George Zimmerman's lawyer can keep blogging about the Trayvon Martin case.

Says the judge.

During that hearing, [Zimmerman's lawyer Mark] O'Mara said his client had been the subject of a carefully orchestrated national media campaign by attorneys for Trayvon's family, who had traveled the country, portraying the former Neighborhood Watch volunteer as a racist murderer.

De la Rionda accused O'Mara of trying to taint potential jurors. All he wanted, de la Rionda said, is to have a fair trial, and the best way to do that is to prohibit all attorneys from talking about or publishing information about the case....

In arguing against the gag order Friday, O'Mara said that when he first took Zimmerman's case, his office was inundated with thousands of pieces of email and media queries, so he created a website, where he regularly posts blogs and court documents....

A dozen news organizations, including the Orlando Sentinel, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN, opposed the gag order, calling it extreme and unnecessary.

When Roe v. Wade came out, Justice Ginsburg believed the motivation behind it was fighting overpopulation.

Emily Bazelon gets clarification directly from the Justice about a remark she made in 2009 that seemed perhaps to favor abortion for population control. Justice Ginsburg reframed her point this way:

“I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.... In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”

That is, she intuited the Court's motivation, which she says she was wrong about — as she observed in the old remark and repeats now — because the Supreme Court later, in 1980, upheld the political decision to exclude Medicaid funding for abortion, in Harris v. McRae. Ginsburg's 2009 quote was:

[Roe v. Wade] surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

These remarks conflate the Supreme Court and Congress. It could have been that concern about overpopulation motivated the Court in Roe, as it pushed back the states' power to ban abortion and put abortion in a relatively positive light as something women had a right to do. That created the political space within which Congress might have opted to fund abortions for poor women. All that happened in Harris v. McRae was acceptance of the political reality that did ensue, the decision not to pay for abortions. The Supreme Court failed to predict the political fallout from Roe. The Court could still, at the time of Roe, have believed that it was enabling Congress to undertake population-control policy. When Harris v. McRae arose, the Court had new information and a new question to answer. It declined to extend Roe to mean that Congress was obligated to fund abortions as part of Medicaid.

Bazelon blithely concludes:

The history lesson is this: There was a feminist women’s rights argument for legal abortion in the 1970s, which the Supreme Court accepted in Roe v. Wade. And there was a separate and distinct argument about preventing population growth by being pro-abortion, made by groups like Zero Population Growth, which the court did not accept, not in Roe and not later.

The women's rights argument is presentable and defensible. Abortion for population control was and is too ugly — and too close to racism — for comfort. What is uncomfortable is suppressed. In that sense the denial is admirable. But Bazelon's instruction on the "history lesson" is too pat and too sanitized to be taken uncritically.

"A federal court on Thursday rejected a Texas law that would require voters to present photo IDs to election officials before being allowed to vote..."

"... in November's election, unanimously ruling that it imposes 'strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor,' who are often racial minorities."

"Online petitions, protests, and statements by African American and civil rights leaders have all demanded Zimmerman be brought to justice."

But those who care about prejudice and stereotypes are hypocrites if they don't pay attention to all the facts.

"The book is helping white folks who otherwise would have simply dismissed that idea understand why so many people believe it."

The idea is that the war on drugs is "a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow."

(Here's the book.)

The word "law" only appears once on the NYT list of "100 Notable Books of 2011."

Maybe the New York Times is missing some great law books, but this is some kind of read on something that ought to matter to legal academics and other law folk.

What's the one book? It's "Rights Gone Wrong/How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality," by Richard Thompson Ford. Here's the NYT review of it by Jeffrey Rosen:

In “Rights Gone Wrong,” Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, argues that both the progressive left and the colorblind right are guilty of the same error: defining discrimination too abstractly and condemning it too categorically, with similarly perverse results....

Ford does not offer an equivocal, cautious, middle-of-the-road critique of civil rights law....

