Legislation Law Prof Blog

Breaking Policy News: US and Cuba Seek to Normalize Relations

In the most significant change in US policy toward Cuba since the 1960s, President Obama and Raul Castro spoke Tuesday (the first direct communication between a US and Cuban leader since 1961) about normalizing relations. This announcement follows a series of diplomatic moves to improve the relationship between the two counties, including Cuba’s release of American Alan Gross the US’s freeing of three incarcerated Cubans.

The Obama administration also announced that it plans to re-open the US embassy in Havana and ease restrictions on travel and commerce between the two counties.

Obama’s actions to improve diplomacy between the two counties follow what he called an “outdated approach” to Cuba. “Isolation has not worked. . . It’s time for a new approach.” The administration’s plan is to promote reform in Cuba through engagement, rather than isolation.  

For more information, click here, here, and here.  

US Receives Failing Grade on Human Right to Housing Report Card

The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) recently released its Housing Report Card, giving the United States a failing grade. NLCHP’s report card examines the current level of US compliance with the human right to housing in the context of American homelessness. Specifically, NLCHP assesses steps taken by the federal government to end and prevent homelessness, as well as relevant state and local policies.

 

 

Read the full report for detailed information about each category and grade.

 

FBI’s First Ever Report on Hate Crimes Based on Gender Identity. Underwhelming.

Under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the FBI began collecting data on hate crimes committed on the basis of gender identity last year.  The FBI presented that data for the first time in this year’s annual Hate Crimes Statistics for 2013 report.  Its findings are underwhelming:  for 2013, the FBI reported only 31 hate crimes based on gender identity. 

According to the Human Right Campaign, the FBI data “does not paint a complete picture of hate crimes against LGBT Americans because of two significant factors.  First, under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the FBI only began collecting data on hate crimes committed on the basis of gender identity last year and were reported for the first time in this year’s report.  HRC remains concerned that the low number of responses for hate crimes based on gender identity and gender non-conformity -- 31 incidents -- suggests that law enforcement are mischaracterizing hate based crimes as ones based on either sexual orientation or gender. Second, current statistics only provide a partial snapshot of hate crimes in America.  As in past years, the vast majority of the participating agencies (88%) reported zero hate crimes. This means that law enforcement in those participating agencies affirmatively reported to the FBI that no hate crime incidents occurred in their jurisdiction.”

In its report on hate violence in 2013, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reported “twelve hate motivated homicides of transgender women of color in 2013, many of them occurring through the months of June through September,” and over 300 incidents of anti-transgender bias.

For a thoughtful and moving discussion of the intersection between violence, race, and gender identity, and a way forward, check out this brief talk by transgender activist, Laverne Cox.  Highly recommended.

Legislative information wants to be free

 At ALICE, we’re always excited to hear about ways that legislative data is being made more easily accessible. This is one area where information wants to be free -- and really ought to be free.

 

At the federal level, the Library of Congress maintains congress.gov, which has replaced the old Thomas library of legislative information. Most readers have probably used one or the other.

 

At the state level, state legislatures each have a website. Some are great, some are a total pain. If you want to track legislation across 50 states, it used to be that you'd have to visit 50 different clunky websites. Then the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) created a bill information service, with access limited to legislators and staff. (NCSL also maintains topic-specific databases that are searchable and open to the public.) But recently, data geeks have made state legislative information searchable by the public, through portals like Open States and Bill Track 50. 

 

For searching model law, there’s always the ALICE library. And, thanks to the good work of ALEC Exposed, even the ALEC library, which was once members-only, is now open to the public. 

 

What about cities? There are far more of them than there are states, and they have even fewer resources available for making legislative information open to the public. But here again, data geeks have been hard at work, and there seem to be great things on the horizon. Thousands of city codes are now available via municode. The next step is to make it easier to track municipal ordinances, and here Councilmatic appears to be leading the way. It was created a few years ago for the City of Philadelphia by Code for America, and the open source technology has since been redeployed by DataMade to Chicago and Oakland. In a sign that this sort of data really does want to be free, DataMade has shared the basic code that scrapes legislative data on GitHub.

 

We hope you find these resources to be useful. Know of other online portals for legislative data that we haven't included here? If so, please share them in the comments!