Supreme Court

by Jeremy Leaming

While President Obama has advanced some eloquent calls for expanding equality, his administration must take more action to ensure equality in the workforce, according to a new ACS Issue Brief.

Landmark measures such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order banning federal contractors from employment discrimination have been undermined by federal judges far too eager to protect the rights of employers, write Ellen Eardley and Cyrus Mehri in “Defending Twentieth Century Equal Employment Reforms in the Twenty-First Century.” 

Citing Simon Lazarus, an attorney with the Constitutional Accountability Center, Eardley and Mehri write that lower federal court judges “have been ‘aggressively activist in narrowing, undermining, and effectively nullifying an array of progressive statutes,’ including statutes involving civil rights and affirmative action.” Eardley and Mehri, attorneys with Mehri & Skalet, PLLC, also note that former federal court judge Nancy Gertner has “recently declared that ‘changes in substantive discrimination law since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [are] tantamount to a virtual repeal.’”

The authors also cite a study from the Harvard Law & Policy Review, the official journal of ACS, which reveals data showing that from 1979 through 2007 judges have increasingly sided with employers in employment discrimination cases and that the rare victories for workers are frequently invalidated at the appellate level. The study by Stewart J. Schwab and Kevin Clermont “found that the anti-plaintiff effect on appeal particularly disturbing because employment discrimination cases are fact-intensive and often turn on the credibility of witnesses.”

And it’s not just the lower courts that have made it difficult for workers to challenge employer malfeasance, the authors add, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued opinions making it tougher to bring class actions claims and providing federal courts with greater power to quickly dismiss workers’ employment discrimination cases.

“The Draconian view of Title VII, distortion of the basic principles of civil procedure, and the new hurdles to class certification adopted by the federal judiciary make it difficult for employees to vindicate their rights,” Eardley and Mehri write.

by Jeremy Leaming

Advocates of privacy rights, especially reproductive rights, have had one challenge after another mostly from state lawmakers bent on destroying those rights.  

As reported earlier this week, religious groups were successful in lobbying the Arkansas legislature to adopt what The New York Times called the “country’s most restrictive ban on abortion – at 12 weeks” of pregnancy.

The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade, found that the Constitution provides women “the right of personal privacy,” which “includes the abortion decision ….” Like many rights protected in the Constitution it’s not an unlimited one. And the Roe Court found that states have a compelling interest to regulate abortion at the point of viability, usually around 24 weeks, as The Times notes.

The law’s sponsor, according to The Times, “compared the more than 50 million abortions in the United States since Roe” to the “Holocaust ….”

That overwrought language is unfortunately typical of too many state lawmakers from coast to coast who for over the past several years have strived to create more laws to make it much more difficult for women to obtain abortions. As former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger has noted, it’s annoyingly ironic that conservative lawmakers who blasted the Affordable Care Act as attempting to strip liberty from Americans are the ones pushing laws depriving women of their liberties. Women have the ability to make health care decisions for themselves, but right-wing lawmakers are more concerned about embryos, which do not have constitutional rights.

Because the Arkansas law so blatantly violates Roe, it is likely to be quickly challenged, as it should be.

Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice American, blasted the law, saying “This is another example of how anti-choice politicians are obsessed with rolling back reproductive rights guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision more than 40 years ago. This law robs women of control over their own lives and puts that control in the hands of politicians in Little Rock. This intrusive, extreme agenda is out of touch with our nation’s values and priorities – and we stand firmly in opposition.”

Too many state lawmakers have been obsessed with restricting the rights of women. Their priorities are regressive and obnoxious in the face of budget difficulties and people who need jobs or government services to help them become trained for new jobs. Instead of harassing women, state lawmakers should focus on issues that will bolster, not harm their communities.