Where are fairness opinions filed

USRowing rejected fairness for female rowers of all ages and levels with the release of its updated Gender Identity Policy on December 1. We are a group of former Olympic rowers, and we are enraged that USRowing would adopt a policy that so blatantly discriminates against female athletes in rowing. The updated policy permits males, with or without testosterone suppression, to compete in girls' and women's events. Only at the collegiate and elite level has USRowing allowed any restrictions. At that level, male rowers competing in the women's category must comply with World Rowing's policy , which requires 12 months of continuous testosterone suppression at no greater than 5 nmol/L, twice the high end of the normal range for females. Science has unequivocally proven that testosterone suppression— even for years —does not erase the physiologic advantages that males have over females. Every cell has a sex which influences all aspects of the body's development. It is not … [Read more...] about USRowing Denies Fairness for Female Athletes

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is currently juggling several legal cases intended to prohibit biological male athletes from competing in female sports. ADF intervened to defend several laws in states across the country to protect women’s sports that are being challenged in court. “I am incredibly proud of our clients and their willingness to be a voice, not just to protect and defend themselves, but to defend future generations of female athletes, as well,” ADF senior counsel Christiana Kiefer told the Daily Caller News Foundation. A legal organization is gearing up to defend female athletes across the country as the debate over whether to allow transgender participation in women’s sports steamrolls ahead. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is currently juggling several legal cases defending female athletes who have personally competed against men who identify as women, ADF senior counsel Christiana Kiefer told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Each case intends to … [Read more...] about ‘Fair And Safe Competition’: How One Legal Group Is Leading The Charge To Protect Women’s Sports

A plea seeking a review of the judgement that upheld the Centre’s 2016 decision to demonetise Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 currency notes was filed in the Supreme Court on Sunday. A five-judge Constitution bench, in a 4:1 majority verdict, on January 2 had given its stamp of approval, saying the decision-making process was neither flawed nor hasty. The review plea was filed by lawyer ML Sharma, one of the 58 petitioners who had moved the top court challenging the demonetisation exercise announced on November 8, 2016. Sharma, in his review plea, contended that the bench did not consider his “written arguments” in its verdict on the batch of pleas which led to “serious injustice and miscarriage of justice”. “It is, therefore, most respectfully prayed that … may be pleased to: (i) Review the Judgment…,” it said. Observing that the scope of judicial review in matters of economic policy is ”narrower”, a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Justice S A Nazeer, since retired, had said … [Read more...] about Plea Seeking Review of Verdict on Demonetisation Filed in Supreme Court

For the 26th time in two years, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton recently filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Biden administration policy. The suit, which seeks to wipe out a new Labor Department rule about the investment of pension trust assets, wasn’t filed in Austin, the state capital, or in Dallas, where the Labor Department’s regional offices are, or anywhere else with a logical connection to the dispute. It was filed in Amarillo. Why Amarillo? By filing there, Mr. Paxton had a 100 percent chance of having the case assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019 and a former deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute, which frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court. “Forum shopping” has long been a problem in civil litigation. Clever lawyers use procedural rules to file in courts deemed most likely to be sympathetic to their claims. But what Mr. Paxton and other plaintiffs are … [Read more...] about Don’t Let Republican ‘Judge Shoppers’ Thwart the Will of Voters

I wrote both my columns this week on policing and democracy. My second column drew from a 2017 paper, “Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities” by the political scientists Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver. I tried, as much as I could, to summarize and explain the main beats of the article, but there was one important point I chose to omit and leave for the newsletter because it speaks to an idea I’ve tried to emphasize in my work at The Times, and I thought it deserved a little more time and attention than I would have been able to give in the column. Many people understand that race is “socially constructed.” Racial categories do not reflect biology as much as they are a product of historical contingencies and material realities. The idea of a singular “white” race comprising the whole of Europe is, for example, more or less the product of centuries of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonialism, imperialism and capitalist … [Read more...] about How We Construct and Reconstruct Race

