News & Commentary

Women aren’t often included in discussions of the criminal justice system, but they face huge hardships while incarcerated and after their release. I would know: I spent the ages of 19 to 29 in federal prison. Now, eight years later, I am a nationally licensed and certified clinical laboratory scientist and a proud mom, but my journey to this point wasn’t easy. I’ve seen firsthand how the criminal justice system fails women in

Another day, another pair of court losses for President Trump’s outrageous and illegal Muslim Ban.Yesterday, federal courts in Maryland and Hawaii rejected the latest iteration of the ban the president promised as a candidate and has been trying to put in place ever since. Just like its predecessors, Muslim Ban 3.0 violates the Constitution, federal statutes, and our bedrock values of religious neutrality and tolerance. As we have

After two years of being attacked by their very own state government, trans North Carolinians are moving closer to obtaining partial victory. Today Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein ha

A recently leaked FBI “Intelligence Assessment” contains troubling signs that the FBI is scrutinizing and possibly surveilling Black activists in its search for potential “extremists.” The report, which the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division prepared, identifies what it calls “Black Identity Extremis

In the wake of bombshell reports by the The New York Times and The New Yorker detailing three decades of sexual misconduct by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the revelations keep coming. So do the questions: How did such flagrant misconduct stay an “open secret” for so long? Just how many women were harmed? And how do we make sure that such an egregious abuse of power never happens again?Sexual harassment that is “severe or pervasive” was deemed by the Supreme Court to be illegal sex discrimination more than 30 years ago, when Mechelle Vinson, a bank employee in Washington, D.C., challenged her manager’s three-year campaign of abuse, including rape. And it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the court clarified that conduct becomes illegal harassment at the point that a “reasonable person” would find it abusive, even if it never gets physical.So it shouldn’t be news to anyone that arriving at a business meeting in a bathrobe and asking for a massage crosses the line. Yet here we are again. Fox News, Uber, the Marine Corps — each new sexual harassment scandal prompts an outpouring of “me, too” stories to remind us that, whatever the law might say about such conduct, culture follows different rules. As these and other scandals show, that culture can be toxic in fields where women are in the minority, especially in leadership roles: entertainment, media, and the military, not to mention Wall Street, law enforcement, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Indeed, Weinstein was enabled by an industry in which the top executives at film studios, according to a 2016 study, are on average 80 percent male — resulting in rampant discrimination in behind-the-camera hiring decisions, as the ACLU has successfully argued to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It’s time to get to work on making antidiscrimination law’s promise a re

Renata Singleton was the victim in a criminal case and served five days in jail. That’s right, the victim. And Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro is to blame. In the fall of 2014, Renata Singleton and her boyfriend got into an arg

Just days after Donald Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, he convened a group of top intelligence and military officials for dinner at the White House. The group included Secretary of Defense James Mattis and CIA Director Michael Pompeo. Presumably they were not there for the steak. Instead, they were there to discuss and sign off on an intelligence-gathering raid in al Ghayil, Yemen — t

My name is Pax Enstad, and I’m a high school junior, a son, a brother and a friend. I’m also a transgender boy. When I tell people th

This Monday, we are back in court, fighting to block Muslim Ban 3.0 before it can go into effect on October 18, 2017. President Trump’s latest proclamation is largely the same as his first two bans, in terms of who will suffer, but worse — because it has no end date. Read our legal analysis