On April 23, 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in Department of Commerce v. New York, No. 18-966.  The argument focused on three main issues: (1) whether the District Court erred in enjoining the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce from reinstating a question about citizenship to the 2020 decennial census on the ground that the secretary’s decision violated the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. 701 et seq; (2) whether, in an action seeking to set aside agency action under the APA, a district court may order discovery outside the administrative record to probe the mental processes of the agency decisionmaker — including by compelling the testimony of high-ranking executive branch officials — without a strong showing that the decisionmaker disbelieved the objective reasons in the administrative record, irreversibly prejudged the issue, or acted on a legally forbidden basis; and (3) whether the Secretary’s decision to add a citizenship question to the decennial census violated the enumeration clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Continue Reading New Developments in Supreme Court 2020 Census Case

On January 7, 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari in Ferguson-Florissant School District v. Missouri Conference of NAACP.  This case involves the Ferguson-Florissant School District (“FFSD”), a St. Louis area school district created after a 1975 desegregation order required the original FFSD to annex two neighboring school districts “to achieve a meaningful desegregation” within one unified district. United States v. Missouri, 515 F.2d 1365, 1366 (8th Cir. 1975) (en banc).

This lawsuit challenged FFSD’s method of electing school board members. The suit alleged that the at-large, popular vote, system, in which people only vote once for a candidate, was racially biased against African-American candidates.  This lawsuit was originally filed in 2014, when six of the seven school board members were Caucasian, even though about four-fifths of FFSD’s student population was African-American and approximately fifty percent of its voting age population was African-American.
Continue Reading U.S. Supreme Court Declines Review of Ferguson-Florissant School District v. Missouri Conference of NAACP

In light of ever-increasing use (and abuse) of social media, school district personnel must be mindful of the rights and responsibilities—of students and of the school districts themselves—that come with this technology.

Interested in learning more about these rights and responsibilities?  If you are a Husch Blackwell client or a member of the Council of the Great City Schools, join us next Tuesday, May 22, at 2:30 Eastern Daylight Time for a complimentary continuing legal education webinar.  Click here to register.
Continue Reading Student Use of Social Media: Rights and Responsibilities