By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 4:18pm
For the last four years, I've had the honor of representing 20 amazing organizations and individuals in our challenge to human gene patents. They include: leading organizations of pathologists and geneticists; scientists, physicians, and genetic counselors who work every day to improve our understanding of the connection between genes, disease, and treatment and the care they provide to patients; breast cancer and women's health groups, who spoke out against the effects of these patents on patients; and women who have family histories of breast and ovarian cancer, or who have already been diagnosed with cancer, and faced obstacles to their medical care because of these patents.
By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 11:35am
Should companies be able to patent human genes? Today, the Supreme Court answered that profound question with a resounding NO.
Seems like common sense, right? But over the last 30 years, the U.S. Patent Office has issued patents on thousands of human genes, including genes associated with colon cancer, Alzheimer's disease, muscular dystrophy, and many other devastating diseases. The status quo meant that companies controlling gene patents had the right to stop all other scientists from examining, studying, testing, and researching our genes.
By Michael Risher, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 5:29pm
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Maryland's arrestee DNA testing law is a serious blow to genetic privacy. The ruling allows the police to seize the DNA of innocent Americans who have never been convicted of any sort of crime, without a search warrant. And as Justice Scalia makes clear in his scathing dissent, the majority opinion goes against decades of precedent that makes it clear that the police cannot search an individual for evidence of a crime (and that's clearly what they are doing here) without a specific reason to think that the search will actually uncover some evidence.
By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:20am
At age four, my family moved for "better" schools from Detroit to a suburb just north of 18 Mile Road. Remember the movie 8 Mile, the story of Eminem's emergence from Detroit's suburban borderline? 18 mile road is 10 miles north, but 100 times whiter. With very few nonwhites, school was not a model of diversity or mutual respect. Here was Jeanette, the only Black girl, who squirmed in her seat during the lesson on slavery, not due to the topic but (I believe) because she felt like a spectacle. There was Frank, from a Vietnamese background, whom cruel (and ignorant) children occasionally called "Chink." I remember Rupert, valedictorian, a terrific athlete, and a wit, but known often as the "Indian kid" (if not by a Middle Eastern epithet). We white children lived blind to our own privilege.
By Cecillia Wang, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project at 11:20am
As the Supreme Court takes up affirmative action once again, the word "diversity" has found its way into many legal briefs. For me, it is not an abstract concept. If today I am a supportive colleague, a successful civil rights lawyer, a good citizen in the broadest and best sense, it is thanks to affirmative action.
I arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1988. I didn't have far to travel. I crammed my belongings into my used Honda and drove to the other end of the county. In 40 minutes, I crossed over into a new world.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision soon in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin to determine if the University of Texas can consider race as one factor, among many, in attempting to create a diverse educational experience for its students. Yet, what critics of affirmative action often gloss over is that our nation's K-12 schools are more segregated by race and class than when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, for many students of all races and classes, college is the first time many students are enriched by a diverse environment.
Today the Supreme Court will hear Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case about a South Carolina Indian girl who the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the child must be returned to her Indian father. The child's mother ignored the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, a federal law designed to protect Indian families from "abusive child welfare practices that resulted in the separation of large numbers of Indian children from their families and tribes through adoption or foster case placement" and, as a result, both the tribe and the father were denied their rights under ICWA.
By Ian S. Thompson, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:41pm
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Edie Windsor’s challenge to the discriminatory, so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Despite the fact that Edie and her late spouse, Thea Spyer, were together for more than four decades and were legally married in Canada in 2007, DOMA required the federal government to treat the couple as legal strangers. When Thea passed away in 2009, Edie was forced to pay more than $363,000 in federal estate taxes that would have otherwise been zero had she been married to a man.
By Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 6:26pm
The ACLU appeared before the Supreme Court to argue for the right of Americans to challenge a law that instituted a far-reaching and unconstitutional surveillance regime.
