Debtor’s prisons consisting of people sent to jail because they were too poor to pay fines were common in the 18th century. Charles Dickens’s father was someone who was sent to a debtor’s prison and his shame over this is said to have been a significant influence in his crusade against the way that poor people were treated. Such prisons were outlawed in the UK in 1869.
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We have all heard (I hope!) of Rosa Parks and her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus, triggering the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and strikes and walkouts and other forms of civil disobedience that highlighted the racial discrimination of those times and eventually led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But there were other lesser-known people who also showed courage and determination in expanding the right of everyone to be treated equally and with dignity.
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Today is the 60th anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that said that ‘separate but equal’ practices were unconstitutional in the field of public education. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the unanimous opinion:
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Federal courts had already declined to rule that the inclusion of the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional largely on the basis that they had earlier ruled that no one could be forced to say the Pledge and thus saying it was voluntary. A new strategy had sought to eliminate it by appealing to state constitutions, with cases in Massachusetts and New Jersey already underway and others pending in other states.
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The US Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the prayer practices of the town of Greece were constitutional. The court voted 5-4 with the usual alignment of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas in the majority, with Kennedy writing the majority opinion. You can see all the opinions here and Lyle Denniston has some analysis of it.
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I wrote recently about the abuse of civil asset forfeitures by over-zealous prosecutors who seize assets without even charging the people with anything.
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Lawsuits challenging the banning of same-sex marriage by states or the non-recognition of those marriages that were performed in states where they are legal, have been cropping up all over the place and every one of them has been successful so far. Georgia has now become the last Southern state to be sued.
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I wrote earlier about two interesting cases for which oral arguments were heard before the US Supreme Court this week. One was heard on Monday and concerned a suit brought by the company POM Wonderful against Coca-Cola and the other was brought by the broadcast TV station ABC against Aereo and was heard on Tuesday.
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I thought that legal challenges to saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools because of objections to the phrase ‘under God’ had been exhausted when several federal Courts of Appeals had all agreed that it was constitutional and that the lack of conflicting rulings made it unlikely that the US Supreme Court would hear the case.
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India has been in the news recently, and not always in a good way. We have had the cases of brutal rapes of women that have shed an unflattering light on social mores and the law enforcement system that seemed to treat these as less than the horrible crimes they are. It is hoped that the uproar that these rapes generated may lead to broad reforms.
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