United States Supreme Court
On April 24th, 2001 the United States Supreme Court, by a five to four
margin, rejected a legal challenge to Alabama's Official English
law, which was a tremendous victory for Official English.
On January 16, 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court
heard oral arguments in Sandoval v. Alexander,
a case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit
held that the Alabama "Department of Public Safety's . . .
official policy of administering its driver's license
examination only in the English language [pursuant to a
1990 constitutional amendment stating that] "English is the
official language of the state of Alabama, . . ." violates Title VI by creating an
adverse, disproportionate
impact on non-English speaking Alabama residents who wish to obtain a
driver's license." U.S. English had filed an amicus brief
in support of the Supreme Court accepting this case for review, and subsequently
filed a merits amicus brief
on November 13, 2000 . As explained in the
attached Op-Ed by the Chairman of U.S.English, an adverse
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Sandoval could be
the death knell of the great American melting-pot. In its merits brief,
U.S. ENGLISH asked the Supreme Court to acknowledge what Senator Hayakawa
identified twenty years ago as "what is already a political and social
reality: That English is the official language of the United States."
In Alexander v. Sandoval, the Supreme Court ruled that private lawyers had no right to
sue the state under the federal anti-discrimination law. The Court Majority, led by
Justice Antonin Scalia, held that private citizens were never
authorized to sue under the Title's disparate-impact regulations. The Court declared
that Congress only prohibited intentional discrimination when it wrote Title VI, but left
it up to the federal government to apply the discrimination ban to practices having unintended
discriminatory effects. Thus, unless Sandoval could prove the Alabama driver's test intentionally discriminated against
her, she had no grounds to sue the state.
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