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Until recently, American legal historiography focused almost solely on national government. Although much of Kansas law reflects U.S. law, the state court's arbitrary powers over labor-management conflicts, yellow dog contracts, civil rights, gender issues, and domestic relations set precedents that reverberated around the country.Sunflower Justiceis a pioneering work that presents the history of a state through the use of its supreme court decisions as evidence. R. Alton Lee traces Kansas's legal history through 150 years of records, shedding light on the state's political, economic, and social history in this groundbreaking overview of Kansas legal cases and judicial biographies. Beginning with the territorial justices and continuing through the late twentieth century, R. Alton Lee covers the dispossession of Native Americans' land, the growth and impact of labor unions, antimonopoly cases against railroad and mining companies, a nine-year state ban on the movieBirth of a Nation, and implications and effects of desegregation, as well as the shooting of Dr. George Tiller for performing legal abortions. Because judicial decisions are not made in a vacuum, Lee presents each of the justices in the context of the era and their personal experiences before examining how their decisions shaped Kansas political, economic, social, and legal history.

As scholars examine the successes and failures of more than 50 years of court-ordered desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and 25 years of language education of Black youth since Martin Luther King Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board, this article revisits the key issues involved in those cases and urges educators and sociolinguists to work together to revise pedagogies. After reviewing what scholars have contributed, the author suggests the need for critical language awareness programs in the United States as one important way in which we can revise our pedagogies, not only to take the students' language into account but also to account for the interconnectedness of language with the larger sociopolitical and sociohistorical phenomena that help to maintain unequal power relations in a still-segregated society.

Lee v. Kemna, holding that a federal habeas petitioner's constitutional challenge to the basic fairness of his trial could and should be heard by the federal district court sitting on his federal habeas corpus petition, is a departure from the larger pattern. Charged with having participated in a first-degree murder in Kansas City in August 1992, Lee (at his state court trial) sought to present an alibi defense that he was in California at the time of the murder. The trial resumed \"without pause,\" and without the testimony of Lee's alibi witnesses. Both defense and prosecution referred to the absent witnesses in their closings; the jury convicted Lee after deliberating three hours, and he was sentenced to life. Justice Ginsburg's opinion for the Court agreed with Chief Judge Bennett's dissent that the state court judgment did not rest on an adequate state procedural ground. The case was remanded for a merits decision on the habeas corpus petition in the federal district court.

The percentage of African American educators in the U.S. has declined over the past 65 years while the public school populations have become more diverse. Reasons for this decline are posited from a review of the literature, including \"Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas,\" and the expanded opportunities for African Americans during this time period. To better understand and gain insights into possible reasons for the decline in African American educators, an oral history was completed of Miss Eileen Miller (1921-2010). Miss Miller, an African American teacher from Wheeling, West Virginia, taught in that city before, during, and after school desegregation. A discussion of her remembrances is situated in the literature and illuminates her life and career. While much is gained from the literature during the period, Miss Miller's story may well stand as an exemplar of the desegregation experience and as such deserves a place in the history as a talented educator who gracefully and powerfully managed her teaching career through many changes.

In their ideal world, school finance reformers would not rely on state-level lawsuits but would look to a reconstituted U.S. Supreme Court, with a liberal majority, to overturn San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the landmark decision of 1973 that declined to strike down Texas's system of school finance as a violation of equal protection. Were educational equity to be guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, a whole new world of litigation would be open to them, and interstate as well as intrastate differences and inadequacies could be attacked in federal courts. In the meantime, legislators and governors in Texas and Kansas face yet another round of lawsuits. Adapted from the source document.

Sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are inherently suspicious because they continue to incarcerate people not because of what they have done, but because of what they might do. I focus on three major criticisms of the laws. First, I use recent recidivism data to challenge the core motivation for the SVP laws—that sex offenders are monsters who cannot control themselves. Second, I situate the laws theoretically as examples of what Feeley and Simon call the “new penology. ” I argue that the SVP laws show the limited promise of the new penology— that we can use science to predict risk accurately—because the actuarial instruments used in SVP determinations make many mistakes. In making this argument, I focus particularly on the most commonly used such instrument, the Static-99. Finally, I argue that the Static-99 fails to meet the constitutional criteria laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks because it does not link an individual's mental illness to his dangerousness.

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and must be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, even if the science of global warming is equivocal and even if there may be negative effects on American industry. The state of Kansas was the first to deny an expansion permit for a coal-fired power plant based on this ruling. The denied utility, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, fought back hard—pulling political strings and mustering economic arguments supporting the expansion. In this paper, we evaluate their economic case, and find it lacking. First, Sunflower does not need the power: the expansion they propose is over four times as large as what would be needed to supply its projected needs in 2030, and it ignores new supply already created. Second, their most emphasized argument—job creation—is overstated: the majority of jobs that would result are low-paying service jobs, while virtually all of the project’s estimated value-added would accrue as corporate profits. We conclude that the corporate beneficiaries of this project are dumping a toxic project “in the middle of nowhere”—Kansas—to supply cheap power to other states. Conservation groups are already fighting this expansion based on its negative environmental impacts. We suggest that the project should be shuttered for economic reasons as well.

Kansas Supreme Court may rule that all written works produced by faculty members are the property of universities by default. The case began in 1998, when the Kansas Board of Regents, which oversees higher education in the state, produced an intellectual-property policy without consulting faculty members at Kansas's Pittsburg State University. Concerned that researchers could miss out on profits from patents on their inventions, the faculty's union filed a complaint.