Columns

GUEST ROOM | The 303 Creative Ruling is a Bigger Deal Than You Think

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As current and recent college students, the recent June Supreme Court rulings against student loan forgiveness and affirmative action stood out to many of us, but there was another, even more significant case decided on the last day of Pride Month this year.

In 303 Creative llc v. Elenis, Lorie Smith, the owner and sole employee of the graphic design business 303 Creative, brought a pre-enforcement challenge against the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Smith proposed to start designing wedding websites and planned to establish a policy of denying service to same-sex couples, which violates CADA. In a statement on her website, Smith wrote, “The messages I have received [since the ruling] have shown that there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about the case,” so let’s clarify the facts of the case.

Columns

GUEST ROOM | The Indian Child Welfare Act and Haaland v. Brackeen

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This Native November or Native American Heritage Month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments regarding the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in the case Haaland v. Brackeen. The conservative majority court, which has already upended 50 years of women’s reproductive rights, is considering challenges to 60 years of affirmative action on college campuses and, on Nov. 9, began considering overturning a nearly 45-year-old federal law that prioritizes placement of Native children with Native families in foster and adoption cases. The case also has the potential to throw a grenade in centuries-old federal tribal protections.

Columns

LEVIN | Affirmative Action Must Stay

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If the Court bans race-conscious admissions, decades of progress toward equal opportunity will be reversed and the wealth of perspectives that we enjoy in academic forums today could dwindle in years to come. We also stand to lose a time-honored, effective mechanism “to counteract the inherited disadvantages that unequally but in patterned ways burden certain races in our society but not others,” Prof. Nelson Tebbe, law, told me. Tebbe, a constitutional law expert, stressed the importance of recognizing “structural racism as an empirical reality in the United States.”

Columns

WISE-ROJAS | Roe v. Wade: A Queer College Student Perspective

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It doesn’t help when your country is telling you that your body doesn’t matter. Being able to have control over your body is treated as a privilege today, when it should be treated as a right. Why do I (and others) suffer the consequences of laws made by a governing body that is an inaccurate representation of the American people, subject to horror stories of young women decades ago doing harmful things to terminate their pregnancies?

abortion

University Responds to Dobbs v. Jackson With Statement

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On Friday, the University published a statement calling the Supreme Court’s elimination of constitutional protections for abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson “disappointing.” Student groups have been reacting throughout the day to both the Court’s decision and University’s statement.

Columns

ST. HILAIRE | When Will Our Hard Work and Credentials Be Enough

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I don’t know if it’s my personal TikTok algorithm or whether all of you seem to be on the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson side of Tiktok too. Not that far removed from Tiktok’s normal M.O., I’ve found this portion of my “For You” page to be as unpredictable as the rest of what the algorithm has tried to convince me is for me. 

Now that we have settled that, there is one video that seems to be a recurring theme lately, and it’s the one we all know. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the Harvard Law educated United States Senator, with a straight face asked Jackson if she thought babies were racist. Now, you, like me, might have wondered what this question could possibly have to do with the role of Supreme Court justice — the role that he and the other 99 United States senators were supposed to be vetting her for. But, after I picked my jaw up from the ground and rolled my eyes, I settled on the fact that it was completely unrelated.