Several dozen advocacy organizations are promoting a proposal to recreate the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as a U.S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights.  This proposed legislation would authorize the newly reauthorized commission to monitor U.S. compliance with international human rights treaties and advocate for U.S. adoption of international human rights treaties.  It would also create a new process for commissioner and executive staff appointments.  Advocates argue that the proposal will strengthen human rights protections in the United States.  Critics respond that the proposal is not at all what it appears to be and that it would, as currently formulated, likely accomplish the opposite of its stated intentions.

The Supreme Court’s 2008 Term concluded with opinions in two closely followed civil rights cases, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (Northwest Austin MUD), and Ricci v. DeStefano (Ricci). Both cases were anticipated as presenting possibilities for sweeping constitutional holdings—in Northwest Austin MUD, the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and in Ricci, the application of Equal Protection analysis to workplace claims of “reverse” discrimination under Title VII. In fact, neither case produced a constitutional seachange, but instead both were decided on grounds of statutory interpretation, consistent perhaps with Chief Justice Roberts’s articulated preference for a “minimalist” jurisprudential approach. Nonetheless, both cases achieved significant, incremental change—in recognizing the Nation’s significant advances in guaranteeing equal voting rights to all, and in advancing the vision of antidiscrimination employment law as a vehicle for ensuring equal, race-neutral employment opportunities...

As it struggled to cope with the aftermath of the Civil War and to dismantle the system of human slavery that had both dominated and disgraced its early history, the United States adopted a trio of amendments designed to fulfill the promise of America as originally expressed in our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Reconstruction amendments were specifically intended to reshape the relationship between government—federal, state, and local—and the people. And while an immediate goal of those amendments was to confer full and equal citizenship on newly freed African-Americans, they had a deeper, more profound purpose: to stamp out a culture of lawlessness and oppression that had grown up around the issue of slavery and attempts to abolish it, but that had grown like a cancer until it menaced the freedom of all citizens and the very notion of liberty upon which this country was founded...

The Supreme Court’s October Term 2009 will see another major gun-rights case, the second in three years. Although the first case was undisputedly a watershed, from both a constitutional law perspective and from a societal-impact perspective, this second case will likely prove more consequential than the first...