EJS has long wanted to engage in the next level of overturning the Intent Doctrine. Finding just the right Director of Law and Policy was critical to achieving this goal. And Reggie is the perfect fit.

Reggie is currently a senior staff counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s Racial Justice Program. An attorney with the ACLU since 1995, he helped pioneer legal challenges to racial profiling practices nationwide and is the ACLU’s chief litigator in challenges to racial profiling, leading national litigation efforts and consulting with ACLU state affiliates and others in cases of “driving while black or brown,” airport profiling, and profiling related to the war on terror.

Shuford’s advocacy to promote affirmative action includes leading recent efforts in Missouri and Oklahoma to defeat anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, similar to California’s Prop. 209. Those initiatives were also sponsored by Ward Connerly and his supporters.

His docket has also included cases involving educational adequacy and equity, the school to prison pipeline, and the right to counsel for indigents. He also has been involved in advocacy against racism in the use of the death penalty.

Since September 11, 2001, working with colleagues around the country, he has filed a half dozen landmark lawsuits against major airlines alleging racial discrimination, as well as a nationwide challenge to the Transportation Security Administration’s management of the No-Fly List.

He has authored numerous petitions and briefs for cases that were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with matters of discrimination, the Equal Protection Clause and First and Fourth Amendment rights. He has published articles related to racial profiling, affirmative action, and violence in the African American community.

Reggie also teaches and speaks regularly around the country and internationally, including Moscow, Geneva, and Canada, on issues of racial justice, profiling, discrimination, national security, and other topics, and has appeared on numerous television programs, including CNN’s Burden of Proof and Talk Back Live, ABC’s 20/20, Court TV’s Pros and Cons and Crier Today, NBC’s Nightly News and Dateline, an MTV documentary, True Life: I Am Driving While Black, and was featured in Leading the Way: The History of Black Lawyers and Judges in America Throughout the Twentieth Century, on Court TV.

He has been interviewed on various radio and TV programs, including National Public Radio and MSNBC, and has been quoted in major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and the Guardian. In addition to his litigation responsibilities, Shuford is the ACLU’s Recruitment and Retention Officer for attorneys of color on the national legal staff.

Prior to the ACLU, Reggie worked in private practice in Raleigh, N.C., with the firm Richard Schwartz & Associates, specializing in education law. Just after graduating law school, he clerked with the Hon. Henry E. Frye of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law, in Chapel Hill, where he was his graduating class president. He is a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School for the 2009-10 academic year and the recent recipient of the University of North Carolina School of Law’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.

We’re elated that Reggie’s joining the EJS team and hope that you have a chance to meet him (or see him again) after he joins us in mid-May.

The Pacific Legal Foundation continues its assault on equal opportunity and fairness by attacking the California state Department of Justice’s brief to the California Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Prop. 209 (“AG Takes Fire on Prop 209,” May 11).

The Foundation employs hyperbole to counter the arguments posed by the Attorney General, when in fact his letter brief only outlined the specific circumstances when article I, section 31 of the California Constitution (Prop. 209) would be misaligned with the protections afforded by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Attorney General was correct in questioning whether Prop. 209 serves a compelling governmental interest, saying in his letter that “there appears to be no factual basis to support a governmental interest in denying preferences that are permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

“Ironically,” continued the letter brief in Coral Construction Inc. v. City and County of San Francisco, S152934, “by effectively disadvantaging racial minorities and women in the political process, without an evident compelling governmental reason for doing so, section 31 seems to accomplish the very evil it purported to eliminate, viz. racial and gender discrimination.”

We believe that Prop. 209 is invalid on its face, and that this was clear from the moment it was passed. But the experience of California since the proposition’s passage demonstrates even more clearly how the measure has distorted the political process by placing remedial legislation out of the reach of minorities and women, and the devastating effect that this has had on California as a whole.

Prop. 209 Created More Barriers to Opportunity

In the public contracting arena, minority- and women-owned businesses have been decimated by Prop. 209. Without the ability to appeal to their local or state representatives to enact legislation to remediate demonstrated discrimination and exclusion, minority- and women-owned businesses have seen a return to the “old boys network” where majority-owned firms monopolize virtually all of the contracting work and often do not even allow minority- and women-owned firms to compete for contracting opportunities.

A comprehensive study of the California Department of Transportation’s contracting showed that after passage of Proposition 209, minority businesses experienced a greater than 50 percent reduction of total awards and contracts on Caltrans projects, translating into millions of dollars in lost revenues.

Two-thirds of the certified transportation construction minority businesses that existed in California in 1996 are out of business. Women-owned businesses have been similarly adversely affected, experiencing a 40 percent decline in Caltrans contract dollars over the past decade.

Prop. 209 devastated other arenas as well. The repeal of inclusive admissions policies in the University of California system has led to dramatic decreases in under-represented minority student enrollment, particularly at the flagship campuses of UC Berkeley and UCLA. In the fall of 2006, the freshman class at UCLA had only 96 African-American students, the lowest number since the early 1970s.

The situation at the State’s graduate schools is equally bleak. Entering Black law students at Berkeley, Davis and UCLA in 2005 comprised less than three percent of the entering class, far below their enrollment levels in 1970 (let alone in the early 1990s). Latino enrollment at these law schools likewise dropped by nearly 50 percent in the wake of Prop. 209. At the UC medical schools, Prop. 209 led to a 43 percent drop in underrepresented minority enrollment between 1995-1996 and 2001-2002.

