WATCH: Devon Westhill Speaks at Federalist Society Supreme Court Preview

Center for Equal OpportunityGovernment Activity

At 12:00 noon ET on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, the Federalist Society’s Faculty Division and Practice Groups will host a panel at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC regarding the upcoming Supreme Court term, which will begin on October 3, 2022. The Court’s docket already includes major cases involving affirmative action, election law, intellectual property, and civil rights. The full list of cases granted thus far for the upcoming term can be viewed on SCOTUSblog. The panel will also discuss broader questions about the direction of the Court. Featuring: – Prof. David D. Cole, National Director of the ACLU – …

CEO Civil Rights Fellowship Begins

Rudy GerstenGovernment Activity

This week, CEO is hosting a dozen Civil Rights fellows from some of the top law schools in the country for a series of activities and training. The inaugural class is made up of a dozen young men and women, including law students from Harvard, Notre Dame, Marquette, Seton Hall, Brigham Young, Wake Forest, St. Mary’s, George Mason, and the University of Maryland.  The first of its kind program, spearheaded by CEO President and General Counsel Devon Westhill, is taking place here in Washington, D.C. We kicked things off last night with a tour of CEO’s office and a welcome dinner …

More Reparations, More HUD

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

While Americans overwhelming reject it (see, e.g., this Gallup poll), the Left and Democratic politicians — especially among those running for president — continue to endorse the idea of reparations.  I’ve noted before that I testified against this the last time around, and here is an article I had written and included as an appendix to that testimony. The Bizarre Campaign To Eliminate “Profiteers of Slavery”: Practical Questions about Chicago Ordinance Are Overwhelming by Roger Clegg (from Human Events, January 12, 2003) Last fall, according to its Tribune, Chicago “became the first major city in the nation” to pass a …

Reparations and Other Silliness

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

Last week there were House hearings on reparations, the first since I testified against them in 2007.  In an earlier email, I had included the main text of my testimony, and this week I’m sending an imagined dialogue — which I included with that testimony at the time and which was published in the Federalist Society’s Engage magazine — between a proponent and an opponent of this (silly) idea.  In sum, reparations would be unfair, unworkable, inevitably unending and expanding, divisive (encouraging a victim mentality among blacks and resentment among everyone else), and of course unconstitutional.  But aside from those …

A Bogus Threat to “Desegregation”

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

There was a big front-page story in the Washington Post this week about a bill before the Kentucky state legislature that will, the headlines claim, “threaten” school “desegregation” in Louisville.  Hardly.  My favorite sentence in the story:  “The threat is no longer from protestors in hoods throwing bricks at buses carrying black children into white parts of town, but from state legislators pushing a bill to return to neighborhood schools.”  Nothing but straight news reporting here, folks!  Nothing slanted or tendentious, nosiree! Look:  There is no segregation in Louisville or anywhere else in the country, and there is no threat …

Dorm Segregation in 2016: The UConn Con

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

It’s back-to-school time, and Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and I posted this column on National Review Online last Friday. Segregation is back. These past few weeks have seen controversy over black-student housing ads for roommates directed to “people of color” only, and over colleges and a law school that created separate class sections restricted for black students. What is going on? It appears, alas, that public universities have formally reintroduced and made fashionable racial segregation, in the guise of creating safe spaces for “their” minority students — to endorse, fund, and foster black separatism in …

No, U.S. Schools Aren’t “Resegregating”

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

The front-page headline on the Washington Post last week screamed, “New Data Shows U.S. schools Are Resegregating.”  Not true. Segregation means the government separating students by race and telling them it is illegal for students of one race to attend the same schools as students of another race. So the number of segregated public schools in the United States today is . . . zero. What is being complained about, instead, are racial “imbalances” that come about, not as a result of racist laws, but because of residential living patterns and the general practice of assigning children to schools that are near where they live. Deliberately assigning children …

Ignore claims of resegregation

CEO StaffGovernment Activity

On May 17, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And that is certainly something worth celebrating. The only fly in the ointment is that this event will also prompt many solemn pronouncements that, alas, our schools are just as segregated as ever and/or that they are resegregating. We will be told that therefore the promise of Brown remains unfulfilled, and that this is the reason for continuing racial disparities in education. But this is not true. Here’s the key statistic that must always be borne in mind: The number of segregated …

Brown v. Board of Education …

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

Here’s the essay I just did this for National Review Online’s “Education Week”: It’s depressing that, nearly six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the legality and morality of racial discrimination in education continues to be a contested issue. Consider: Last month the Obama administration issued “guidance” for universities on the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision last June in Fisher v. University of Texas. The guidance predictably reiterates that the administration “strongly support[s] diversity” — including, of course, using discrimination in order to achieve it — but, as a legal matter, this is irrelevant if a school is sued, …

Roger Clegg testifies regarding H.R. 40

CEO StaffGovernment Activity

TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL AT AN OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE LEGACY OF THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE BEFORE THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND CIVIL LIBERTIES December 18, 2007Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2141 Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Roger Clegg, and I am president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit research and educational organization that is based in Falls Church, Virginia. Our chairman is Linda Chavez, and our focus is on public policy issues that involve …