Ford ends his stimulating polemic by arguing for a more “nuanced” approach to civil rights. He calls for the return of thoughtful, pragmatic judges who will take the time to distinguish justified from unjustified acts of discrimination, rejecting selfish or perverse claims of “rights gone wrong” while protecting people from truly invidious indignities.

Noted.

Goodbye to Derrick Bell.

The eminent law professor has died.

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even those intended to lessen the effects of past injustice. Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday....

Mr. Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest....

Much of Mr. Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of allegorical stories....

One his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Mr. Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves” in exchange for one thing: its black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin....

Not everyone welcomed the move to narrative and allegory in legal scholarship. In 1997, Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” storytellers like Mr. Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."

Prof. Bell was 80.

If white victims are chosen because they are "easy targets," is that a "hate crime"?

From a report on the Wisconsin State Fair crime spree:

The investigation into 11 of the violent incidents on the opening night of the Wisconsin State Fair has resulted in the arrest of a 16-year-old African-American who reportedly told investigators he targeted whites... because he considered them "easy targets."

Meanwhile:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was asked on WLS Radio’s Roe and Roeper Show Friday if he thought the crimes warranted hate crime status, “I think it is absolutely outrageous, it is a hate crime, and I would imagine the prosecutor will be very aggressive on this. There is no tolerance whether it’s white on black or black on white, there shouldn’t be any tolerance in general for that kind of problems.”

It's not really hate — is it? — if the idea is that this type of person won't fight back or is unlikely to be armed. It's a stereotype based on race, but it's not that you're hurting that person because you hate people in that group. But "hate crime" is not the statutory language. It's just a popular expression referring to the statute that provides for penalty enhancement when someone "intentionally selects" a victim based on race. 

Why is Elie Mystal so annoyed at the Stanford lawprof who wrote a book called "Is Marriage for White People?"?

I'm reading this blog post over at Above the Law because Instapundit linked to it.  Instapundit did one of those ultra-sleek posts shorn of all opinion: "ELIE MYSTAL has a question for Stanford." That points us to a question that is the post title — "Stanford Law School: Why Are Your Professors Writing Books That Sound Like They’ve Been Written By Bloggers?" — but the post isn't mainly a challenge to Stanford to do something about lawprofs writing books that are insufficiently larded with citation and sober rumination. Mystal's post is mainly about the specific content of a book written by Ralph Richard Banks and aimed at general readers and — it's pretty obvious — TV and radio talk shows. Want to talk about black people and marriage? Bring on Professor Banks. He'll say some provocative things in language that will charge up the audience.

Maybe Mystal is a little jealous:

Now, if I were a blogger looking to make a quick buck, that’s exactly the kind of book I’d write. In fact, look for my upcoming book, “Why White People Can Afford To Piss Away Time & Money in Law School, But Blacks Can’t.”

But Ralph Banks isn’t a blogger, he’s a Stanford Law professor. Shouldn’t we expect less sensationalized bullcrap from him?

Here's Ralph Banks, who is, like Mystal, a black male writer with an elite legal education, and he's writing a book about marriage and black people, and he's also a Stanford law professor, while Mystal is writing for a blog. Moreover, Banks — if we're to believe an advance review (the book's not out until September) — is arguing that black women can "shift the power balance" by marrying white men. Mystal states more than once that he is married to a black woman, but:

For what it’s worth, I have no problem whatsoever with interracial marriage...

So whether or not Professor Banks has a worthwhile point, my objection rests with the way it was stated. I do this every day. I know a sensational headline when I’m looking at one. I’m familiar with how one writes generally reasonable arguments for 90% of a piece interspersed with ten percent of barely coherent hyperbole. We live in a culture where getting heard over the white noise sometimes requires you to shout a little bit. I get that.

I just don’t see why we need that from Stanford Law School, and I don’t see why we need it on a topic where there has been so little top-notch scholarly work.... Couldn’t the Stanford Law professor give us something a little bit more than Is Marriage for White People? Couldn’t the SLS prof tell his publisher (who, dollar-to-donuts, is the one who came up with this title): “Come now, that’s dumb. After the initial shock value, people will just say I’m being dumb, and that’s not going to be good for sales.”