These numbers are troubling on many different levels. For individual minority students, they mean fewer educational opportunities overall and increased feelings of isolation for those who find themselves in non-diverse educational settings. On a broader level, these declines mean that many UC campuses are no longer even close to reflective of California as a whole. This in turn undermines one of the primary missions of the taxpayer-funded UC system – to train the state’s future leaders.

Prop. 209 Violates Equal Protection Principles

Under the precedent that the U.S. Supreme Court set forth in Washington v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 and Hunter v. Erickson, Prop. 209 clearly violates federal equal protection principles by making beneficial race- and gender-based legislation more difficult to enact than similar legislation benefiting other groups.

Whereas, for example, disabled individuals or veterans or other groups may all petition their local government to enact laws to even out the playing field, minorities and women in California cannot. Their only recourse to achieve such legislation is to go to “the most inaccessible political level” and to seek a state constitutional amendment overturning Proposition 209.

Prop. 209 thus unquestionably reallocates political power in a manner that operates to the disadvantage of minorities and women: precisely the type of “political structure” distortion that the U.S. Supreme Court has held violates federal equal protection principles.

The real-world impact of Prop. 209 ‘s distortion of equal protection principles is profound and is felt every day in neighborhoods and communities throughout California. These decreases in opportunity highlight how severely Prop. 209 has skewed the political structure of the State at a time when California itself is becoming increasingly diverse.

Attorney General Jerry Brown’s brief illuminates for the Supreme Court a sound legal foundation for eliminating Prop. 209, which has pushed disadvantaged groups farther away from equal opportunity.

Dennis Herrera is city attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, which is the appellant in the Coral Construction case. Eva Paterson is co-founder and president of the Equal Justice Society, which joined an amicus curiae brief in the case. Oren Sellstrom is associate director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Coalition for Economic Equity.

California State Attorney General Jerry Brown today filed a brief (PDF) with the state Supreme Court today opining that article 1, section 31 of the California Constitution (Prop. 209) is unconstitutional as applied in certain circumstances.

The letter brief was filed in response to the Supreme Court’s request for an opinion regarding Coral Construction v. City and County of San Francisco, a case pending before the Court concerning whether San Francisco’s attempt to remedy longstanding exclusion of minority- and women-owned businesses in its public contracting violates article I, section 31.

The letter stated: “To the extent that the prohibitions against race- and gender-based discrimination in article I, section 31 of the California Constitution (hereafter referred to as section 31) are aligned with the prohibitions enforced under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, section 31 is constitutional.

“However, to the extent that section 31 is interpreted more broadly to bar race- or gender-conscious programs that would be permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment, it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution, pursuant to Washington v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (1982) 458 U.S. 457 (Seattle) and Hunter v. Erickson (1969) 393 U.S. 385 (Hunter). To that extent, section 31 would create an unequal political structure based on race and gender that is not narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest.”

“It is unclear precisely what governmental interest section 31 was intended to serve,” the letter also stated. “If it is the interest in protecting all Californians from discrimination based on race or gender, that is concededly a compelling governmental interest. However, there appears to be no factual basis to support a governmental interest in denying preferences that are permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Ironically, by effectively disadvantaging racial minorities and women in the political process, without an evident compelling governmental reason for doing so, section 31 seems to accomplish the very evil it purported to eliminate, viz. racial and gender discrimination.”

The Equal Justice Society and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, on behalf of a coalition of more than 60 organizations and individuals advocating against the constitutionality of Prop. 209, applaud Attorney General Jerry Brown for his position on this issue.

We will continue to argue that the state Supreme Court should take this opportunity to strike down Prop. 209, an initiative responsible for much harm to communities of color, women and to California as a whole.

Download the Attorney General’s letter

]]> http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/2009/04/calif-attorney-general-says-prop-209-unconstitutional/feed/ 1 http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/2009/03/calif-appellate-court-upholds-promoting-diversity-in-schools/ http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/2009/03/calif-appellate-court-upholds-promoting-diversity-in-schools/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:17:53 +0000 Sara Jackson http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/?p=614 Yesterday marked an important victory for advocates of school diversity and equal opportunity. A California Court of Appeals ruled that Berkeley Unified School District’s policy of taking neighborhood demographics into account when making school assignments is not discriminatory as alleged by challengers.

The Court concluded that the District’s plan “does not show partiality, prejudice or preference to any student on the basis of that student’s race,” and that “the particular policy challenged here…is not discriminatory.” Therefore, the plan does not violate Proposition 209, California’s anti-affirmative action initiative passed in 1996.

In arriving at its decision, the court invoked the continuing legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, and affirmed the ability of school districts to develop and implement affirmative policies that foster social diversity and inclusion in their schools.

EJS lauds the Court’s decision, and we offer our congratulations and gratitude to the allies whose skillful and tireless advocacy contributed to this momentous victory – in particular, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and the ACLU of Northern & Southern California. This collaboration is an important testament to the value and continued pursuit of racial diversity and educational equality in our schools.

To read the full court decision:
http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/berkley_district/berkeley_decision.pdf

For additional information and coverage:

http://www.naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article=1382

http://www.aclunc.org/news/press_releases/appellate_court_upholds_berkeley_unified_school_districts_voluntary_desegregation_plan.shtml

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/18/BAO716I7H4.DTL