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Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling invalidating patents on human genes.  The case was brought by the ACLU, along with the Public Patent Foundation, on behalf of 20medical organizations, geneticists, health advocacy groups, and patients and challenged patents controlled by Myriad Genetics on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.  Based on a 30-year-old U.S. Patent & Trademark Office policy, Myriad had obtained its patents on these two genes, which are closely associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risk, and stopped other laboratories in the U.S. from providing genetic testing to patients, even when these labs wanted to offer different, more comprehensive, or less expensive tests. 

This piece originally ran at the Guardian.

Originally posted by the ACLU of California.
If you mis

It may still only be 2014 on your Gregorian calendar, but for the political gossip press, it might as well be 2016 because it seems like all they can talk about is the presidential election that is 2.5 years away.

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This week, the United Nations Human Rights Committee will review U.S. compliance with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the U.S. in 1992. The review will cast light on a dark underbelly of American exceptionalism — our refusal to acknowledge that human rights treaties have effect overseas. Unlike most of the world (the only other exception being Israel), the United States continues to claim that human rights treaties don’t apply to U.S. activities overseas.

Just months into my second year of law school at the University of Michigan, I witnessed my rights and life profoundly altered because of the passage of Proposal 2. This law banned Michigan’s institutions of higher learning from considering race as one of many factors in admissions, even though these programs had already been approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Recently, I had a meeting with Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).  I was bringing some youth leaders to his office to discuss racial justice and education.  When we arrived, he starting telling us his story.  We were in awe.  It was a history lesson from the source itself.  He talked about the events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and showed us photos of his own beating, one of the most infamous attacks by police in history. On March 7, 1965 voting rights supporters, led by John Lewis and others, attempted a march from Selma, Ala. to the state capitol in Montgomery to present then-Governor George Wallace with a list of grievances, demanding the fundamental right to vote for all.

True or false: a police department in Florida failed to tell judges about its use of a cell phone tracking device because the manufacturer asked them to keep it under wraps.