Look, it's a great title, and people are going to stop and pay attention — in part because of the title and in part because of Banks's status as a high-level lawprof. Now, maybe that feels unfair to Mystal, who toils as a blogger unassisted by lawprof status. (But Mystal didn't build his own blog traffic; he stepped up onto a writing-platform built by David Lat.) Maybe it also seems unfair that lawprof-bloggers get some initial attention as bloggers because they are lawprofs. (But the information superhighway is littered with little-read blogs written by lawprofs who thought lots of people would want to know what they had to say about this and that because they are lawprofs. It's not that easy!)

I think it's fine for lawprofs to speak to the general public about a variety of public issues. We need smart and interesting people contributing to the national dialogue. And some of these people are law professors. I wouldn't want to say to law professors — especially to the lawprof named Althouse — you need to crawl back into the stereotypical lawprof box and write books and articles that look more like something conventional people can glance at and say: Scholarship!

Lefty blogger loves the idea of restaurants refusing to serve people that their other customers express open hatred toward.

"Sounds like a good idea to me. I don’t generally consider myself a snob, but in this case I’ll make an exception — I’ll be happy to dine at an establishment that knows exactly which kind of undesirables should be kept out."

Swopa loves that a Madison restaurant asked Governor Scott Walker to leave when customers booed him. He/she links to a Madison blogger who deleted the name of the restaurant after the restaurant received threats. (Threats? Were they reported to the police?) Swopa notes that he edited his post to delete the name of the restaurant, but he leaves in his "via Howie Klein on Twitter" link, and the name of the restaurant is right there.

Idiot. Don't rely on Firedoglake to protect you. They care. They want to protect you. But they just can't quite pull off the protectiveness they'd love to give you.

And that's the problem with liberals. They care. They're here to help. They're here to help the people they've decided are the people who deserve to be helped. But they do a half-assed job of protecting even the people they care about.

And how about believing in principles that you are willing to follow at a high level of abstraction? You love the idea of restaurants letting the passions of their customers determine who ought to be seated (at least when they sympathize with those passions). What sprang into my head was: Ollie's Barbecue!

Ollie's Barbecue is a family owned restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, specializing in barbecued meats and homemade pies, with a seating capacity of 220 customers... The restaurant caters to a family and white-collar trade with a take-out service for Negroes....

Ah, but who remembers anything anymore? It's today that matters. The war dead are dead, and now their memorial is a handy place to tape your signs and back your table up against so all your stuff doesn't fall on the floor.

And who thinks about tomorrow? The state capitol is occupied right now and plastered with thousands of signs this week, and isn't that just great? You haven't give a moment's thought — have you? — to what free speech rights will apply to the next group that wants to appropriate the state capitol? Are you planning on advocating viewpoint discrimination to keep the signs you find loathsome off the walls?

No. I know. You have no plan. You haven't thought about it. Swopa began his post this way:

Sometimes, it’s good to leave detached, cerebral meta-analyses of politics aside and just get a taste of public opinion being expressed the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes! The whole point of principles is that you're supposed to follow them all the time — especially when you would find it most satisfying to violate them. Swopa's all: Let's not be "detached" and "cerebral" today when we're having such fun.

What children!

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some evidence that the story of the booing and ejectment was a hoax. Of course, nothing in my post depends on whether the incident really happened or not. I'm writing about the reaction to the incident, not the incident itself. If it is a hoax, I would like to get to the bottom of it. Did the owners of the restaurant seek to endear themselves to Madisonians with viral P.R. about their political faith? Or were employees appropriating their employer's reputation?

"Halle Berry may have chosen the wrong words but she makes the right point."

