Recently in Civil Rights Law Category

The California Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the names of police officers involved in shootings in the line of duty are exempt from disclosure under the California Public Records Act (CPRA), reports Metropolitan News-Enterprise.

A California appellate court ruled in February that the officers’ names were not exempt from the CPRA. The California Supreme Court judges unanimously agreed to hear the police identity disclosure case this week.

A Northern California federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. For California's same-sex couples, however, the ruling will not provide immediate relief.

Karen Golinski, a staff attorney for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sued the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to obtain health insurance benefits for her spouse, Amy Cunninghis. While same-sex marriages are still on hold in California pending the outcome of further appeals in the state's Proposition 8 battle, Golinski and Cunninghis were legally married during the brief period in 2008 when the state permitted same-sex marriages.

While most Court-watchers are waiting for a Supreme Court announcement regarding a grant or denial of cert in Fisher v. Texas, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is taking up the university affirmative action issue on its own. Monday, the court heard arguments in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. Brown, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 209.

Proposition 209 is the 1996 voter initiative that banned racial, ethnic and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting. Both the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have previously upheld the law, reports the Huffington Post, but plaintiffs claim that the court should reconsider its position in light of the Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling that upheld race-based admissions at the University of Michigan Law School.

Today we have a case waged by five orca whales — Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka and Ulises — through their Next Friends, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), against Sea World. Proving that Justice isn’t blind to plaintiffs of the water-based mammal variety, a federal court dismissed the claim this week with prejudice.

PETA and the whales claimed that Sea World violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibitions against slavery and involuntary servitude by capturing the plaintiffs, and forcing them to live in grotesquely unnatural conditions and perform tricks. Sea World argued that whales aren’t people.

Okay, so it was a little more complicated than that.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision today in Perry v. Brown did not say that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to wed, (like Judge Vaughn Walker's previous ruling in the case), nor did it immediately lift the California Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban.

Instead, Judge Stephen Reinhardt's narrowly-tailored decision relied on Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's reasoning in the 1996 case, Romer v. Evans, to find that, after the gay community won marriage equality, a law rescinding that right was unconstitutional.

So why Romer v. Evans? And why no constitutional right to marriage equality? Perhaps because Judge Reinhardt was trying to keep this case out of the Supreme Court.

The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Citizens Redistricting Commission's new State Senate maps on Friday. The Court's decision means that Democrats will likely secure a two-third majority in the State Senate come fall, which would allow them to pass tax bills without Republican cooperation, reports The Sacramento Bee.

The Citizens Redistricting Commission -- a new body created through a 2008 ballot measure to adjust voting districts after the decadal census -- released new voting district maps in August 2011. Republicans challenged the implementation of the senate and congressional maps on constitutional and statutory grounds, and lost.

California's Second Appellate District Court ruled today that parents can request records involving a school district's investigation and reprimand of one of its teacher under the California Public Records Act (CPRA).

In the case, Marken v. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, the teacher, Ari Marken, attempted to enjoin the release of the records, arguing that the disclosure of his personnel records was not authorized under the CPRA and would violate his constitutional and statutory rights of privacy.

If you’ve been anywhere a television, newspaper, or computer in the last five days, you’ve most likely seen images of a UC Davis campus police officer pepper-spraying a line of peaceful protesters on November 18.

Many people are outraged by what they believe is the use of excessive force against peaceful protesters, and question whether the officer would be protected by qualified immunity. Others are simply debating whether pepper spray is “a food product, essentially.”

The California Supreme Court ruled today that individual citizens have the right to defend ballot initiatives when the public officials refuse to do so.

In the decision, the court decided that California Proposition 8 proponent ProtectMarriage has standing to challenge a federal judge's ruling that struck down the initiative in 2010.

ProtectMarriage, a conservative coalition that sponsored the 2008 ballot proposition restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after Gov. Jerry Brown and Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris refused to appeal Judge Vaughn Walker's 2010 decision invalidating the initiative.

California's Second Appellate District ruled this week that a suspect's reluctance to leave his car does not trigger probable cause for a warrantless search.

Officers Currie and Prodigalidad stopped Vernon Evans after they observed him commit traffic violations. They claimed that Evans appeared nervous. That nervousness, and the fact that the stop occurred at night in gang territory, prompted Currie to ask Evans to step out of the car.