Oklahoma board rejects taxpayer-funded religious school, Manhattan DA sues lawmaker over Trump case, and U.S. News releases new law school rankings ??
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The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, in a 5-0 vote, rejected the Catholic Church's application to create the first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in the U.S., taking a first step toward a long legal battle testing the concept of separation of church and state.
Board chairman Robert Franklin said it was not unusual to deny a school's application on a first vote but later approve it. Republican state officials appointed all five board members.
Franklin and other board members emphasized that they were not voting on the constitutionality of such a school but on whether the application met the board's standards.
Roman Catholic organizers propose creating the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to offer an online education for kindergarten through high school, initially for 500 students and eventually 1,500.
The church has 30 days to adjust its application to answer board concerns that included the proposed special education program and conflicts in school governance. Once a new application is submitted, the board will take another vote.
Any legal fight could test the scope of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment "establishment clause," which restricts government officials from endorsing any particular religion or promoting religion over nonreligion.
Church officials have said they hope the case will reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where a 6-3 conservative majority has taken an expansive view of religious rights, including in two rulings since 2020 concerning schools in?Maine ?and Montana.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday sued Republican U.S. Representative Jim Jordan to stop what Bragg called a "campaign of intimidation" against the criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump in New York.
The lawsuit aims to block a?subpoena ?of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who once led the Manhattan DA's multi-year investigation of Trump, by the Republican-led House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which Jordan chairs.
"Rather than allowing the criminal process to proceed in the ordinary course, Chairman Jordan and the committee are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation and obstruction," Bragg's lawyers wrote in the complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Later on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil set a hearing in the case for April 19. She gave Jordan until April 17 to respond to Bragg's complaint.
Many Republicans have portrayed Bragg's prosecution as a politically-motivated stunt to interfere in the 2024 presidential election, where Trump is seeking another White House term.
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In a surprise move, U.S. News & World Report released the?top 14 schools ?on its latest law and medical school rankings on Tuesday. The big reveal comes one week ahead of the planned release of the full rankings, which cover all 199 American Bar Association-accredited law schools.
Yale and Stanford are tied at the No. 1 spot, despite a?boycott ?among top law schools of U.S. News' popular rankings and an overhaul of its methodology. At least 12 of the top 14 schools said the publication's methodology?hurt student diversity ?and affordability.
In response to the boycott, U.S. News?overhauled ?the methodology of the law schools ranking to rely largely on ABA data, place more weight on bar passage and employment, and reduce the emphasis on Law School Admission Test scores.
U.S. News has disclosed the broad methodology changes it made in the wake of the boycott but has yet to specify the weights assigned to each metric within the new methodology.
The law schools in the top 14 remain largely unchanged from last year, although there were some significant shifts. Duke Law School moved up five spots to tie with New York University School of Law at No. 6, while Columbia Law School fell four spots to No. 8, tying with the University of Virginia School of Law.
"It’s impossible to say why Columbia dropped like they did, because we don’t know how they allocated the weights," said law school admissions consultant Mike Spivey.
Dianne Hensley, a Texas justice of the peace who sits in Waco, on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to revive her religious rights lawsuit against a judicial ethics panel that sanctioned her in 2019 over her refusal to officiate at same-sex marriage ceremonies.
Lawyers for Hensley argued in a?court filing ?that a lower appeals tribunal wrongly upheld the dismissal of her lawsuit against the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
She has declined to officiate at same-sex weddings on account of her Christian faith.
Hensley's lawsuit is not challenging the commission's?sanction . Instead, her legal team, led by conservative lawyer Jonathan Mitchell, an architect of state anti-abortion legislative efforts, is pursuing damages and an injunction against any future disciplinary action tied to performing same-sex weddings.
"The 'public warning' that the Commission issued … will remain on the books no matter what happens in this lawsuit, and it will not be disturbed by the relief that Judge Hensley is seeking," Mitchell told the justices.
Justices of the peace, who are elected and serve four-year terms, hear certain misdemeanor and civil cases and disputes involving landlords and tenants. They can officiate at weddings but are not required to, Hensley's lawyers said.
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