Friday Catch-Up and Clean-Up

ACLU SUES LA COUNTY FOR JUVENILE PROBATION CAMP CONDITIONS THAT “WOULD MAKE DICKENS SHUDDER.”

I thought that Dickens shuddering quote from ACLU’s chief counsel, Mark Rosenbaum, was a little over the top too until I read all 37 pages of the complaint that the ACLU and some other advocacy groups have filed against the LA County Probation and the county Office of Education for failing provide anything resembling adequate educational instruction at Camp Challenger, one of the most troubled probation camps in the county system. Instead, teachers failed to show up, gave diplomas to kids who could neither read nor write, pulled kids out of class to do chores for days at a time purely for staff’s convenience—and so on.

One of the students named in the suit (under a pseudonym) was kept in solitary confinement for as long as a month, and given either no instruction at all on some days, and a few educational papers shoved under this door on other days.

KPCC’s Frank Stolz has a report that gives a pretty good overview of the issue.

Read it for yourself. As for its accuracy, I spoke to someone who is an insider in the County Board of Supervisors’s offices about the lawsuit.

“I’m afraid they’ve got a good case,” he said

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BEVERLY HILLS SCHOOL DISTRICT VOTES TO KEEP SOME KIDS, EXCLUDE OTHERS

After weeks of controversy followed by a four-hour wrangling session, Tuesday night, the Beverly Hills school board took its final vote as to which non-90290 kids it would keep and which out-of-the-area permit students it would toss. The LA Times has a story on the vote.

And here’s the back story on the BH schools issue.

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SUPREMES BLOCK BROADCAST OF FED COURT’S PROP 8 HEARINGS CAUSING LEGAL SCHOLARS TO MUTTER UNHAPPILY

The WaPo has the story about the reaction of legal scholars to the US Supreme Court’s decision to prohibit the Prop 8 lawsuit hearings from being broadcast. Here’s the first ‘graph.

It was a hastily written ruling by Supreme Court standards, and it carried a dissent almost equal in length to the majority’s opinion. But the 5 to 4 decision the court issued late Wednesday blocking the broadcast of a federal trial about the constitutionality of same-sex marriage is being scoured by legal analysts and activists for deeper meaning.

Of note, felt the scholars, was the fact that the ruling split entirely along ideological lines, with Kennedy as the swing vote (as usual). (Here’s the order itself.)

Many are finding a hint of sympathy for those who oppose same-sex marriage. An unmistakable worry about how cameras could transform what the ruling called the “orderly, decorous, rational traditions” of the courts. Some even detect a whiff of Bush v. Gore.

“It is almost classic Freudian,” said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, “in that it is talking about one thing, but really seems to mean something else.”

Emily Bazelon at Slate, however, puts it in much stronger terms.

I’m having Bush v. Gore déjà vu. Late Wednesday, the Supreme Court blocked video streaming of the California gay marriage trial. In this unusual (unprecedented?) order, meddling in the governance of the lower courts, are all the hallmarks of the court’s worst self-inflicted bruise. It’s a smaller bruise this time around, granted. But still.

Let’s count the parallels…..