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Originally posted by the ACLU of California.
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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.

By Alice S.

On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired between 61 and 67 shots into a crowd of unarmed anti-war protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others. My 19-year-old sister, Allison Krause, was one of four students shot to death by the Ohio National Guard in the parking lot of her university campus as she protested the Vietnam War. I was 15 years old at the time.