Social Movements & the Law

This article was updated on June 29 at 4:09 p.m.In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday.

Raymond Mattia’s family said the partial release of body camera footage “feels like a cheap attempt to justify what they did.”

The Supreme Court killed affirmative action, but not for military academies or the legacy admissions that protect the ruling class.

The orders include state healthcare plans for gender-affirming surgery and restricting conversation therapy for LGBTQ youth.

Oak Flat, a mountainous area east of Phoenix, is an Apache sacred site where Native Americans gather to pray and perform coming-of-age ceremonies and sweat rituals.

Oak Flat, a mountainous area east of Phoenix, is an Apache sacred site where Native Americans gather to pray and perform coming-of-age ceremonies and sweat rituals.

Arizona pharmacists will be able to dispense birth control - pills, the patch or a ring - to patients without a prescription.

For young Navajo people, the lack of water makes it more difficult to return to the Navajo Nation to make a permanent home.

By a narrow margin, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Navajo Nation in a case over water rights in the drought-stricken US Southwest.

It is the third time this month that federal courts have enjoined laws backed by DeSantis that target LGBTQ people.

Black Lives Matter Protesters are facing new issues after a court ruling against Deray Mckesson makes him liable for neglience during a demonstration.

Two Los Angeles County supervisors will propose Tuesday that the county library system make its eBooks available to all California teens and residents.

Originally issued in 1953, the Freedom to Read Statement is just as important 70 years later. We invite all to sign onto the newly affirmed statement.

This action occured on June 23, 2023.

The internet is a powerful tool for online resources for different communities. Read on for more LGBTQ support and resources.

"The relationship between class and intimate violence against women is much misunderstood. While many studies of intimate violence focus on poor and working-class women, few examine the issue comparatively in terms of class privilege and class disadvantage. James Ptacek draws on in-depth interviews with sixty women from wealthy, professional, working-class, and poor communities to investigate how social class shapes both women's experiences of violence and the responses of their communities to this violence. Ptacek's framing of women's victimization as "social entrapment" links private violence to public responses and connects social inequalities to the dilemmas that women face"--

It is a book all LIS educators and administrators need to read now. The editors and author contributors show us by direct action what critical librarianship is. At the heart of the book is an ethics of care and self-care, an ethics born out of critical stances positioned in examining our rich intersectionalities and inter-being as people of color and allies. Librarians With Spines is a call to action that asks us to reflect on our intentionality as information professionals. It challenges librarians to proudly uphold and carry forward our duty to serve our communities in our daily work.

"In Defense of Sovereignty recounts the history of the Oneida Nation and its struggles for self-determination. Since the nation's removal from New York in the 1820s to what would become the state of Wisconsin, it has been engaged in legal conflicts with US actors to retain its sovereignty and its lands. Legal scholar and former Oneida Nation senior staff attorney Rebecca M. Webster traces this history, including the nation's treaties with the US but focusing especially on its relationship with the village of Hobart, Wisconsin. Since 2003 there have been six disputes that have led to litigation between the local government and the nation. Central to these disputes are the local government's attempts to regulate the nation and relegate its government to the position of a common landowner, subject to municipal authority. As in so many conflicts between Indigenous nations and local municipalities, the media narrative about the Oneida Nation's battle for sovereignty has been dominated by the local government's standpoint. In Defense of Sovereignty offers another perspective, that of a nation citizen directly involved in the litigation, augmented by contributions from historians, attorneys, and a retired nation employee. It makes an important contribution to public debates about the inherent right of Indigenous nations to continue to exist and exercise self-governance within their territories without being challenged at every turn"--

"The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? Cedric Johnson argues that this shortcoming was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality"--

Controlling reproduction - who has children, how many, and when - is important to states, communities, families, and individuals across the globe. However, the stakes are even higher than might at first be appreciated: control over reproduction is an incredibly powerful tool. Contests over reproduction necessarily involve control over women and their bodies. Yet because reproduction is so intertwined with other social processes and institutions, controlling it also extends far into most corners of social, economic, and political life. Nancy Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee explore how various social institutions beyond the individual - including state, religion, market, and family - are involved in the negotiation of reproductive power. They draw on examples from across the world, such as direct fertility policies in China and Romania, the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and Brazil, racial discrimination and resistance in Mexico and the US, and how Japan and Norway use laws intended to encourage gender equality to indirectly shape reproduction. This engaging book sheds new light on the operations of power and gender in society. It will appeal to students taking courses on reproduction in departments of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies. -- Provided by publisher.

"Race, Ethnicity, and the COVID-19 Pandemic is an extensive examination of the causes and consequences of the global pandemic on racial and ethnic minorities, offering analysis of the causes of the unique experiences of Black, Indigenous and Latin communities in the US and the world from multiple social sciences perspectives"--;"To understand racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths, we must first understand how they are linked to racial inequality. In the United States, the material advantages afforded by whiteness lead to lower rates of infections and deaths from COVID-19 when compared to the rates among Black, Latino, and Native American populations. Most experts point to differences in population density, underlying health conditions, and proportions of essential workers as the primary determinants in the levels of COVID-19 deaths. The national response to the pandemic has laid bare the fundamentals of a racialized social structure. Assembled by a prestigious group of sociologists, this volume examines how particularly during the first year of COVID-19, the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic led to different and poorer outcomes for Black, Latino, and Native American populations. While color-blindness shaped national discussions on essential workers, charity, and differential mortality, minorities were overwhelmingly affected. The essays in this collection provide a mix of critical examination of the progress and direction of our COVID-19 response, personal accounts of the stark difference in care and outcomes for minorities throughout the United States, and offer recommendations to create a foundation for future response and research during the critical early days"--

"Examines how different institutions--Hollywood, universities, corporations, and law enforcement--have sought to be inclusive of Muslims in an era of rampant Islamophobia"--

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."-

"How a national grassroots network fought a resurgence of the KKK and other fascist groups during the Reagan years, and how it laid the groundwork for today's anti-fascist/anti-racist movements."--

"Asian American Histories of the United States illuminates how an over-century-long history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the United States is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century"--;"Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the 21st century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early 21st century." -- Publisher's website

"In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future." --

"Tells the stories of those who suffered during the worst social and political failure in the continent's history-the War on Drugs-and what we can do to right the wrongs of the past"--