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Human & Civil Rights Agencies

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - A group of white firefighters who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to sanction their promotions over black colleagues are receiving their new badges Thursday in a ceremony that provides symbolic recognition of their victory. The high court ruled in June that New Haven officials violated white firefighters' civil rights when they threw out 2003 test results in which too few minorities did well. The case became an issue in confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from a Christian student group that had been denied recognition by a public law school in California for excluding homosexuals and nonbelievers. The case pits anti-discrimination principles against religious freedom.

The group, the Christian Legal Society, says it welcomes all students to participate in its activities. But it does not allow students to become voting members or to assume leadership posit...

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Supreme Court appeared split Monday along familiar ideological lines over whether the Constitution forbids locking up forever juveniles whose crimes fall short of homicide. Attorneys for two Florida men sentenced as teenagers to life in prison without parole argued that such terms violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Certainly it is unusual, said Bryan Stevenson, the attorney for Joe Harris Sulliv...

Three Democratic Congressional committee chairmen said Tuesday that they would move to overturn a four-month-old Supreme Court ruling that made it significantly harder for workers to win many age discrimination cases. The three chairmen criticized the court’s decision in a case involving a 54-year-old man who was demoted, saying the ruling flouted Congress’s intent and created unfair obstacles to the victims of age discrimination. In a 5-to-4 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cr...

Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night. Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev...

WASHINGTON:  President-elect Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress are planning swift action to overturn a