Search the Community

Washington (CNN)A divided Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to temporarily block a lower court order that had cleared the way for a transgender male high school student to use the boys' bathroom in a Virginia public school this fall. The ruling is a victory for the school board and a loss -- for now -- for Gavin Grimm, the student who won at the lower court level. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have left the lower court decision undisturbed. It took five justices to act, and Justice Stephen Breyer wrote separately to say that he concurred in the decision in part because granting the stay would "preserve the status quo" until the court has a chance to consider a petition for cert. "I vote to grant the application as a courtesy," Breyer wrote. "The order comes as something of a surprise given the current composition of the court," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law. "In the short term, this means the relationship between transgender identity and sex discrimination will be left in limbo until the Supreme Court resolves it one way or the other. But given that Justice Breyer's vote was only a courtesy, it's hard to see the court being able to settle this matter until a ninth justice is appointed," Vladeck said. The case comes as the issue of transgender policies have caused controversy across the country. Most notably, the Department of Justice is suing North Carolina over its law concerning transgender bathrooms. On Monday, a federal court heard a separate challenge to the law from the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. In court papers in the Virginia case, lawyers for the Gloucester County School Board asked the court to preserve the status quo and allow the school's policy to remain in effect once the school year commenced, while they asked the Supreme Court to take up an appeal of the lower court ruling. The school board said the policy was meant in part to protect the "basic expectations of bodily privacy of Gloucester County students." It stressed that in September, when the school year commences, Grimm would have access to three single-user restrooms as well as a restroom in the nurse's office. Grimm's lawyers say the policy violates an anti-discrimination law and told the court that it should allow the lower court order to remain in place. "No irreparable harm will occur" said Joshua Block, an ACLU lawyer, if Grimm "is allowed to use the boys' restroom while this court considers whether to grant certiorari." Block said that Grimm "is a boy and lives accordingly in all aspects of his life" but that "the sex assigned to him at birth was female." Grimm was originally allowed to use the boys' restroom, but after complaints from some parents, the school administered a new policy restricting restrooms to students based on their biological gender. His lawyers say that the policy violates Title IX, a federal law banning sex discrimination in schools. They say the law protects the rights of transgender students to use restrooms consistent with their gender identity. "Banishing transgender students from the restrooms used by their peers unquestionably interferes with their equal educational opportunity under Title IX," Block argued. Block later said the court's ruling would mean Grimm will be "stigmatized" for the upcoming school year. "We are disappointed that the court has issued a stay and that Gavin will have to begin another school year isolated from his peers and stigmatized by the Gloucester County school board just because he's a boy who is transgender," Block said in a statement. "We remain hopeful that Gavin will ultimately prevail." The National Center for Lesbian Rights, meanwhile, called Wednesday's ruling "disappointing" but were encouraged that it was temporary. "Especially in light of Justice Breyer's statement that his vote for a stay was a mere 'courtesy' to preserve the status quo while the court considers whether to review the decision, this should not be taken as any sign of where a majority of the court is leaning on the substantive question of whether Title IX protects transgender students," the group said in a statement. The Gloucester County School Board issued a brief statement welcoming the court's decision. "The school board welcomes the Supreme Court's decision as the new school year approaches. The board continues to believe that its resolution of this complex matter fully considered the interests of all students and parents in the Gloucester County school system," the statement said.

So the justices are supposed to recuse themselves in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned. But the individual justice is the only one that can make that decision Meet the woman who got a Supreme Court justice tattooed on her arm Supreme Court justice has heart

Washington (CNN)In a dramatic ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday threw out a Texas abortion access law in a victory to supporters of abortion rights who argued it would have shuttered all but a handful of clinics in the state. The 5-3 ruling is the most significant decision from the Supreme Court on abortion in two decades and could serve to deter other states from passing so-called "clinic shutdown" laws. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion, which was joined in full by Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the swing vote on the abortion issue. "There was no significant health-related problem that the new law helped to cure," Breyer wrote. "We agree with the District Court that the surgical-center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an "undue burden" on their constitutional right to do so." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Breyer's opinion and wrote a brief concurring opinion, which focused on what she called women in "desperate circumstances." "When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners, faute de mieux, at great risk to their health and safety." The ruling will have major reverberations on the presidential election, where the fate of the Supreme Court has been front-and-center after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. Senate Republicans have refused to act on President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, leaving the court with eight justices. Hillary Clinton immediately praised the ruling. "SCOTUS's decision is a victory for women in Texas and across America. Safe abortion should be a right—not just on paper, but in reality. -H" Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote dissents. Thomas wrote a bitter dissent for himself, accusing the court of eroding the Constitution. "The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while disfavoring many of the rights actually enumerated in the Constitution," Thomas wrote. "But our Constitution renounces the notion that some constitutional rights are more equal than others. ... A law either infringes a constitutional right, or not; there is no room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees of encroachment. Unless the Court abides by one set of rules to adjudicate constitutional rights, it will continue reducing constitutional law to policy-driven value judgments until the last shreds of its legitimacy disappear." There were two provisions of the law at issue. The first said that doctors have to have local admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, the second says that the clinics have to upgrade their facilities to hospital-like standards. Critics say if the 2013 law, known as H.B. 2, is allowed to go into effect it could shutter all but a handful of clinics in a state with 5.4 million women of reproductive age. Texas countered that the law was passed in response to the Kermit Gosnell scandal. The Pennsylvania man was convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder for killing babies that were born alive in his clinic. State Solicitor General Scott Keller argued in court papers that if the court were to uphold the law, an abortion clinic "will remain open in each area where one will close, meaning that over 90% of Texas women of reproductive age will live within 150 miles of an open abortion clinic." A federal appeals court upheld the Texas law in 2015, and last spring a majority of the Supreme Court voted to stay that ruling pending appeal. The four conservative justices at the time: Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, publicly noted that they would have denied the stay. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/27/politics/supreme-court-abortion-texas/index.html