Last week, the Trump Administration lost again in court. This time, the court rejected Trump’s attempt to withdraw federal funding from “sanctuary cities.” Sanctuary cities are those cities that do not require their local police departments to act as de facto federal immigration agents, but instead allow their police departments […]
As a devout Jewish child who grew up attending synagogue and Hebrew School, from a very young age I was constantly surrounded by stories of the Holocaust – how Hitler took advantage of economic conditions, found an easy-to-identify “other” for a scapegoat, and rose to power by preying on people’s […]
By MATTHEW BROWN Associated Press
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled in favor of a wildlife activist who said his free speech rights were violated when a sheriff’s deputy barred […]
On February 9, 2017, the federal U.S. Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against implementation of Donald Trump’s Executive Order banning Muslims from the U.S. The order from the federal appeals court agreed with a federal district court decision in Seattle that had blocked implementation of the Muslim Ban […]
Over the past few weeks, courts across the nation have rejected a number of state laws that were recently passed with the intent to restrict access to vote. Although the sponsors of the various state laws claim that the laws are intended to “prevent voter fraud,” in truth they are aimed at preventing poor and minority voters from voting by requiring specific types of ID to vote, eliminating early voting, and implementing a number of other measures that make it harder to vote. As the presidential election nears, the courts are seeing through the “voter fraud” ruse, and repeatedly rejecting these laws.
Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which sets legal precedent for the states of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, ruled that a jury could find that police used unconstitutional excessive force when they tasered a man recovering from a diabetic seizure.
Two especially disturbing trends emerge from The Post’s data — (1) many of the victims who were killed by police were military veterans killed during PTSD episodes, and (2) in many cases, witnesses or victims call 911 seeking medical assistance from the police but, instead of providing aid ,the police end up killing the mentally ill individual.
Last month, in G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a landmark ruling holding that the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination prohibits discrimination against transgender students. The U.S. Department of Education had issued its formal interpretation of Title IX and its regulations and held that “when a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex ... a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.” The appeals court held that it must defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law because the interpretation is reasonable and the law itself is ambiguous on the issue of transgender students. The decision sets federal legal precedent for Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Last week, in Evenwel v. Abbott, the US Supreme Court rejected the latest attempt at political gerrymandering aimed at disenfranchising Latino communities in Texas. This attempt has been attributed as the brainchild of the “Project on Fair Representation,” a right-wing group that succeeded in dismantling a key protection against racial discrimination in the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder.
Last week, in Shell Offshore v. Greenpeace, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order vacating a civil contempt order that was issued against Greenpeace last summer during the Shell No! banner hang off the St. John’s Bridge. In July, a number of activists had suspended themselves from the bridge over the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon to temporarily block Shell’s contracted vessel, the Fennica, from leaving the Portland harbor. The Fennica carried a crucial piece of oil drilling equipment and Shell planned to send the Fennica north to Alaska’s Chukchi Sea to conduct oil drilling in the Arctic.
