By The Editors
As 2012 looms, and TheDefendersOnline.com takes its traditional two-week hiatus for the holidays, we look back on a year full of astonishing events.

New York Supreme Court Justice Eugene Devine upheld New York’s law ending prison-based gerrymandering in the Little v. LATFOR lawsuit.

By The Editors
Once the sentencing rules for an offense are changed to lesser terms, is it fair to still subject some individuals to the old, harsher rules?

By Doug Miller
The study, Lost Ground, 2011,  found that low- and moderate-income African Americans and Latino Americans have suffered a disproportionate share of losses.

By John Payton
Editor’s Note — The President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund takes issue in a letter to the New York Times of November 2 with a recent op-ed dismissing the effectiveness of recent civil rights litigation.

By Ronnie Reese via the Chicago Tribune
Editor’s Note — Nearly two decades ago, nearly 6,000 black Chicagoans had sought the chance to serve their city as firefighters. Their quest dream was at first denied, and then long-delayed before being ultimately vindicated by the Supreme Court in the case of Lewis v. The City of Chicago. This week the first of those candidates were called to begin the first round of testing, as an article from the Chicago Tribune

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Only eight states publicly report the race and ethnicity of juveniles transferred to adult courts for criminal prosecution, the Justice Department has found, and it’s no wonder that more states don’t. Those that do are sending disproportionate numbers of African-American or Hispanic teenagers to face the possibility of the most serious punishment that a juvenile offender can face—getting locked up in a state prison alongside hardened adult criminals.

By John Payton
Editor’s Note: These remarks were delivered by John Payton, President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Monday to conference of the National Housing Law Project in Washington.

LDF joined more than eighty civil rights, disability, parent, student, grassroots and education organizations from across the country to urge Congress not to turn back the clock on teacher quality gains for poor and minority students, English Learners, and students with disabilities as it considers reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB).

Editor’s Note:  Forty-eight years and two months after his speech for the ages, the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. will once again ring out over the National Mall in the nation’s capitol this Sunday as the memorial to him is dedicated.   The attorneys who staffed the NAACP legal Defense and Educational Fund during the [...]