On Wednesday, the city of Memphis remembered the life of Tyre Nichols, a young man who was beaten by at least five Memphis police officers and died three days later. Stories like this are terrible, they’re relentless, and they renew one of the most contentious debates in the nation: Are there deep and systemic problems with the American police? How we answer that question isn’t based solely on personal experience or even available data. It often reflects a massive partisan divide, one that reveals how we understand our relationships with the institutions we prize the most — and the least. Every year Gallup releases a survey that measures public confidence in a variety of American institutions, including the police. In 2022, no institution (aside from the presidency) reflected a greater partisan trust gap than the police. A full 67 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in the police, versus only 28 percent of Democrats. Why is that gap so large? While I try to avoid … [Read more...] about ‘Bad Apples’ or Systemic Issues?

A Honduran asylum-seeker living in Tennessee alleges in a federal lawsuit that the Diocese of Knoxville tried to sabotage a police investigation after she accused a priest of groping her during a grief counseling session following her husband’s death. Identified in court papers as Jane Doe, the mother of three alleges in the lawsuit filed on Nov. 10  that the diocese “obstructed law enforcement” and tried to intimidate her into “abandoning her cooperation with the criminal prosecution” of the Rev. Antony Devassey Punnackal. The lawsuit also states that Punnackal hired a private investigator to dig up the widow’s employment records, and she became a pariah in the Hispanic community of Gatlinburg after “agents” of the diocese began spreading false rumors about her. “The complaint speaks for itself,” the widow’s lawyer, Andrew Fels, told NBC News, when asked to elaborate. He is seeking $5 million in damages for his client. Punnackal, who was the pastor of St. Mary's Catholic … [Read more...] about Widow says she was groped by Catholic priest during grief counseling session

A Missouri man is facing execution on Tuesday for the 2004 killings of his girlfriend and her three children. Leonard Taylor, 58, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on February 7. Police officers found the bodies of Angela Rowe, her 10-year-old daughter Alexus Conley, 6-year-old daughter AcQreya Conley, and 5-year-old son Tyrese Conley. All four were found shot inside their home in Jennings, Missouri, on December 3, 2004, after Rowe's relatives asked police to go to her home as they had not heard from her for several days. Taylor, Rowe's live-in boyfriend, who had a criminal record for drug and fraud-related offenses, was arrested in Kentucky a few days later. He was convicted in 2008, but maintains he was thousands of miles away at the time of the killings. In January, Taylor's attorney Kent Gipson sought a hearing on his client's innocence claim under a provision in Missouri law that allows a prosecutor to file a motion asking for a hearing before a judge if there is … [Read more...] about Who Is Leonard Taylor? Missouri to execute man over 2004 murders

WASHINGTON — An extraordinary pair of orders by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Supreme Court is highlighting how the partisan tug of war has pervaded the state’s courts and, by extension, the nation’s. On Friday, the court moved to rehear two major voting rights cases that it had previously decided, one striking down a gerrymandered map of State Senate districts and another nullifying new voter identification requirements . Such rehearings by the court are exceedingly rare. In fact, North Carolina’s Supreme Court ordered as many rehearings on Friday as it has in the past three decades. What also made the rehearings exceptional was that the cases had been decided less than two months ago — by a court that, at the time, contained four Democratic and three Republican justices. The court that voted to rehear the cases has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, courtesy of the party’s sweep of state Supreme Court races in November. And the potential beneficiary of those reviews … [Read more...] about On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings

WASHINGTON, March 18 - Congressional leaders, concerned that many nonprofit hospitals are not providing enough charity care to justify their tax-exempt status, say they will set standards for the industry if it does not do so itself. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who had already been examining nonprofit groups like United Way and the American Red Cross, is broadening his focus to include nonprofit hospitals, with an eye to legislation that would clarify standards for their tax exemptions. Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, began investigating the financial practices of nonprofit hospitals last year. The commissioner of internal revenue, Mark W. Everson, said tax officials often found little difference between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals "in their operations, their attention to the benefit of the community or their levels of charity care." Huge … [Read more...] about Nonprofit Hospitals Face Scrutiny Over Practices