African American Policy ForumVarmennettu tili

Kimberlé Crenshaw (@sandylocks) points out that when Trump bragged about how many judicial vacancies there were when he took office, he failed to mention that those judicial vacancies existed because Mitch McConnell and the GOP refused to confirm President Obama's appointees.

"The Republicans base has cared much more about judges than the Democratic base. In 2016, exit polls showed that the #1 reason people gave for voting Trump was the Supreme Court." -Dean Chemerinsky explains why judicial politics has often been asymmetrical. #UnderTheBlacklight

.@NAACP_LDF director-counsel @Sifill_LDF talks about Justice Ginsburg's dissents in Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Shelby County v. Holder. In each dissent, Justice Ginsburg carefully goes through the facts and masterfully applies the facts to the law.

"We don't have any civil rights lawyers left on the bench ... I think we should reimagine what the Court should look like." -@Sifill_LDF on the current makeup of the Supreme Court

"Almost all of the justice on the Supreme Court are former federal appellate judges. ... Most of them have backgrounds as former prosecutors. ... That's a very skewed lens for a profession that actually is quite broad." As Sherrilyn Ifill notes, this is deeply problematic.

When almost every Supreme Court justice has a background in prosecution as opposed to civil rights or criminal defense, their understanding of the world, of the law, and of all the cases before them are necessarily going to be different from ours. #UnderTheBlacklight

Devon Carbado, a professor at @UCLA_Law, disusses Justice Ginsburg in Florida v. J.L., where she held that reasonable suspicion doesn't mean you get to stop people based on an anonymous tip that there's a Black man out there in a plaid shirt.

Prof. Crenshaw explains that we need to recognize how racial advantages are embedded in systems that distribute social opportunities and try to interrupt those processes. Yet working toward greater equity is exactly what President Trump would call "reverse racism."