Supreme Court 
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/30/2023
The Latest SCOTUS Case to Privilege Religion Over Civil Society
by Linda Greenhouse
Historically, the Supreme Court has viewed workplace accommodations for religious workers in terms of protecting minority faiths and relieving undue burdens on employers and coworkers. A pending case brought by a Christian postal worker promises to upend that balance.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
1/12/2023
Hamline Controversy Shows How Religion and Neoliberal Administration Converge to Reject Expertise
by Alexander Jabbari
An instructive contrast can be drawn from a 1997 controversy over a frieze depicting Muhammad on the wall of the United States Supreme Court. Since then, post-9/11 Islamophobia, a culture of deliberate trolling under the banner of free speech, and the rise of corporate-style university management have drained the capacity for nuance.
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SOURCE: Christianity Today
1/13/2023
Council of Christian Colleges and Universities Gets Court Win on Exemptions to Discrimination Law
A judge dismissed a lawsuit by LGBTQ students that challenged the faith-based exemptions that Christian colleges can claim from enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/14/2022
After Bruen: One Nation, Under Guns
by Ryan Busse
"As bad as America’s gun-violence problem is, it could be about to get much worse," says former gun industry insider turned whistleblower. The selective reading of the historical record advanced by Justice Thomas's opinion would force judges to play historian to decide cases, destabilizing gun law in many ways.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/2/2022
The Blindness of the Supreme Court's "Colorblindness"
by Drew Gilpin Faust
"Affirmative action opened a door I would walk through.... My professors, soon to be my colleagues, could imagine me among them because the very notion of women faculty had been given a legitimacy and a thinkability."
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
12/6/2022
SCOTUS Seems Poised to Overrule Democracy By Drawing on a Historical Forgery
In 1818, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina sent John Quincy Adams a fake document that made it look like Pinckney was a principal author of the 1787 Constitution. At the time, the ruse was rejected. Why are Supreme Court conservatives looking to this document in to justify their decisions?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/14/2022
The Conservative Movement Has Captured SCOTUS. Now What?
by Linda Greenhouse
As the institution with the power to advance conservative goals without popular support, it was inevitable that the right would focus on packing the judiciary, explains veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/8/2022
Haaland v. Brackeen: The Case that Could Break Native Sovereignty
by Rebecca Nagle
"The U.S. has been passing laws that treat tribes and tribal citizens differently from non-Native citizens since the founding of the republic. If that is unconstitutional, the entire legal structure defending the legal rights of Indigenous nations could crumble."
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SOURCE: Organization of American Historians
11/9/2022
OAH, AHA File Joint SCOTUS Brief in Case Affecting Indigenous Adoption and Family Rights
"If the court strikes down the ICWA in whole or in part, the decision could have devastating impacts on Native American families and, potentially, on federal Indian law writ large. Resuming the practice of Native child removal would cause active harm to Native families as well as jeopardize the future sovereignty of tribal governments.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
10/29/2022
A Warning from Weimar: The Danger of Courts Hostile to Democracy
by Samuel Huneke
Far from being guardrails for democracy, Weimar courts were implacably hostile to it, and paved the way for its overthrow by leniency toward right-wing political violence.
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SOURCE: Vox
10/30/2022
Inside the Affirmative Action Cases Before SCOTUS
Edward Blum is a longtime conservative legal activist who is leading lawsuits claiming that affirmative action in admissions violates the requirement that the constituiton be color-blind; whether there is any such principle is debatable. Includes insights from historians Hugh Davis Graham and Eddie R. Cole.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
10/31/2022
A Roundup of Affirmative Action Takes as SCOTUS Hears Arguments in Harvard, UNC Cases
From left, right and center, and from pundits and legal scholars, a roundup of analysis on the oral arguments in Supreme Court cases that could eliminate race-conscious admissions policies.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
10/31/2022
Defendant in Michigan Admissions Case: Ending Affirmative Action Would be Disastrous
by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone
The former President of the University of Michigan says that diversity in higher education remains a compelling reason to allow race as one factor in college admissions.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/28/2022
SCOTUS Affirmative Action Cases Hinge on History of Brown and the 14th Amendment
by Linda Greenhouse
Neither Brown nor the 14th Amendment were driven by a belief in a "colorblind" Constitution; instead, they were rooted in the historically specific context of racial oppression. The plaintiffs in two cases before the court want to obscure that history, says veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/24/2022
2005 Diary Entry Shows Justice Alito Told Ted Kennedy He Respected Roe Precedent
In his pre-confirmation interview with the Senator, Alito claimed he wrote antiabortion legal memos because he wanted to please his bosses in the Reagan administration. This failed to reassure Kennedy, who voted against his nomination and wrote skeptically of the judge's integrity in his diary.
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10/23/2022
Originalism is Doomed to Failure. Will it Destroy Democracy First?
by Richard Striner
Textualism as a theory of judicial interpretation arose as a semantic game among academics, but has been put to brutal use by the Federalist Society to undermine the democracy that most 21st century Americans enjoy.
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SOURCE: NPR
8/18/2022
Southern Republicans Want to Narrow the Census Definition of Black Identity – Why?
In a case that involves both the history of voting rights and exclusion and changes in the Census's recognition of complex ethnic identities since 1980, the Supreme Court may reverse a longstanding assumption about which voters are properly understood to be Black.
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SOURCE: NPR
10/17/2022
SCOTUS Declines to Hear Challenge to Citizenship Law Disadvantaging American Samoans
Residents of US territories are able to receive birthright citizenship if an act of Congress grants it to them. While Congress's refusal to do so for residents of American Samoa has clear racist roots, the Court declined to hear a case challenging this exclusion.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
10/10/2022
Does Justice Jackson Offer a Path to Defend Rights Through Originalism?
by Evan Turiano
Abolitionists and the drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments understood that the legitimacy of broader claims to rights and citizenship depended on making a claim on the purposes set forth for the Constitution. Ketanji Brown Jackson's recent voting rights dissent suggests she hopes to revive that tradition.
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SOURCE: NPR
10/8/2022
Supreme Court Sketch Artist Retires after 45 Years
Although he was paid to sketch the proceedings for decades, Art Lien believes the time has come for cameras in the SCOTUS chambers.
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