"It is important to read past her ugly custody case to have a larger conversation about race (one the baby's father apparently does not want to have). Her daughter will have to choose a racial identity, the way she had to choose a racial identity. In America, that means it will probably be chosen, at least in part, by the way people react to her. In America, her skin color (black or white) will be something that people use to define her. I applaud Halle Berry's courage, if not her choice of words. When she says, 'I believe in the one drop theory,' of course, she does not mean to endorse racism. But she does have the courage to do something so few Americans can: talk about race."

Either that or she's using whatever weapons she finds at hand as she fights for what she wants in her child custody battle.

"Setting high expectations for Madison’s often-struggling minority students is the driving force behind an all-male charter school Caire is proposing for the district."

Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire is one of the 5 Madisonians "to watch in 2012," according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

The school, to be called the Madison Preparatory Academy, would have longer school days, offer a college preparatory curriculum — and require students to wear uniforms.

As the proposal heads for preliminary approval from the School Board early this year and possible final approval in the fall, it already faces opposition from the teachers union, which opposes non-unionized charter schools, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, which opposes single-gender schools.

Why does the State Journal use the term "single-gender" instead of "single-sex" in this context? Anyway, I think the problem is making a special school for males and not having an equivalent one for females. But this isn't a case of training males for elite achievement (as it was in the Supreme Court case dealing with the Virginia Military Institute). Caire seems to be saying that males have a special problem that needs remediation. Actually, he seems to be saying black males have a special problem needing remediation:

Caire views the school as a key step toward building a stronger black middle class in Madison....

An underdeveloped black middle class in Madison means fewer positive role models for youth, Caire said, which partly explains why the city has disproportionately lower graduation rates and higher incarceration rates among minorities. 

But it's not racial discrimination that's being proposed. It's sex discrimination. In equal protection law, race discrimination must be justified — at least theoretically — meeting a higher standard than sex discrimination. But if the government interest to be served by sex discrimination is characterized as racial, does that make the argument for sex discrimination weaker or stronger?

Please discuss. I'll say more later.

"They were trying to show that my intention was to get Pigford defunded."

"And, I had never heard of Pigford, so for the last four and half months, all I’ve been doing is eating, breathing, sleeping Pigford, researching Pigford, finding whistleblowers who are hiding in plain sight who have been wanting to tell the story of how this was rigged."

"By the time this thing would reach the Supreme Court Obama's going to have amnesty. He's s going to have all these brand-new Democrat voters."

Rush Limbaugh rails against the federal court decision preliminarily enjoining the Arizona immigration law:

The judge is a Clinton appointee, Susan Bolton, and I remember, after it was reported or learned that she was a Clinton appointee, I remember everybody said, "Ah, but this woman, she's not a political judge. She's really not partisan judge. She's a fair judge." Oh, yeah, right. Right, right, right, right....

This judge has not ruled on the law. There is no racial profiling. We didn't make a [big] deal of it because we figure a judge is gonna look at the law, not the stupid media in making her decision. But she listened to the media. She had to ignore the high bar that was not met in staying the law. This underscores why Sonia Sotomayor should not be on the Supreme Court. This underscores why Elena Kagan should not be on the Supreme Court, because they are activists. They have no judicial temperament, judicial experience, they're not judges. Well, Sotomayor pretended to be one on TV, I guess, but she's not....

This is all reacting to the sudden news of the opinion, which he hasn't read. It's 36 pages long, and "there's no way that I'm going to be able to go through all 36 pages prior to the program ending, but I know what went on here":

[The judge has] bought the notion there was racial profiling and discrimination and all this happy horse manure that's part of the American left these days. So that's pretty much it. I guess the judge is saying it's not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don't know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to. But, she didn't. She's a leftist and she made an activist decision, not a judicial decision. 

So... Judge Bolton just looks at the hot-button issue and emotes without attending to the text that should govern her opinion... asserts Rush Limbaugh as he takes a glance at the news of the decision and let's his feelings flow.

To quote Rush, out of context, from the middle of that rant: "Nothing, nothing in the media is real.  There is nothing real.  Media is not real. [Political ideology] is not real. It's all spin; it's all fake; it's all lies."

