Dive Brief:
- President Donald Trump has reportedly narrowed down his list of potential Supreme Court nominees to three: Neil Gorsuch, a Denver judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit; Thomas Hardiman, a Philadelphia judge for the 3rd Circuit; and William Pryor, an Atlanta judge for the 11th Circuit.
- Education Week reports Gorsuch came out against overly harsh school discipline and transfer to law enforcement in A.M. v. Holmes last year, he upheld a school district’s use of a “timeout room” for an elementary student with developmental disabilities, and he has argued that the Ten Commandments can be incorporated into school curriculum and displayed in public places to convey a secular message about the authority of law.
- Hardiman supported student free speech in J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District and supported religious expression by students and parents in public schools in a handful of cases, while Pryor is taking heat from conservatives for his support of equal protections for transgender employees and students who wanted to form a gay-straight alliance in Florida.
Dive Insight:
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last February should have been followed by a timely nomination by then-president Barack Obama but Republicans fought for a delay Democrats ultimately went along with. Trump’s nominees are in their 40s and 50s, meaning if approved for the Supreme Court with life terms, they will have the ability to shape jurisprudence for decades.
Key legal issues facing the education system today are civil rights protections for transgender students and those with disabilities, as well as a movement to give fundamentalist Christian ideology a greater place in public schools.