Equality Under the Law

Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed that his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Thanks to Dr. King, the long-sought goal of equality under the law is within reach. But we still have work to do. Consider the story of Edmund Lee … ...

The NCAA prohibits felons from coaching in sponsored basketball tournaments. Dominic Hardie, a black basketball coach, sued the NCAA for racial discrimination. But Hardie doesn’t allege intentional discrimination. Instead, he’s suing the NCAA under a theory of liability known as disparate impact. One problem: It’s an open quest ...

Yesterday, the Florida Supreme Court rejected a union’s lawsuit challenging Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, and a Florida appellate court rejected a school district’s claim that charter schools violate the state constitution. These decisions protect K-12 students across the state. Florida’s tax credit scholarship ...

Last year, PLF and Parent Revolution joined forces to support a group of elementary school parents who were sued by the Anaheim school district. What did the parents do to warrant legal action? As we previously discussed, they invoked California’s Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the “parent trigger,” and petitioned to conve ...

This upcoming Wednesday, April 5, Wencong Fa and I will be in St. Louis for oral argument in E.L. v. Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation. We will be representing Edmund Lee and his mother La’Shieka White in their quest to strike down a St. Louis policy that prohibits African-American children from attending magnet and charter schools ...

On Wednesday, my colleague Joshua Thompson argued on behalf of our client Edmund Lee, Jr., as Edmund fights to end discrimination in St. Louis. The Eighth Circuit panel (Judges Beam, Benton, and Colloton) were sympathetic to our argument that a policy which forbids black students in St. Louis county from attending the same schools as … ...

A little over a year ago we wrote about a maddening case in Anaheim, California. In 2015, a group of elementary school parents sought to take advantage of California’s Parent Empowerment Act (the “parent trigger”) to force the Anaheim City School District to convert their children’s continually failing school into an indepe ...

The Ninth Circuit issued a favorable opinion today in Hardie v. NCAA, a case raising the important question of whether disparate impact liability is cognizable under Title II of the Civil Rights Act. The Ninth Circuit didn’t answer the question. It held instead that NCAA’s ban on felon-coaches in its high school tournaments didn’t ...

In April, the California Court of Appeal affirmed a victory won by parents of students at Anaheim’s Palm Lane Elementary School. The parents had used California’s “parent trigger” law to petition to have the perpetually failing school converted into a charter school, but the school district sued the parents to stop the petit ...