Category Archive

The Department of Justice has law-enforcement responsibilities in all kinds of areas: antitrust, tax, environment, general criminal and civil litigation, and so forth.  But just about all the opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the department as attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is because of one area:  civil rights.  That happens to be the Center for Equal Opportunity’s area, too. Opponents to the nomination are trying to paint Sen. Sessions as a racist, and as someone who therefore will be unenthusiastic about enforcing the civil-rights laws.  But the real concern here is not that Sen. Sessions will not …

As we count our blessings at the end of the year, don’t forget to include thanks to Senator Mitch McConnell and the Senate Judiciary Committee for what they’ve done to keep the federal judiciary from getting any worse than it already is. It’s hard to win even good lawsuits with bad judges. A few examples that have come across my desk just in the past week or so: George Leef has a fine column on how Grand Valley State University has been sued, rightly, for violating the free-speech rights of its students. Microsoft ought to be sued if it decides …

I’m just a poor but reasonably honest civil-rights lawyer, not a political expert or psychologist, but I did have a few thoughts on the post-election fallout that I’m observing: No one can deny that there is racism in America’s past, and no one can deny that there are still racists. But the problem with the Left is that it willfully exaggerates the amount of racism that still exists — such as when it tells Americans about the racism in their past to the exclusion of everything else, and especially everything positive. That is, its problem is obsession with race and …

In addition to our speaking on campuses and other venues, media outreach, and general research and writing (in National Review Online, Commentary Magazine, The New York Times, and other magazines, newspapers, and publications), here are just a few highlights of CEO’s work this past year.  We continue to give unmatched bang for the buck.    Fisher v. University of Texas –This case challenging racial preferences in student admissions relied on a legal theory we developed, and before the case’s first trip to the Supreme Court we joined and helped write an amicus brief with the court of appeals, were the first to flag for conservative media …

Some questions for the Left, especially the campus Left: Do you really think it is a good thing for race relations on campus and elsewhere for Americans to be obsessed with race? Do you really think that it’s a good thing for race relations if every white student thinks of himself (or herself!) as beholden to any nonwhite student he meets — beholden in the sense that he must check his privilege and walk on eggshells? Do you really think it is a good thing for race relations if every nonwhite person focuses on past injustices to people who may …

According to this Washington Post article, black Maryland state legislators are “planning to propose emergency legislation to address the dearth of minority-owned businesses approved to grow medical marijuana in the state.”  There’s a federal constitutional problem here, though: A predicate for racial preferences in government contracting is a demonstration that there has historically been discrimination in the industry involved. Medical marijuana was legalized in Maryland only a couple of years ago, so one wonders how much discrimination there has been, historically, in an industry that does not yet actually exist.  But never mind all that.  “This is a good modern-day civil rights …

If there’s one thing that this country needs more of, it’s racial division.  That, at least, seems to be the view of the Obama administration. As Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation writes in this Issue Brief posted recently: On the first day of Congress’s recess, the Obama Administration recommended the most sweeping changes to the nation’s official racial and ethnic categories in decades.  The two most significant proposals were creating a new ethno/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and taking from those who identify as Hispanic the option to identify their …

Do non-citizens vote? Yes, they do, according to this study — and they vote quite a bit.  Here’s the abstract: In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that …

The Left’s view is that “systemic racism” and “institutional racism” and “implicit bias” are all bad except that it is all right to discriminate systematically and institutionally and explicitly against whites and Asian Americans, and in favor of African Americans and Latinos, where the latter two are “underrepresented” in, say, Ivy League admissions or in Silicon Valley, but it is not all right to discriminate against Asian Americans, let alone anyone else, and in favor of whites, period, and so it is also all right to have, say, contracting discrimination programs that discriminate against whites and in favor of African …