The lawsuit was filed by Deshanae L. Brown, who alleges she was subjected to discrimination based on her race, sex, and disability, citing violations of federal and state laws including Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
The ruling upheld a lower court's preliminary injunction, the latest rebuke to a major shift that advocates warn would push 170,000 people in federally subsidized housing back into homelessness.
In effect, the Trump administration is attempting to roll back civil rights enforcement in housing at the federal level, and pressure states to weaken their own protections as well. That's not just bad policy, it's unlawful.
There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory " Black Codes" in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation's modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly.
The Founders, in creating and nurturing our system of governance by and through the Constitution provided separate and distinct branches of government, the Legislative, Executive and Judicial and, further, provided for intentional, established and delineated checks and balances so that power was balanced and not able to be usurped by any one branch tyrannically against the interest of the citizenry.
This script is based on a theory proposed by Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School. Ackerman's idea is laid out in his 1991 book We The People: Foundations, and is discussed in the second of his Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures of 2006. It's gained prominence since the 2024 election and the wholesale assault on our governmental system by Trump.
From 2021 until 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court did not decide one case involving traditional Fourth Amendment issues-such as what is a search, when is a warrant required and whether the exclusionary rule applies. I taught Criminal Procedure - Investigations in the fall semester and struggled to explain to my students why the justices seemingly had lost interest in the Fourth Amendment. But this term, there are two Fourth Amendment cases, one already decided and one to be argued this spring.