"Of course race is involved. Because people don’t generally lose their minds and start acting like idiots in this country unless race is involved somehow…"

Elie Mystal takes on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

"Althouse ends up more or less agreeing with us, so of course we more or less agree with her."

Says James Taranto. He concludes:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, subject of the current national conversation about race, was necessary not because "we're all racists"--indeed, if we are, such a law would seem to be an exercise in futility--but because a racist doctrine dominated, and defined the laws of, a region of the country. If "racism" is just a universal human shortcoming, then what was the point of condemning Jim Crow?

Violent urges are universal (or nearly so), yet we outlaw all sorts of acts of violence. We don't pretend that because we've criminalized murder, assault, and rape that we've eradicated violent urges. By the same token, if we enact a law that prohibits various harmful actions that people might take based on racist thoughts,  we don't pretend that we've eradicated the thoughts. We've come together as a nation over the belief that certain actions are wrong, but we might still want to look into our own hearts and question how good we really are.

I can think of 2 reasons why we might want to do this, even if we feel quite sure we're far from the stereotypical ugly racist.

1. We may aspire to a higher morality than the conventional norm. I think of Jesus saying "Be perfect... as your heavenly Father is perfect."

2. We might be deluded about the positions and policies we believe are right. Perhaps there are some deep or repressed beliefs about race that underlie something we think will do good. For example, those who support affirmative action should want to make sure that they are not motivated by racial prejudices that they are in denial about. So should those who oppose it. Doubt yourself. Test yourself. Don't be complacent.

Did Obama's speechwriters write Calderon's speech?

That's what I thought when I heard this:

In Arizona, there is some racial profiling criteria in order to enforce the law that it's against any sense of human rights; and, of course, is provoking very disappointing, uh, things -- or very disappointing opinion -- in Mexico and around the world, even here in America.  So to introduce this kind of elements, especially racial profiling aspect that are attempting against what we consider human rights, it's the principle of discrimination which is against the values of this great nation.

I thought that before I heard Rush Limbaugh say that's what he thought. Read the whole thing. Don't miss the Wolf Blitzer interview.

What Rand Paul really said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rand Paul is coming under attack for things he said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race discrimination in privately owned restaurants and hotels. He's also being defended, of course, notably here, by Allahpundit:

I don’t like to go back-to-back on the same subject but a hot rumor hit Twitter as the last post was being published that Paul told NPR he would have voted against the 1964 CRA. (Much like certain Democrats who are still serving in the Senate did.) As you’ll see, it’s not true. The reporter, smelling blood, badgers him about it, but Paul never quite gives him a straight answer. And he qualifies his response with enough virtue — he opposes institutional racism, would have marched with MLK, likes a lot of what was in the CRA — that there’s really no wound inflicted here. His reservations about the law have to do not with the ends but with the means of federal compulsion; he wants business owners to serve everyone but clearly prefers using boycotts and local laws to pressure them. It’s not a question of being pro- or anti-discrimination, in other words, it’s a question of how federalism and civil-rights enforcement mesh. The left’s going to give him plenty of grief for that — expect questions soon about whether he would have voted to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment — but the “closet Klansman” narrative that NPR’s going for here is D.O.A.

It's true that Rand made many expressions of his opposition to race discrimination in what was a hearty effort to blunt the effect of what he was saying, but it is not true that his "reservations" were limited to federalism concerns. (As to federalism, there was an argument, rejected long ago by the Supreme Court, that the Constitution did not empower Congress to regulate in this area.)

Rand was also expressing the view that owners of private businesses have a right to decide whom they will serve. Such a right would not run counter to the 14th Amendment, because the 14th Amendment only protects individuals from the actions of the state and privately owned restaurants and hotels are not the state. If you want a legal requirement that these businesses treat people equally, you need to pass a statute, which is why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.  And that statute was susceptible to arguments it violated the right of the business owners to do what they wanted with their own property. When the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not only did it need to find an enumerated power for Congress to act, but it also had to deal with the argument that the Act violated the Due Process Clause. Rand's statement harkened back to both of those old arguments.

