American Civil Liberties Union

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that speaking out about sexual harassment at work shouldn't cost you your job. This comes on the tails of last week's ruling that students who are sexually harassed can bring claims under both Title IX and Section 1983 (see post about the Fitzgerald decision). In yesterday's decision in Crawford v. Nashville, the court ruled unanimously that Vicky Crawford, who was fired from her job after she participated in her employer's internal investigation of sexual harassment, can sue her employer for retaliation.

On Wednesday, nearly nine months after the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the transfer of 40 women prisoners from New Jersey's women's prison to a men's supermax prison, the Department of Corrections (DOC) transferred the women back.

In March 2007 the DOC abruptly moved the women from Edna Mahan Correctional Facility to New Jersey State Prison, where they were held in lockdown conditions – confined in their cells for up to 22 hours a day and denied basic movement within the prison. Unlike the male prisoners, the women were denied access to the prison school and law library, and to basic hygiene and privacy.

The ACLU received this month a settlement compliance report from Management Systems, Inc., the Detroit property management company that illegally evicted Tanica Lewis in 2006 because of property damage caused by her abusive ex-boyfriend, against whom she had a personal protection order.

In the settlement, reached in February of this year, Management Systems agreed to institute a Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking Policy, which prohibits the company from evicting tenants or discriminating against applicants on the basis that they are victims of any of these forms of violence. The policy also allows tenants to end their leases early if they need to flee violence and gives them the option of relocating to another property managed by the company.