With the Supreme Court having announced last month that it will take up momentous cases about same-sex marriage and the death penalty, the court has positioned itself to be at the center of the country’s ongoing civil rights debate later this year. But for now, two other civil rights controversies occupy center stage, albeit on very different wings.
Last week the court heard arguments in a housing discrimination case that on its face appears to present a dry issue of statutory interpretation but in truth cuts to the core of federal law’s relevance to race discrimination. Meanwhile, about as removed from the Supreme Court as one can get, millions of Americans have been immersed in a podcast that has explored the investigation into the 1999 murder of a Baltimore high school student and the subsequent conviction of a classmate now serving a life sentence. Though wildly different, these two controversies raise a common question: How important are the courts and law to civil rights in the real world?