Look at what he said:

I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind....

I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

He likens private property rights to free speech rights. If you care about free speech rights, you defend even the people who say horrible things — Nazis, the KKK, etc. That's standard constitutional law doctrine. In Rand's view — and in the view of many libertarians — property rights work the same way. So you could have this horrible racist restauranteur who excluded black people, and the government would have to leave him alone, just as the government couldn't do anything about it if a white person had a dinner party at his house and only invited his white friends.

***

A few years ago, I was at a conference with libertarians, and I was confronted with exactly this point of view. I expressed my concern that they were putting an extreme and abstract idea above things that really matter in the world. I challenged them — in what I thought was a friendly conversation — to explain to me how I could know that their commitment to the extreme abstraction did not, in fact, have an origin in racism. Which came first, the proud defense of private property or the shameful prejudices that polite people don't admit to anymore?

For raising the subject, I was loudly denounced, both at the dinner table, and on the Reason Magazine website. As I said at the time:

I am struck -- you may think it is absurd for me to be suddenly struck by this -- but I am struck by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas. I'm used to the way lefties and liberals take themselves seriously and how deeply they believe. Me, I find true believers strange and -- if they have power -- frightening. 

I appreciate libertarians up to a point, but the extreme ones are missing something that is needed if you are to be trusted with power. I'm glad Rand Paul is on the scene, but I'm going to hold him to his own statements, and it is plain to me that Allahpundit has misunderstood or misrepresented what he said. I'm certainly not saying he's a racist, but he seems to support a legal position that would place racist private businesses beyond the power of anti-discrimination statutes.

UPDATE: Rand Paul goes on the Laura Ingraham show and, with the help of her very supportive questions, finally gets around to saying that if he were in Congress in 1964, he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act.  Here's audio of the entire segment. Here's a text summary.

UPDATE 2: Allahpundit responds to me:

Althouse’s point is that Paul opposes any government interference in how someone runs their business, which would be strong form laissez faire; I assumed, because he danced around NPR’s questions and because this was obviously about to become a major headache for him, that he was taking the more palatable, weaker form position that it’s more acceptable for state and local agencies to act against discrimination but that the feds should stay out. (As it turned out, he now says having the feds interfere is fine.) That’s why I brought federalism into it, and that’s why I thought the Fourteenth Amendment would eventually end up in the discussion. If Paul doesn’t want the feds meddling in private businesses to protect minority rights, does he at least support letting them meddle with state governments that refuse to do so?

"Meddle" in what way? Require the states to legislate? Under New York v. United States, that is more of a constitutional problem than directly regulating. Do you mean putting conditions on accepting federal funds? That could be done most easily. If you mean using §5 of the 14th Amendment, that shouldn't work, because the states are not violating rights by failing to control the choices private citizens that are not, in fact, rights violations. It's hard to believe Paul would support these things (even before he conceded that he'd vote for the CRA of 1964).

"A judge's race or gender makes for a dramatic difference in the outcome of cases they hear..."

The ABA Journal reports on 2 studies:

In federal racial harassment cases, one study found that plaintiffs lost just 54 percent of the time when the judge handling the case was an African-American. Yet plaintiffs lost 81 percent of the time when the judge was Hispanic, 79 percent when the judge was white, and 67 percent of the time when the judge was Asian American....

A second study, looked at 556 federal appellate cases involving allegations of sexual harassment or sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The finding: plaintiffs were at least twice as likely to win if a female judge was on the appellate panel....

More grist for the empathy/"wise Latina" conversation.

Black firefighters move to intervene in the Ricci v. DeStefano.

You may remember Ricci as the Supreme Court case won by white firefighters who lost out when New Haven canceled the results of a test that did not yield racially balanced results.