The Supreme Court has denied Guam’s petition for certiorari, in Davis v. Guam, bringing a successful close to CIR’s nine-year fight to overturn the territory’s racially restrictive plebiscite law. With this order, CIR’s recent Ninth Circuit victory will stand in its entirety, and Guam will not be allowed to conduct a vote that discriminates on the basis of race.
In July, lead counsel Gibson Dunn’s Luke Townsend won a major victory ...
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The defendants in Barke v. Banks — members of the Public Employment Relations Board — have filed a motion to dismiss CIR’s complaint, challenging California’s union gag law. The defendants argue that the plaintiffs — seven city council and school board members — lack standing to challenge Section 3550, which prohibits public employers from making statements that “deter or discourage” union membership.
According to the defendants’ theory, only school boards and ...
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The Center for Individual Rights has filed suit challenging a racial set-aside program for federal government contracts. Section 8(a) allows the Small Business Administration to set aside contracts for companies owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged” individuals. The SBA presumes that companies owned by members of certain racial and ethnic groups qualify as “socially disadvantaged.”
CIR represents Ultima Services, Corp., a company owned by business woman and entrepreneur, Celeste Bennett. Ultima ...
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2019 has been a busy year for CIR. Whether defending free speech in a welfare office in New York or challenging a racial voting law in Guam, CIR has been fighting for individual rights wherever the Constitution reaches.
You can read about CIR’s work in our most recent Docket Report.
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On July 11, CIR filed a motion for partial summary judgment on behalf of New York civil servant Salvatore Davi. After months of discovery, including depositions of numerous New York officials and review of thousands of documents, the record demonstrates that Davi was engaged in a private, after-hours discussion on Facebook in which he never mentioned his job and which concerned a significant issue of public policy: the appropriate goal ...
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In 1989, Michael Greve and Michael McDonald founded the Center for Individual Rights, a new kind of public interest firm that would fight back against the liberal drift in constitutional law. CIR would bring original cases that took dead aim at threats to individual liberty. It was a big gamble, but it paid off in big ways. For three decades, CIR has been bringing cases that no one would touch ...
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Guam is an American territory in the western Pacific Ocean. The small island was ceded to the U.S. in 1898, at the close of the Spanish-American War. Since that time, it has become a home to nearly 170,000 people of various ethnic and national back-grounds.
In recent years, left-wing historians have tried to build a narrative that would tarnish America’s reputation in Guam. The story goes that in the seventeenth century, ...
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