Articles

During the Obama administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) made significant efforts to crack down on sexual misconduct on college campuses, pursuant to its power to enforce Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination by federal funding recipients. OCR issued guidance (the ...

A federal district court recently struck down the Fairfax County School Board’s (FCSB) revamped admissions scheme at the highly selective magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., as racially discriminatory against Asian American students. Although a 2-1 Fourth Circuit panel stayed the Coalition for TJ v. FCSB judgment ...

The Tennessee legislature recently struck a blow for the individual freedoms of Tennesseans by approving SB2285, which Governor Lee is expected to sign. Though Governor Lee has admirably scaled back bureaucracy on many fronts, Tennesseans still must deal with government agencies from time to time. In these interactions, sometimes the individual and ...

Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions about workplace vaccine-or-test requirements have received much media commentary from vaccine advocates and detractors, these cases are much more than flashpoints in COVID-related culture wars. Instead, the court’s ruling in NFIB v. OSHA/Ohio v. OSHA, 2022 DJDAR 549 (Jan. 13, 2022), is importan ...

Would a win for the plaintiffs challenging race-preferential admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina be an anti-democratic result — an example of how, as progressive legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern of Slate has put it, “Republicans have outsourced large chunks of their agenda to the federal judiciary and the Supreme C ...

Could a Supreme Court opinion about the arcane question of hospital reimbursement rates deal a critical blow to the unconstitutional nature of the federal regulatory state? The narrow issue in American Hospital Association v. Becerra is about the proper interpretation of the rules that the Department of Health and Human Services must follow when se ...

Should racial preferences in university admissions be legal? The U.S. Supreme Court has an opportunity to revisit that hotly debated question if it decides to take up Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (about racial preferences at a private college) and/or Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina (preferences at a public un ...

Right now, the Supreme Court has given the government the opportunity to weigh in on a case in which Asian-American applicants allege discrimination by Harvard’s Admissions Committee. Another suit, alleging anti-Asian discrimination at Yale, has been filed in federal district court. Some selective high schools have also revamped their admissi ...

*Editor’s note: On July 23, 2021, PLF filed a regulatory comment letter with the Department of Education about nondiscriminatory administration of school discipline. You can read that letter here. *** Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed that his children would be judged not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their & ...