It was late on Election Day 2010 and Vander Plaats, a Sioux City, Iowa, businessman and leader of a campaign to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices, had just gotten word that he and his team had pulled it off. The voters had rejected the three justices up for a retention vote: David Baker, Michael Streit, and Chief Justice Marsha Ternus.…

From the time President Barack Obama introduced Sonia Sotomayor as his U.S. Supreme Court nominee to the day of her confirmation as an associate justice, conservative criticism of her nomination remained vocal and unrelenting. While some conservatives focused on Sotomayor's positions on gun rights and abortion, many seemed fixated with her…

Just over a month after the Supreme Court of the United States' ruling in the Seattle and Louisville cases, news analysts and school district officials from Boston to Berkeley, California, from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Evanston, Illinois, are still trying to assess its impact on their student reassignment programs. But the community of scholars…