Equality Under the Law

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker from New Orleans, walked up to the Press Street Depot ticket counter and bought a first-class seat on the 4:15 p.m. train.   There was nothing particularly extraordinary or even interesting about a man buying a ticket on the East Louisiana Local, as any onlooker would … ...

In late April, an Idaho judge allowed a vital free speech lawsuit against Boise State University to go forward. Big City Coffee, the plaintiff, had lost its contract with the university because some administrators and students were offended that the café supports local police. Thankfully, Judge Cynthia Yee-Wallace has denied Boise State’s re ...

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 ...

Is it legal to penalize top-performing Asian American students to help students of other ethnicities? Legal or not, it is happening all around the country. In February, a federal judge sided with the Pacific Legal Foundation and ruled that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County adopted a test-free admission proces ...

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which banned the use of race, sex or ethnicity in public employment, education and contracting. Things have changed drastically since then. In 2020, a California ballot measure sought to repeal Prop 209 and revive discrimination in government decision-making. And in 2022, the state legislature prop ...

My colleagues and I have written many times about our Thomas Jefferson High School admissions case, but nothing we could write better captures what’s at stake in the case than what Coalition for TJ member Hung Cao just wrote in The Washington Post. Cao is a TJ alum. A Vietnamese refugee who later became a … ...

Schoolchildren are not known for their patience. But sometimes they have good reason to want something not next year, not next month, but now. Such as when their futures are on the line before the Supreme Court.   The slow Supreme Court process  In normal circumstances, it takes more than a year for the Supreme … ...

On March 31, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to stay a February 25 district court ruling that the Fairfax County School Board violated the law in changing admissions requirements at the nation’s top public high school. The district court judge had agreed with a coalition of concerned parents and community members … ...