving, Who Battled Ban on Mixed-Race Marriage, Dies at 68

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68. Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said the cause was pneumonia. The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last group of segregation laws to remain on the books — those requiring separation of the races in marriage. The ruling was unanimous, its opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional. In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. “We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race,” he said. By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their m
Read more

31 states have heightened religious freedom protections

Image
The recent flurry of state bills giving religious exemptions from certain laws -- including the Arizona law that Gov. Jan Brewer (R) just vetoed -- raises a question: How many states already provide heightened protection for the exercise of religion? The answer? Thirty-one, 18 of which passed state laws based on the 1993 federal  Religious Freedom Restoration Act . The protections in an additional 13 states came through court rulings. Here's a map of which states have added protections and which do not: "These state RFRAs were enacted in response to Supreme Court decisions that had nothing to do with gay rights or same-sex marriage," explained University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock in an e-mail. "And the state court decisions interpreting their state constitutions arose in all sorts of contexts, mostly far removed from  gay rights or same-sex marriage. There were cases about Amish buggies, hunting moose for native Alaskan funeral rituals, an atte
Read more