A federal appeals court, in a breakthrough ruling on transgender rights, has ruled that the Constitution’s ban on unequal treatment of the sexes provides significant  protection against discrimination based on gender identity. If a program or policy by a public agency, like a school, denies equality based on a stereotyped image of how a transgender… Read More

The Supreme Court, taking on another significant controversy over voting rights, agreed on Tuesday to clarify the power of states to take voters off the registration rolls if they skip going to the polls in several elections.  The new case from Ohio will come up for review in the court’s term starting next fall. At… Read More

For years, lawyers working on election cases have hoped that, one day, they could persuade the Supreme Court to finally decide if partisanship can go too far in drawing up new election districts.   On Friday, one of those attempts appeared to have run into doubts that the Justices have power to decide it. The case… Read More

Trump Administration lawyers, in a court filing made public Friday, argued that no federal court can order the president to turn over documents for use in a lawsuit, even if the demand involves papers created during the election campaign for the presidency.   That claim was made as those attorneys continued to try to fend off… Read More

The Supreme Court will have to move with unusual speed if it is to promptly settle the constitutional dispute over President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals of six Mideast nations with Muslim majorities.   The Justices at this point are only about five weeks from the planned end of their… Read More

In a ruling that is going to be tested, and soon, in the Supreme Court, a federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, on Thursday barred the Trump Administration from enforcing the President’s revised curb on immigration of foreign nationals from six Muslim-majority nations. That order, the majority said, “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination,”… Read More

Gavin Grimm, the Virginia youth who has been praised by federal judges for his maturity in pursuing his legal claims as a transgender boy, has now officially become the master of his case.  He reached age 18 earlier this month, so two federal courts have now changed his ongoing case title.  Now it is Gavin Grimm… Read More

State officials in Wisconsin asked the Supreme Court on Monday to put on hold a federal court ruling that fashioned a new test for judging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering – the drawing of election districts specifically to favor one party’s candidates over the other’s.   The case of Gill v. Whitford is one of the… Read More

State legislatures may not move more black voters into an election district to give them a majority if they already make alliances with white voters that allow them to get their preferred candidates elected, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday.  The federal Voting Acts does not require a “racial gerrymander” of that kind, and… Read More

Lawyers for the Trump Administration missed a court-ordered deadline for turning over a document that gave President Trump a way to justify his immigration restrictions without aiming them specifically at Muslims.  The document is said to be a paper prepared by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani at Donald Trump’s request. Friday was the… Read More