Social Movements & the Law

By Minh N. Vu Seyfarth Synopsis: SCOTUS grants certiorari on an ADA Title III case for the first time in 18 years to resolve a circuit split on whether an

For New York employers, the standards for sexual harassment may be shifting. The state requires all employers to adopt its model sex harassment policy...

A U.S. homeland security adviser spent Tuesday meeting with Mexico’s president and other top officials, emerging with a five-point plan.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday signed a bill that would make child rapists eligible for the death penalty in the state.  “In Florida, we believe it’s only appropriate that the worst o…

From ABC News (via YouTube): ABC News’ Jaclyn Lee reports on libraries being on the frontlines of the increasing homelessness crisis across the U.S. and how librarians are learning techniques to help.

An interview with Laura Moulton, founder of Street Books, a mobile library which serves Portland's houseless community. SSP annual meeting attendees are invited to bring paperback books to donate to Street Books.

Missouri is one of a growing number of places where government funding is being deployed as the newest weapon in the fight over books. Beginning May 30, a new state rule could deny state funding to libraries over books deemed inappropriate for young readers — although it's not clear how it will be enforced.

Who is Robert Morris:     Born in Salem Massachusetts in 1825, Neither Morris, his siblings, nor his parents were enslaved. This foundatio...

Love, marriage… and a secret history of trauma. Anna Maria Tremonti has been keeping her past a secret for over 40 years. As one of Canada’s most respected journalists, she has a reputation for being fearless and hard-hitting. She’s reported from some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. But none were as immediately threatening as life at home. In her early 20s, she fell in love with a man who seemed worldly and charming. Behind closed doors he was incredibly violent. They were only married for a year but the consequences of the abuse have lasted a lifetime. This is the first time Anna Maria has told anyone—including family or close friends—the details of what she endured. Working with her therapist, she reveals the intimate details of a past she’s kept to herself for most of her life. The result is a profoundly intimate portrait of a powerful woman confronting the source of tremendous pain and trauma and, remarkably, freeing herself from a life-long sense of shame. Written and hosted by Anna Maria Tremonti (The Current), produced by Daemon Fairless (Hunting Warhead, Boys Like Me) and mixed by Mira Burt-Wintonick (Wiretap, Love Me, Sorry About The Kid).

PHOENIX (AP) — Human remains that had been buried for decades in a California gravesite and marked as “Jane Doe" have been identified as a Navajo woman who went missing from northern Arizona, authorities said.

We created a rigorous empirical account of laws protecting the human rights of all migrants and the cross-national implementation that helps them flourish.Now you can explore it.

This week, protests were held across the United States against right-wing efforts to ban books and antiracism education in schools. Fourteen protesters with Florida’s Dream Defenders were arrested Wednesday for staging a peaceful sit-in inside the office of Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis at the end of the state’s legislative session, in which he backed efforts to ban abortion after six weeks, deny gender-affirming care for youth, roll back rent control, censor discussions of LGBTQ issues and Black history in schools, and crack down on immigrants and unions in his political crusade against “wokeness.” We speak with one of the arrested protesters, Nailah Summers-Polite, co-director of Dream Defenders, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar well known for her work in the field of critical race theory, about the Freedom to Learn protests and the push to preserve the integrity of the AP African American studies course attacked by DeSantis and other far-right activists.

EPA News Release: EPA Proposes to Establish First-Time Clean Water Act Protections for Over 250 Tribes

An English writing tool providing gender-inclusive alternatives for gendered nouns and verbs.

A daily independent global news hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González. “Sing Your Song”: Remembering Harry Belafonte, Who Used His Stardom to Help MLK & Civil Rights Movement; Harry Belafonte in His Own Words on Opposing Iraq War & Calling George W. Bush a “Terrorist”; “Get Down to Business”: Harry Belafonte in 2016 on Trump, Socialism & Fighting for Justice

This weekend, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González gives the opening plenary at American University’s one-day conference, “Burying 200 Years of the U.S. Monroe Doctrine,” marking 200 years since the Monroe Doctrine, the foreign policy directive from President James Monroe that effectively declared all of Latin America a U.S. sphere of influence. For the past two centuries, the Monroe Doctrine has been repeatedly used to justify scores of invasions, interventions and CIA regime changes in the Americas. On today’s show, we speak to two other conference guests, CodePink’s Medea Benjamin and The Red Nation’s Nick Estes, about the Monroe Doctrine’s long and brutal legacy within U.S. imperialism.

In a stunning show of support for libraries, late yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to support a resolution backing the Internet Archive and the digital rights of all libraries. Supervisor Connie Chan, whose district includes the Internet Archive, authored the legislation and brought the resolution before the Board. “At a […]

The call for Indigenous data sovereignty (ID-Sov) —the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data—has grown in intensity and scope over the past five years. To date three national-level Indigenous data sovereignty networks exist: Te Mana Raraunga - Maori Data Sovereignty Network, the United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN), and the Maiamnayri Wingara Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Group in Australia. Similar initiatives are underway in Hawaii and Sweden.

We here at Open Culture heartily endorse the practice of viewing art, whether in a physical museum, in the pages of a book, or online. For some, however, it tends to have one serious shortcoming: all the colors are already filled in.

Here’s the Full Text of a Statement From Representative Pramila Jayapal:  In honor of National Library Week, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) is introducing a resolution to honor library workers nationwide today. “Libraries and library workers don’t just facilitate the public’s access to information, many stepped up during the pandemic to provide personal protective equipment […]

From colouring books to abolition newspapers and Reader’s Digest magazines, thousands of titles are banned in prisons and jails across the country, often with opaque reasons and with little oversight, Alex Woodward reports

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Library Association praised the Prison Libraries Act, introduced today by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO-5th), along with co-leads Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18th) and Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH-11th), and 25 cosponsors.

The number of reported challenges and attempted bans to books doubled in 2022 according to data released by the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom Monday.

Library boards, school boards and legislatures are becoming battlegrounds in a push to censor books. Communities are fighting back.

The Justice Department today filed a complaint challenging Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), a recently enacted law that denies necessary medical care to youth based solely on who they are. The complaint alleges that SB 1’s ban on providing certain medically necessary care to transgender minors violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The department is also asking the court to issue an immediate order to prevent the law from going into effect on July 1, 2023.

The latest vote comes a century after the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in Congress.

"The modern American public corporation stands at the center of various forms of inequality in our society-because of its influence on the economy, the environment, and the government as well as its own employees and consumers. But corporate law has long overlooked the feminist perspective, to the detriment of many underrepresented minority populations. In this edited volume, a diverse group of scholars takes up the challenge to rewrite corporate law from a feminist perspective. Applying a feminist perspective to corporate governance and corporate law allows us to see what the world would look like if corporations were governed by different individuals with different priorities. The feminist judgments in this volume take on (1) the foundational principle that corporations are entities that possess a legal identity separate and distinct from their owners and the related concept of limited liability; (2) the appropriate scope of the rights that accompany corporate ownership (such as the "shareholder wealth maximization" norm); (3) the lack of diversity on corporate boards and at top management levels as well as the meaning of fiduciary duties; (4) the effects of interpersonal relationships in close corporations; and (5) the availability of protection for vulnerable investors and potential investors"--

02/2021