A legal watchdog located in Asheville, NC filed two civil rights complaints this week for discriminating against students based on skin color.
Splits were evident among 14 judges of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, as they held a rare “en banc” hearing Thursday in a case involving North Carolina State Health Plan coverage for treatment sought by transgender people.
A House bill requiring North Carolina public schools to teach students a unit on the Civil Rights Movement has found widespread bipartisan support among state legislators.
The U.S. solicitor general will take part in oral arguments next month in a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with admissions policies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The nation’s highest court announced Friday that oral arguments on Oct. 31 will last 90 minutes. That’s 30 minutes longer than the time allotment originally announced.
A filing this month in the U.S. Supreme Court accuses University of North Carolina leaders of making the same types of arguments that segregationists made against the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education. The brief from Students for Fair Admissions marks the latest salvo in that group’s battle against UNC’s race-based admissions policy. The nation’s highest court will hear oral arguments in the case on Oct. 31.
House Bill 514, which would allow four cities in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to create and run their own charter schools, passed its initial vote in the Senate, 30-20. The bill will remain on the Senate calendar for Monday, June 4, for final approval. Then it will go to the House, which must approve the...
A bill allowing a few towns to operate their own charter schools is closer to becoming law. The Senate education and rules committees passed House Bill 514 on Wednesday, May 30, but not without criticism. H.B. 514 would allow four Mecklenburg County towns — Mint Hill, Matthews, Cornelius, and Huntersville — to run charter schools...
RALEIGH — Reporting about U.S. Supreme Court debates often revolves around disagreements between liberal and conservative voting blocs. But Damon Root, senior editor at Reason magazine and Reason.com, says most debates actually involve competing concepts of judicial activism and judicial restraint. Root has written a book on the topic titled Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. He discussed his work with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio.
RALEIGH — The N.C. Supreme Court gave a boost to school choice efforts on Thursday by declaring that the state’s fledgling Opportunity Scholarships Program met constitutional muster. The state’s highest court was split, with its four Republicans voting to reverse an August 2014 ruling by Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood. The high court’s three Democrats wanted to uphold Hobgood’s decision.
DURHAM — The Rev. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP and initiator of the Moral Monday protests, continued his attack Tuesday on what he called “a monster voter suppression bill” and likened efforts to award Opportunity Scholarships to children from low-income families to segregationist actions of the 1950s and 1960s.
RALEIGH — In Kansas, the plaintiff was Montoy. In Connecticut, it was Sheff, and Brigham filed the complaint in Vermont. The Leandro lawsuit, in which the state Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina has a constitutional obligation to adequately fund education in its poorer counties, has had sibling cases in 44 other states. That is because almost every state in the union has a constitutional provision similar to North Carolina’s, which promises a “sound and basic education” for all its residents. All but five states have had litigation regarding their funding of K-12 education.
