Social Movements & the Law

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.

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.

The New York Times is tracking the status of abortion laws in each state following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Summary of H.R.1065 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

Read the full 98-page initial draft majority opinion.

AN ACT: AMENDING TITLE 36, CHAPTER 23, ARIZONA REVISED STATUTES, BY ADDING ARTICLE 3; RELATING TO ABORTIONll

Independent News and Analysis on the U.S. Supreme Court

We must stand up to politicians who want to restrict people’s ability to make their own health care decisions in consultation with their doctors.

Text for H.R.2694 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

Summary of H.R.1581 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Reproductive Rights are Human Rights Act of 2019

Sex and reproductive health-related bills in the U.S. Congress.

Reproductive rights—having the ability to decide whether and when to have children—are important to women’s socioeconomic well-being and overall health. Research suggests that being able to make decisions about one’s own reproductive life and the timing of one’s entry into parenthood is associated with greater relationship stability and satisfaction (National Campaign to Prevent Teen and […]

Brief of amici curiae reproductive justice scholars supporting petitioners–cross-respondents.

The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives

Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has recognized that personal privacy and reproductive rights are among our most important constitutional liberties. In its earliest years, the ACLU defended

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a woman’s Constitutional right to choose.  This decision expressly took away a right from the American people that it had recognized for nearly 50 years – a woman’s right to make her own reproductive health care decisions, free from…

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shadow docket refusing to block a Texas law banning abortion after six weeks. This new law violates the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade, which declared a pregnant person has a constitutional right to an abortion.

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

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"--

"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." --

Read examines the labor force activity of Arab-American women, a group whose work experiences provide an exception to accepted theories. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native-born Arab-American women resemble those of U.S.-born white women. These differences cannot be explained by Arab-American women's human capital characteristics or family resources, but are due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. Read's findings challenge assumptions about variations in ethnic women's labor force participation. Arab cultural values play an important role in determining the position of women of Arab descent in American society.

"In Disappearing Rooms Michelle Castaneda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in U.S. immigration courts and detention centers. She uses a performance studies perspective to show how the theatrical concept of mise-en-scene offers new insights about immigration law and the absurdist dynamics of carceral space. Castaneda draws upon her experiences in immigration trials as an interpreter and courtroom companion to analyze the scenography-lighting, staging, framing, gesture, speech, and choreography-of specific rooms within the immigration enforcement system. Castaneda's ethnographies of proceedings in a "removal" office in New York City, a detention center courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast reveal the depersonalizing violence enacted in immigration law through its embodied, ritualistic, and affective components. She shows how the creative practices of detained and disappeared peoples living under acute duress imagine the abolition of detention and borders. Featuring original illustrations by artist-journalist, Molly Crabapple, Disappearing Rooms shines a light into otherwise hidden spaces of law within the contemporary deportation regime. Duke University of Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient"--

Drawing on ethnographic research, this book explores different experiences of urban Native identity across two pan-Indian communities in NE Ohio. In addition to elucidating how false memories of Indian-ness invisibilize and overwrite the stories and identities of urban Indigenous people, this research reveals the significance of continuous relations with tribal nations to the persistence of Indigenous peoples and perspectives in twenty-first century US society.