I didn’t do a roundup today, but I did write two posts that are pretty directly tied to civil rights (not including the Sarah Palin’s wardrobe post I just linked to below).
First, the data is now out on how barring affirmative action affected minority enrollment at Michigan’s state universities. The result? It’s a mixed bag, but the overall trends are a shift in minority enrollment to less-prestigious universities, a greater difficulty in attracting even qualified minority students (in part because of the elimination of race-conscious scholarship programs), and, most oddly, a fall in minority enrollment at some schools which never used race-conscious policies in the first place.
Also in that post, a citation to a study of minority law graduates from the University of Michigan law school from 1966 – 1996, when the school still used affirmative action. The authors found that the minority graduates had equally-successful careers along every metric compared to their White peers.
The other post noted a new rule by the Federal Bureau of Prison prohibiting the shackling of pregnant woman during labor or delivery. Readers might recall that I flagged a case this summer ruling that such procedures do not violate the 8th amendment, because, the 8th circuit said, pregnant women giving birth present a “flight risk”. Since that dealt with a state prison, and this is a federal rule, it is likely that the rule would have had no effect on the case even if it was enforced at the time. But it does give us some momentum, and that’s a good thing.