Legalistic Precedents for Gender/Sexuality and Racial Disparities

This course covers key issue areas targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union Northern California (ACLU NorCal) chapter and seeks to build more informed policy-based discourse around racial and gender/sexuality disparities in technology and civil liberties, reproductive rights, housing, and general/special education policy by discussing legal precedents that perpetuate discriminatory treatment of minorities under legal pretenses. Additional themes will be covered that have perpetuated legally protected strategies to exploit racial and gender/sexuality minority groups such as: (i) the legalistic process' insistence on expediency in finding nearest precedents resulting in misapplication of legal language across different issue areas (i.e. abstraction of abortion law applied to net neutrality), and coverage of Supreme Court and circuit court decisions that are legitimized by popular culture but no longer have constitutional precedent (i.e. Brown v. Board of Education overturned by the implicitly segregationist Freeman v. Pitts and Missouri v. Jenkins decision, etc. The course seeks to build awareness around legalistic language that are leveraged for discriminatory treatment of minorities and strives to create spaces for policy-based discussion around key issue areas under the purview of the ACLU NorCal chapter.