News & Commentary

Jose "Ivan" Noe Nuñez Martinez is a 37-year old gay man who fled his native Mexico in 2001, when he was about 21 years old, because he feared for his life. He'd received violent threats because of his sexual orientation, and a gay friend of his there was murdered.   In 2010, Ivan traveled back to Mexico to visit his mother, whom he feared

The #MeToo movement has offered an important lesson on the collective power of voices joining together to take on individual experiences of injustice. On Monday, the Supreme Court dealt a huge blow to precisely this kind of collective power, ruling against the ability of workers to join together to take on employment discrimination and abuse. The court ruled that employers are free to force workers who have been victims of unfair labor practices into privat

Kasandra Reddington has been a proud Montanan ever since her family moved to the state when she was 10 years old. She is a graduate of Montana State University Billings with a degree in psychology and now resides in Helena, where she works as a tutor at a public college. She enjoys a lot of things about Montana, but especially the state parks.Unfortunately, an anti-trans ballot initiative is threatening Kasandra’s ability to work and do the activities she loves, solely because she is transgender. Kasandra is not alone. Around the country, opponents of LGBTQ equality are targeting transgender and non-bina

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has claimed that the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Illinois against the Chicago Police Department resulted in approximately 236 additional victims killed and over 1,100 additional shootings in 2016 alone. This represents a new low for Sessions. He is wrong on the facts — there was no ACLU lawsuit — and wrong on what is required by the Constitution.  This is not the first time Sessions has been wrong on the facts and argued for bias-filled

When it comes to the practice of civil asset forfeiture, the state of Missouri has the right idea. State law mandates that 100 percent of proceeds from cash and property forfeitures that result in convictions be used to fund the state’s public schools. That’s a sound idea, but there’s one problem: It isn’t happening. In 2016, local law enforcement only sent $100,000 to public schools when it seized $6.3 million worth of property. And of that total, 44 percent went to the feds. What accounts for this discrepancy?  Simple: Missouri law enforcement has conspired with the Department of Justice, in defiance of state law, t

In 2015, video surfaced of a police officer violently dragging a Black girl from her school desk. He was arresting her, and using shockingly excessive force, because she was “disturbing school,” a vague law that more or less made it a crime for a student to be loud, to talk back to staff or school police. In other words, it criminalized being a kid.  Unsurprisingly, this law has disproportionately affected students of color, who are already over-policed outside the school

My name is Liv Funk, and I’m writing this to explain why I want changes to how LGBTQ students are treated at North Bend High School in Oregon. This is very personal for me. I’m about to graduate from North Bend, but I’m continuing to speak up so that nobod

Last month, a professor at Willamette University College of Law reached out to our office for help on a case her student-run legal clinic had been working on. It was, Professor Warren Binford said, one of the worst cases of discrimination at a school that she had ever seen in Oregon. In our job, we hear a lot of awful and heartbreaking cases, but the cruel treatment of LGBTQ students at North Bend High School shocked us. LGBTQ students at the rural school on the Oregon coast have been harassed, threatened, bullied, and assaulted ju

The Trump administration announced Friday that it is proposing a new “gag rule” designed to block patients who rely on Title X from accessing critical family planning services at reproductive health care providers including Planned Parenthood. The new proposed rule, which comes despite strong opposition from more than