LA wants to give free lawyers to evicted tenants
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When attorneys appear in L.A. County courtrooms ready to fight over an eviction proceeding, they typically stand next to the landlord.
That could change if county supervisors approve a “right to counsel” ordinance, which would pair lawyers with struggling renters in unincorporated L.A. County, home to one million residents. On Tuesday, the supervisors voted to advance the plan, which they will need to approve once more before it becomes law.
They praised the plan as a way to shift the power dynamic between landlords well-versed in housing law and tenants who are not.
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Universities are ending millions in scholarships for BIPOC students
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Duke University recently discontinued a 45-year-old scholarship that covered tuition, currently about $66,000 a year, and housing costs of some Black undergraduate students.
The University of Iowa has changed the selection criteria for its Advantage Iowa Award, which dispenses more than $9 million a year in financial help to first-year students from historically underrepresented groups. White students, who previously weren’t eligible, can now apply.
Across the four-campus University of Missouri system, officials are changing the eligibility rules for $17.2 million in institutional and donor-funded scholarships earmarked for students from certain racial or ethnic groups. Race will no longer be considered in scholarship applications.
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Project 2025 is taking cues from SCOTUS’ worst decisions
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On a precious few occasions, the Donald Trump White House was foiled by its own incompetence. For example, their cover-up of their inclusion of a citizenship question on the Census—a stunt aimed at disempowering communities of color—was so sloppy that the Supreme Court declared it unlawfully pretextual. They so bungled the administrative rulemaking process that advocates were able to successfully challenge dozens of anti-environment regulations. And it took them three tries to come up with a version of a Muslim travel ban that the Supreme Court’s conservatives believed they could uphold with a straight face.
In short, they weren’t prepared before. But if Trump wins the White House in November 2024, the people around him don’t plan to make that mistake again.
Over the past few years, the Heritage Foundation has led the creation of a step-by-step manual, the “Mandate For Leadership,” that is designed to allow the next Republican president to function effectively as an authoritarian. This 900-page behemoth can be boiled down to one core directive: create a white Christian nationalist society.
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Why do many judges fail to recuse themselves when they have conflicts?
Speaking Of...
Soon after longtime New Orleans attorney Wendy Vitter became a federal judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, she heard a lawsuit against the local government in Plaquemines Parish, a peninsular province encompassing the final 70 miles of the Mississippi River, between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.
A group of paramedics had sued the parish, seeking compensation for unpaid overtime. Vitter oversaw a pair of jury trials in 2019 and 2021, both resulting in wins for the parish. But an appeals court later ruled Vitter had erred in judgment and overturned her final order. That paved the way for the paramedics to be awarded more than $500,000 in compensation, plus hundreds of thousands more for their attorneys.
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