This year it’s ten years since same-sex marriage was first possible in Canada and the US Supreme Court will soon rule on the question. What is so troublesome about the push for same-sex marriage?

The same-sex marriage agenda in the U.S. has been heavily critiqued by a wide variety of queer and trans activists because it fails to meaningfully address the key material problems facing queer and trans people, such as criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty, health care access and homelessness, while it consumes enormous resources. It also has been a conservative shift in queer and trans politics, which has moved away from feminist and anti-racist critiques of marriage as a terrible and unfair way to distribute life chances and toward a conservative celebration of marriage as key to healthy families. This has happened alongside a right wing push in the U.S. to blame poverty on people’s failure to marry and to further cut poverty alleviation programs. In the U.S., after same-sex marriage is legal, queer and trans people will still face the same problems of a racist and violent growing immigration enforcement system, a growing wealth divide, and racist mass imprisonment. Some people who have immigration status or wealth to share with a partner will benefit, but the queer and trans people in the worst situations will still be facing the same dangers.

Four Burning Questions for Dean Spade, professor, lawyer, civil rights activist

By McGill Reporter Staff
Dean Spade is a lawyer, civil rights activist, and Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements. Before joining the faculty at Seattle, he taught classes related to sexual orientation, gender identity, and law and social movements at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School as a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow. In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income, people of color, or both. His book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published in 2011.
Spade will be one of three panelists at the event Radical Formations: Sex, Race, Trans on Friday, April 12, 4-5:30 pm in the McIntyre Medical Building, Room 522 (reception to follow). The panel is presented by Professor Robert Leckey, William Dawson Scholar in the Faculty of Law, and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Gender Studies. For more information or to register, please go here.

GOP issues critical report of labor secretary nominee Perez

Republican lawmakers sharply criticized Thomas Perez, the nominee for labor secretary, in a report Sunday over what they said was a questionable deal he brokered while serving as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
The 63-page report, issued after months of investigation, is certain to provide fodder for Republicans seeking to challenge Perez at his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.
The GOP lawmakers accuse Perez of misusing his power last year to persuade the city of St. Paul, Minn., to withdraw a housing discrimination case before it could be heard by the Supreme Court. In exchange, the Justice Department agreed not to intervene in two whistleblower cases against St. Paul that could have won up to $200 million for taxpayers.
Perez has defended his reason for wanting St. Paul to drop its case, telling investigators that he feared an adverse ruling from the Supreme Court would jeopardize the government’s use of statistics to win housing discrimination cases. The Justice Department also says Perez got proper clearance and made the deal in the best interests of the nation.
But Republicans say the deal was dubious, that Perez misled senior officials about his intentions and that he tried to cover up the true reason for his decision not to intervene in the whistleblower cases. “This offer was inappropriate and potentially violated Perez’s duty of loyalty to his client, the United States,” said the report from Sen. Charles E. Grassley, California Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (Va.). Issa is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Goodlatte heads the House Judiciary Committee. Grassley is top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Top Democrats on the House Oversight Committee issued a report on the investigation Sunday, writing that Perez “acted professionally to advance the interests of civil rights and effectively combat the scourge of housing discrimination.” The Justice Department also defended Perez, saying litigation decisions made by the department “were in the best interests of the United States and were consistent with the department’s legal, ethical and professional responsibility obligations.”
The GOP report cites documents that suggest Perez’s decision frustrated and confused career lawyers at Justice who initially wanted to join the whistleblower cases against St. Paul. These lawyers described the department’s change of heart as “weirdness,” “ridiculous” and a case of “cover your head pingpong.”
Democrats say Perez was up front about using the strategy and cleared it with ethics and professional responsibility officials before it was finalized. Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli told investigators that it was common Justice Department practice to encourage parties not to pursue Supreme Court cases with poor fact patterns that could lead to adverse national interests.
“Instead of identifying inappropriate conduct by Mr. Perez, it appears that the accusations against him are part of a broader political campaign to undermine the legal safeguards against discrimination that Mr. Perez was protecting,” said the staff memo issued Sunday by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Labor Nominee's Civil Rights Work Draws Praise, Controversy

