scotus
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Supreme Court Rules Unanimously for Better Education for Students With Disabilities
On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that school districts must provide students with disabilities the opportunity to make “appropriately ambitious” progress in their education, and that decision will likely have an impact on the 6.5 million students with disabilities in the United States. According to NPR, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District…
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Supreme Court Orders New Hearing in Case of Texas Inmate’s Racially Biased Death Sentence
Duane Buck may get justice yet. On Wednesday the Supreme Court of the United States ordered a new hearing for Buck, a black Texas inmate who has sat for years on death row, after hearing claims that improper testimony about his race got him sentenced to death. As The Guardian reports, justices voted 6-2 in…
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Bracing Ourselves for Trump’s Possible Supreme Court Pick
Amid the resulting commotion from his latest executive actions, President Donald Trump announced Monday that at 8 p.m. Tuesday he would announce his pick to replace late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. That’s right. The president gave us a heads-up that he would be making a major announcement of who may get one of the…
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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Texas Appeal to Revive Strict Voter-ID Requirements
Score 1 for voting-rights advocates. On Monday the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal by Texas that sought to bring back the state’s strict voter-identification requirements, which had been found to disproportionately affect minorities, Reuters reports. In July 2016, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 2011…
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American Nightmare: Counsel of Record Christina Swarns Talks Buck v. Davis
Editor’s note: For more information about the Buck v. Davis case, read “Racial Bias Got Duane Buck the Death Sentence; the Supreme Court Can Fix It,” also on The Root. Christina Swarns, litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has her work cut out for her Wednesday. Swarns is lead counsel in…
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Racial Bias Got Duane Buck the Death Sentence; the Supreme Court Can Fix It
The perceived criminality and dangerousness of black men in the United States has a long and storied history. Black men are killed, become hashtags, and their names become etched into an American lexicon of atrocities against blackness. Terence Crutcher. Philando Castile. John Crawford III. Duane Buck could be next. “Nobody in this room is unaware…
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These 4 Court Rulings Give Police Powerful Weapons to Abuse Your Rights. They Need to Go
The emergence of Donald Trump as the self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate on November’s presidential ballot should be cause for serious concern for all of us. If not for the reasons related to the Republican presidential nominee’s positions on Black Lives Matter and other groups of peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of…
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3 Years Later, the Ghosts of Shelby Still Haunt Us
Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a crushing ruling in the landmark case Shelby v. Holder (pdf). For reasons still mostly unclear to me (Chief Justice John Roberts partially opined that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act were “extraordinary measures” no longer needed because America’s legacy on race “had changed”), Section 5 of the…
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The Many Complaints of Abigail Fisher
On Thursday the Supreme Court upheld the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies and shot down claims by Abigail Fisher that the policy was unconstitutional. Although Fisher claimed that she was denied entry to the University of Texas because she was white; obviously her spot had been taken by some student of color who was…