Case

Author(s):  
Charles W. Eagles

With the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Loewen and Sallis, joined by a dozen other plaintiffs, sued the state in federal court. Loewen v. Turnipseed sought to force approval of the textbook. Attorneys Melvyn Leventhal and later Frank Parker with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law fought the case for four years through endless delays, depositions, motions, and negotiations. Peter Stockett represented the state in Judge Orma R. Smith’s court.

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
K.N. Golikov ◽  

The subject of this article is the problems of the nature, essence and purpose of prosecutorial activity. The purpose of the article is to study and justify the role of the human rights function in prosecutorial activities in the concept of a modern legal state. At the heart of prosecutorial activity is the implementation of the main function of the Prosecutor’s office – its rights and freedoms, their protection. This means that any type (branch) of Prosecutor's supervision is permeated with human rights content in relation to a citizen, society, or the state. This is confirmed by the fact that the Federal law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation” establishes an independent type of Prosecutor's supervision-supervision over the observance of human and civil rights and freedoms. It is argued that the legislation enshrines the human rights activities of the Prosecutor's office as its most important function. It is proposed to add this to the Law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation”.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasey Hendricks

At their most basic level taxes carry, in the words of Schumpeter ([1918] 1991), “the thunder of history” (p. 101). They say something about the ever-changing structures of social, economic, and political life. Taxes offer a blueprint, in both symbolic and concrete terms, for uncovering the most fundamental arrangements in society – stratification included. The historical retellings captured within these data highlight the politics of taxation in Alabama from 1856 to 1901, including conflicts over whom money is expended upon as well as struggles over who carries their fair share of the tax burden. The selected timeline overlaps with the formation of five of six constitutions adopted in the State of Alabama, including 1861, 1865, 1868, 1875, and 1901. Having these years as the focal point makes for an especially meaningful case study, given how much these constitutional formations made the state a site for much political debate. These data contain 5,121 pages of periodicals from newspapers throughout the state, including: Alabama Sentinel, Alabama State Intelligencer, Alabama State Journal, Athens Herald, Daily Alabama Journal, Daily Confederation, Elyton Herald, Mobile Daily Tribune, Mobile Tribune, Mobile Weekly Tribune, Morning Herald, Nationalist, New Era, Observer, Tuscaloosa Observer, Tuskegee News, Universalist Herald, and Wilcox News and Pacificator. The contemporary relevance of these historical debates manifests in Alabama’s current constitution which was adopted in 1901. This constitution departs from well-established conventions of treating the document as a legal framework that specifies a general role of governance but is firm enough to protect the civil rights and liberties of the population. Instead, it stands more as a legislative document, or procedural straightjacket, that preempts through statutory material what regulatory action is possible by the state. These barriers included a refusal to establish a state board of education and enact a tax structure for local education in addition to debt and tax limitations that constrained government capacity more broadly. Prohibitive features like these are among the reasons that, by 2020, the 1901 Constitution has been amended nearly 1,000 times since its adoption. However, similar procedural barriers have been duplicated across the U.S. since (e.g., California’s Proposition 13 of 1978). Reference: Schumpeter, Joseph. [1918] 1991. “The Crisis of the Tax State.” Pp. 99-140 in The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, edited by Richard Swedberg. Princeton University Press.


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.


1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Mark Voss-Hubbard

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.


Author(s):  
Tran Quoc Viet

Ensuring civil rights is the responsibility of the State. This research aims to define the policy implications for tectonic Government to fulfill the responsibility to ensure the civil rights in Vietnam today. By summarizing some of the recent prominent results of the Vietnamese Government, the article provides the policy implications in the fields of politics, economy, culture-society, legal, international cooperation. The final goal of these policies is bring the satisfaction and happiness to people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-111
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Sizov

In this article the author considers ensuring the personal security of a convicted person who is in prison as a necessary condition for full, comprehensive observance and enforcement of human and civil rights and freedoms. The author analyzes the concept of “personal security of convicts”, as well as examines the legal framework governing this activity. At present, issues of ensuring the personal safety of prisoners in places of deprivation of liberty are becoming increasingly relevant, since crime in institutions of the penal system is one of the most dangerous criminogenic factors. Currently, in places of isolation there is a risk of committing illegal acts on the part of the convicts themselves, as well as on the part of other persons who visit such institutions for various reasons. The author concludes that convicts’ security in correctional institutions is a multidimensional activity and contains many factors. Security in correctional institutions is provided by the employees with mandatory interaction with other law enforcement and government agencies. In order for the state, represented by institutions and bodies of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia, to perform its direct duty to ensure the safety of convicts, it is necessary: constant and enhanced supervision of these persons; strict observance by convicts of the established rules in correctional institutions, the procedure for applying incentives and penalties to them; conducting educational activities; transferring convicts to a safe place, etc. All these measures are aimed exclusively at ensuring human and civil rights and freedoms in places of detention, which in turn is an additional factor that has a positive impact on the development of the state and society.


Lex Russica ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 148-160
Author(s):  
I. G. Skorokhod

According to the author of the paper, the head of state is not a position, not a title, not any state body, but the function of the President of the Republic of Belarus, along with the function of the guarantor of the Constitution, human and civil rights and freedoms. The function of the head of state is unchanged and is due to his position in the system of state authorities. This function manifests the nature and essence of the institution of the presidency, which cannot be reduced to specific actions or practices, therefore, it is implemented through the exercise of powers in various organizational forms. In this regard, the concept of “president”, unlike “head of state”, is not static, but dynamic, since the list of rights and duties of the President of the Republic of Belarus is open.Powers are unambiguous, substantive rights and duties of the President, legitimized from the functions and expressed in various organizational forms of his activities. At the same time, the characteristics of the President’s powers can only show the external side of his activities. The powers of the President, in contrast to the functions, are a variable value. The President through representative, legitimation, arbitration, control, rulemaking, personnel, integration, symbolist and ceremonial state powers carries out the function of the head of state.The function of the head of state is the superiority and precedence of the President over all state officials. In accordance with it, the idea of the Republic of Belarus is personified. This function allows the President of the Republic of Belarus to be the main public representative and act on behalf of the Belarusian state both within it and in international relations. This is the result of the state obtaining the status of a legitimate state, the continuity and interaction of state authorities, mediation between them. The constitutional function of the head of state makes it necessary for the President to have instruments of power-state bodies operating within this function.


Author(s):  
T. I. Otcheskaya

The article is devoted to topical issues of protection of human and civil rights and freedoms by an important state body — the prosecutor’s offi ce in two states — the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The author investigated the issue of the formation of prosecutorial supervision in the European space in the mechanism of statehood on the example of the Russian Federation and in the Asian space on the example of the People’s Republic of China.At the same time, the approaches of the two states to the protection of human rights at the constitutional level, which are regulated by the Constitution of the PRC and the Constitution of the Russian Federation, have been studied. The achievements of the Russian prosecutor’s offi ce in protecting human and civil rights and freedoms, which are the responsibility of the state, including on issues of observance of the labor rights of citizens, the right of citizens to protect life and health, are consecrated.The state program of action in the fi eld of human rights adopted by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China has also been studied in detail. Achievements in the social sphere are shown, which are provided not only by the state, but also by the prosecutor’s offi ce. The approaches of legal science in the two states are consecrated not only in the regulation of human and civil rights and freedoms, but also in their provision.Based on the material studied, the author concluded that it is possible to use the positive experience of Russia and China, mutually in both states, in order to ensure the protection of human and civil rights and freedoms in each of them.


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