Equality and Opportunity

Imagine being taught from an early age to reduce a person's identity or worth to immutable characteristics over which they have no power, particularly race and gender. This is a trend rapidly taking hold of the public education system. But PLF is helping state lawmakers craft legislation that will stop the worst type of harmful stereotyping i ...

When, in December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval for innovative antiviral medications to treat COVID-19, the news was hailed as the biggest advance in the pandemic since the vaccines. But while we're moving forward in combating the virus and ending the pandemic, there's one area where New York is moving rapidly ba ...

There's no mistaking the message Tuesday's recall election sent to the San Francisco Board of Education: focus on education, not racial politics. In addition to the Board's myopic focus on renaming schools instead of reopening them last year, the landslide results were also motivated by the Board's decision to scrap competitive merit-based admis ...

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 Court"? ...

Occupational licenses, which impact a wide variety of professions, require workers to obtain state-issued "permission slips" before working in their desired fields. Often, if not always, the state licensing boards with the authority to accept and deny license applications as they please are stacked with individuals representing special interest ...

Sunday marks six years since Justice Antonin Scalia passed away. It's a fitting occasion to remember the late Justice and his legacy. But one of the greatest aspects of his legacy has nothing to do with the law. It was his friendship with his ideological foe, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Justices eventually came to represent two branches of ...

The year before California banned race-based affirmative action at state schools, only one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors at the University of California, San Diego. But in 1998, after the ban on racial preferences went into effect, one in five black students made honors at UC San Diego—the same ratio as white students. Whe ...

The American Bar Association (ABA) recently proposed a new rule that would require law schools seeking accreditation to implement "bias, racism and cross-cultural competency" training for all students, as well as adopt and promote equity-based policies. Taken at face value, the proposed rule may seem like a positive step toward building a firm f ...

When the Supreme Court upheld the use of racial preferences in college admissions in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the majority opinion, added a trenchant prediction: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." Is it possible the end of affir ...