Civil rights and access to justice advocates faced mounting pressure in 2025, as President Donald Trump's return to office drove aggressive immigration enforcement, deep cuts to criminal justice funding, renewed Supreme Court scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act, and a steep increase in executions.
Civil rights and access to justice advocates faced mounting pressure in 2025, as President Donald Trump's return to office drove aggressive immigration enforcement, deep cuts to criminal justice funding, renewed Supreme Court scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act, and a steep increase in executions.
The use of artificial intelligence in hiring practices is among the areas targeted by a sweeping new mandate enacted by New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights meant to shore up protections against discrimination.
The Ninth Circuit has held that police officers in Washington state could have violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a man who died in their custody during a suspected drug overdose, finding that their alleged use of force would be excessive under federal law if proven.
A West Virginia man sentenced to more than two years in federal prison for illegal possession of a firearm should not have been searched during a 2023 traffic stop, a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel ruled Thursday, finding that a gun found on him should have been suppressed.
The NCAA and a New York state university argue they did not violate New York state's antidiscrimination law by not allowing a transgender sprinter to compete in a women's track event, telling a state court that she could have still participated in the race if she had been willing to run in the male category.
Alabama on Wednesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to let the state execute a man whose IQ test scores placed him just above the state's cutoff for intellectual disability — a designation that would forbid his execution as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear its second case involving the same Mississippi prosecutor's peremptory strikes of Black prospective jurors in a Black defendant's death penalty case — and the same state judge's approval of those strikes.
Almost 50 Democratic lawmakers are urging congressional appropriators to fix the long-standing budget shortfall for federal defenders in the upcoming full-year budget.
A recent report showing that the unstandardized and subjective U.S. system of medicolegal death investigations contributes to unjust convictions should prompt courts and lawmakers to reject manner of death testimony in favor of more transparent and testable forensic evidence, say Peter Neufeld and Isabelle Cohn at the Innocence Project.
Self-represented family court litigants must navigate the often-bewildering process of finding, completing and filing the correct form, so courts and policymakers should consider several ways to make the process more accessible, says Caroline Rogus at Drexel University.
