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Supreme Court Throws Out
Alabama By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a case requiring Alabama to give drivers license examinations in languages other than English. The case, known as Sandoval, had been used by the Clinton Administration and others to justify multilingual government services. The Supreme Court said that the case never should have been brought, and rejected the idea that federal law requires government services in languages other than English because of the effect on "non-English-speakers." Martha Sandoval, an immigrant from Mexico, sued Alabama because it gave drivers license exams only in English. Sandoval has lived in the U.S. for 17 years, but refused to learn English. So she sued, claiming that giving drivers license exams in English was "national origin discrimination" against her, which violates federal anti-discrimination law. The lower federal courts agreed with Sandoval, and ordered the state to provide drivers license exams in languages other than English. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, reversed those lower court decisions. Scalia said that private individuals, like Sandoval, could not sue government agencies under the civil rights laws unless they could show that the discrimination was intentional. Sandoval could not show that the initiative vote which declared English the official language of Alabama was intentional discrimination. Four Supreme Court justices, however, bitterly dissented, arguing that a previous case allowed private individuals to sue government agencies for failing to provide services in languages other than English. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the dissenting opinion, said "years ago all the Justices believed that private parties could . . . enjoin the provision of governmental services in a manner that discriminated against non-English speakers." The Supreme Court's rejection of the Sandoval case removes the legal reasoning behind recent expansions of language-related discrimination claims, including the recent Executive Order 13166, which requires federal government agencies, contractors and grantees to provide translation and multilingual government services upon demand. If just one vote had changed on the Supreme Court, however, those expansions would have been locked in. |
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The
ELPAC Report 