President Obama's nominee to lead the Labor Department has been one of the most aggressive advocates for civil rights in decades. Tom Perez prosecuted a record number of hate crimes cases and extracted huge settlements from banks that overcharged minorities for home loans.
But some Republican lawmakers say those same qualities give them pause about voting to confirm Perez as a Cabinet member.
'Making A Huge Difference'
As the son of Dominican immigrants, and a guy who helped put himself through Ivy League schools by working as a garbage collector, Perez knows something about climbing the ladder.
"Over my career, I've learned that true progress is possible if you keep an open mind, listen to all sides and focus on results," he said last month during the White House rollout of his nomination.
About those results: For more than three years, Perez has run the civil rights unit as an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, where he has sued Texas and South Carolina over voting rights and searched for abusive law enforcement patterns in more than a dozen police departments.
Perez has done something else, too, says Mark Perriello, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities.
"All the work that he has done to secure the rights of people with disabilities to live independently in the community, to have access to polling, to have access to simple things like technology and watching Netflix with your family at home at night has been nothing less than stellar," Perriello says. "He is making a huge difference."
Perriello and dozens of other disability rights advocates have just to support Perez as labor secretary.
It's support the nominee may need to counter vocal opposition from Republican lawmakers like Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley.
"This person's going to have trouble — both through the committee process and on the floor," Grassley says. "He's got a lot of questions to answer."
A Quid Pro Quo?
Grassley and two House Republicans, Darrell Issa of California and Robert Goodlatte of Virginia, released a report late Sunday that blasted Perez for his role in what they call a quid pro quo last year, when the Justice Department agreed not to support a big whistle-blower lawsuit against St. Paul, Minn., for mishandling federal money.
The report drafted by congressional Republicans says Perez's testimony about the episode conflicts with that of other accounts from people inside the Justice Department and lawyers in Minnesota who worked on the issue.
"Perez's inconsistent testimony on a range of subjects calls into question the reliability of his testimony and raises questions about his truthfulness during his transcribed interview," the report said.
The report also alleges Perez engineered a plan to back away from the whistle-blower case without notifying his superiors or ethics lawyers at Justice about all the facts, and that he meddled with the decision-making by career lawyers in the government, while asking them to avoid putting the details in writing, placing "ideology over objectivity and politics over the rule of law."
The situation "confused and frustrated the career Justice Department attorneys ... who described the situation as 'weirdness,' 'ridiculous' and 'cover your head ping pong,' " the report added.
House Democrats countered that the criticism was political.
"Instead of identifying inappropriate conduct by Mr. Perez, it appears that the accusations against him are part of a broader political campaign to undermine the legal safeguards against discrimination that Mr. Perez was protecting," they said in a statement.
Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson also defended Perez's actions in an emailed statement. "The resolution reached in these cases was in the best interests of the United States and consistent with the Department's broad discretion to consider policy and other factors — including pending litigation — in resolving False Claims Act [whistle-blower] matters," Iverson said.
She pointed out that private plaintiffs still were allowed to move forward with their whistle-blower case.
"The Department's decision was appropriate, and followed an examination of the relevant facts, legal, and policy considerations at issue, and following Mr. Perez's consultation with career ethics officers," she added.
St. Paul leaders agreed to drop their Supreme Court challenge to a legal tool known as disparate impact theory that the Justice Department often uses in housing discrimination cases. (For an explanation of disparate impact theory, check out . There's more background on the Supreme Court case and the St. Paul whistle-blower lawsuit .)
Grassley says that kind of arrangement is not against the law, "but it looks pretty bad right now when somebody at that high level of government makes a quid pro quo that costs the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars ... just for the purpose, for philosophical or ideological purposes, to get a case to the Supreme Court dropped."
Facing Questions
Asked if he would be prepared to block the Perez nomination, Grassley replied: "I'm at least prepared to resist any attempt to bring it up until we get all of our questions answered."
At his Senate confirmation hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday, Perez could face even more questions about his management at the Justice Department's civil rights unit. The department's inspector general recently concluded the atmosphere there is filled with partisanship and bullying, though watchdogs say most of that trouble dates back a decade, before Perez arrived.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is planning its own hearing this week on those issues. In a statement to NPR, Goodlatte, the committee chairman, said he was "shocked the President is moving forward with this nomination. ... Mr. Perez should face tough questions about this backroom deal he helped coordinate, his role in interfering with a Supreme Court case, and his mismanagement of the Civil Rights Division."
Supporters of Perez say the White House knew all about those controversies when it nominated him to lead the Labor Department. Obama says he wants Perez to play a big role in such issues as long-term unemployment, immigration and the minimum wage.
"His story," the president said last month, "reminds us of this country's promise: That if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, what your last name is, you can make it if you try."
Perez is in line to become one of the highest-profile Latino Cabinet members in recent memory, if he can get past Senate Republicans

Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyers and Attorneys

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Civil Rights

The field of "civil rights" is very broad. It includes discrimination against racial minorities, women, GLBT members, the disabled, immigrants and others, each of which is a large subject on its own. And it also includes, especially if one merges civil rights with civil liberties, the rights of workers and unions, including employment discrimination, criminal justice issues, aspects of family law, and perhaps other fields. Other law school area groups have written memoranda to guide interested students.
Turning to civil rights, there are some preliminary observations to keep in mind. First, Constitutional Law is obviously a building block for this area, and as a required course everyone will take it. Many students may want to take con law in the first year, although there are two reservations here: the first year course is four credit hours and some of the other sections are five, and if a student wants to study with a particular con law professor he or she may not be teaching the first year section.
A second observation is that however important offerings in the civil rights field are (we discuss these below), students should not confine themselves to such courses because other courses provide context, insights and skills that are valuable to all lawyers, including civil rights lawyers.
Some of these courses are Administrative Law, Conflicts of Laws, Evidence or Civil Litigation, Corporate Law, Federal Courts, Negotiation or Mediation, State Constitutional Law or State Court Practice, Statutory Interpretation or Legislation, Taxation and Trial Advocacy. Students who are more (or less) interested in litigation will of course take that into account in appraising these courses.
A related point is that students should consider also courses or seminars that are further afield from civil rights. We will not attempt to list these here, but there are many areas which will broaden individuals even if they have no apparent or immediate payoff in the civil rights field. In such cases a student should consider the intructor as well as the course. Such courses might include Law and Literature, Business Crimes and International Law (in one of its many manifestations). Other examples, perhaps a step closer to civil rights, are Counterterrorism, Comparative Constitutional Law, and one of the offerings on free speech.
When one looks for courses that are more centrally concerned with civil rights, in the fall can be mentioned Education Law, Employment Law, Family Law or Child, Parent and State, Immigration Law and Separation of Powers. . . . In the spring are Affirmative Action Today, Colloquium on Education Law and Policy, Constitutional Litigation, Immigration Law (again), Groups, Individuals and the Law, Women at Work, Employment Law (again), and Topics in Labor and Employment.
Not all of the courses and seminars mentioned above are offered every year.
We have reserved the clinics for last, both because they are taken for more credits than ordinary courses and seminars, and because NYU has an enormous range of clinics taught by professors who are experienced in the field as well as familiar with the theory and doctrine of the subject. There are approximately 15 clinics in each of the fall and spring, although some are year-long. Many are in the civil rights field, and therefore most students interested in civil rights, broadly construed, apply to a clinic. Conversation with students currently in a clinic is advised, as is reading the valuable report of the Clinical Area Group on its offerings.
We hope this memorandum is helpful. Members of the Civil Rights Area Group are available to counsel students with particular questions.

Civil rights lawyers: NYPD spying violates rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — The New York Police Department's focus on Muslims has renewed the political surveillance of the 1960s and '70s that was banned under a landmark legal ruling, according to a new court filing by civil rights lawyers. They are seeking an injunction against further surveillance of Muslims without evidence of crimes and a new court-appointed auditor to oversee police activities.

Describing continuing surveillance of Muslims as "widespread and intense," the civil rights lawyers complained that the NYPD has monitored public places where Muslims eat, shop and worship and has kept records and notes about police observations despite any evidence of unlawful or terror-related activities. The lawyers said the NYPD's actions violate rules, known as the Handschu guidelines, that a court had imposed as part of a 1985 landmark settlement with the NYPD to a lawsuit they filed.

"There is substantial persuasive evidence that the defendants are conducting investigations into organizations and individuals associated with the Muslim faith and the Muslim community in New York, and have been doing so for years, using intrusive methods, without a reasonable indication of unlawful activity, or a criminal predicate of any sort," the lawyers wrote in a motion filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. They said the NYPD's actions were so "flagrant and persistent" that an auditor should be appointed.

A spokesman for the NYPD did not respond to a phone message and email request for comment from The Associated Press.

The NYPD and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said the department follows the Handschu guidelines and did not break any laws over the course of its surveillance of Muslim communities. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said the department has plenty of oversight, including five district attorneys, a committee that investigates police corruption, the NYPD's own internal affairs office and the court-imposed Handschu guidelines.

The spying was the subject of a series of stories by the AP that revealed the NYPD intelligence division infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds. The NYPD is the largest police department in the nation, and Bloomberg has held up its counterterrorism tactics as a model for the rest of the country. The new court motion by the civil rights lawyers refers repeatedly to the AP's reporting and includes some internal NYPD documents the AP had obtained and published.

The motion focuses on a particular section of the NYPD's intelligence division known initially as the Demographics Unit and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit. This unit is at the heart of the NYPD's spying program, built with help from the CIA. It assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
Supporters said the Demographics Unit was central to keeping the city safe, though a senior NYPD official testified last year that the unit never generated any leads or triggered a terrorism investigation.

The Handschu guidelines came out of landmark lawsuit the lawyers filed and a subsequent 1985 court settlement that set strict time limits for investigations, imposed rules on the kinds of records police could keep and created a three-person body to oversee such investigations.

The last time civil rights lawyers in the Handshu case filed a motion like this was in November 2005. It was not immediately clear when the judge will make a ruling on the new motion.