Supreme

• Candidly, the leading AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform, released today its 2023 Impact Report, which highlights customer profiles and shares key milestones met by the company in 2023.
• Achievements featured in the report include surpassing $1 billion in projected impact over the life of the loans of its end users, the vast majority of whom are offered Candidly as a workplace benefit from their employer.
• This number represents the total dollar impact that Candidly users are on track to realize as a result of actions taken and payments facilitated through the Candidly platform; for example, dollars saved on interest from extra payments, monthly savings from income-driven repayment plans, and projected forgiveness amounts.
• Tax-Advantaged Student Loan Employer Contributions - Candidly tripled the dollars sent to student debt via employer-sponsored student loan repayment contributions in 2023.

• AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Covenant Clearinghouse, the nation's largest trustee and servicer of real estate assessments, is pleased to announce that it has retained Lawrence S. Robbins, of the firm Friedman Kaplan, to represent the company in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
• Larry clerked for the Honorable John Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, an Assistant to the U.S.
• Solicitor General, and an Associate Independent Counsel, and was a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Mayer Brown LLP.
• His virtually unrivaled appellate experience includes arguing 20 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court (most recently Ruan v. U.S., No.

• Ron DeSantis had his way, the word “woke” would be banished from public use and memory.
• As he promised in Iowa in December 2023 during his failed presidential campaign, “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress.
• Back then, the word was used as a warning to be aware of racial injustices in general and Southern white folks in particular.

The early days of wokeness

• Examples of its use – in various forms of the word “awake” – date back to before the Civil War in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned newspaper.
• Because education and literacy were “of the highest importance,” the editors wrote, it was “surely time that we should awake from this lethargy of years” during enslavement.
• In a 1904 editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American, for instance, the editors urged Black people to “Wake up, wake up!” and demand full-citizenship rights.
• Wake up Africa!” At around the same time, blues singers were using the word to hide protest messages in the language of love songs.

A miscarriage of justice

On March 25, 1931, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, falsely accused a group of
several Black young men of rape.
Based on their words, the nine Black men – ages 12 to 19 years old – were immediately arrested and in less than two weeks, all were tried, convicted, and with one exception, sentenced to death.

• All the cases were appealed and eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
• In its 1932 Powell v. Alabama decision, the court overturned the verdicts in part because prosecutors excluded potential Black jurors from serving during the trial.
• But instead of freedom, the cases were retried – and each of the “Scottsboro Boys” was found guilty again.

How woke became a four-letter word

• Over the years, the memory of the Scottsboro Boys has remained a part of Black consciousness and of staying woke.
• Two years later, a documentary on the group was called “Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement.”

• When asked to define the term in June 2023, DeSantis explained: “It’s a form of cultural Marxism.
• Civic literacy requires an understanding of the social causes and consequences of human behavior – the very essence of being woke.

Ronald E. Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings which had struck out Smith’s ambitious claim seeking to establish civil (tort) liability for those emitters’ contributions to climate change.
• With the Supreme Court decision, Smith has won the right to present his full case before the High Court.

The case against the corporate emitters

• Smith argued the activities and effects of the corporate defendants amount to three forms of “tort” or civil wrong: public nuisance, negligence, and a new form of civil wrong described as a “proposed climate system damage tort”.
• Read more:
  Children's climate change case at the European Court of Human Rights: what's at stake?
• The first two causes of action – public nuisance and negligence – have long lineages in the common law.
• A key plank of the corporate emitters’ argument was that the courts “are ill-suited to deal with a systemic problem of this nature with all the complexity entailed”.

The challenges of establishing causation

• Questions of causation and proximity have been stumbling blocks for litigants overseas attempting to bring similar tort claims to Smith’s.
• In this case, the seven corporate emitters are associated with around 30% of total New Zealand emissions.
• The court suggested that there may be scope for adjusting the causation rules to better reflect the nature of modern environmental issues like climate change.

What role for tikanga and where now?

• Recent Supreme Court decisions have accepted and applied tikanga as the “first law of New Zealand” including in relation to environmental protection.
• The Court followed that approach in this case, accepting that crucial aspects of Smith’s case rely on tikanga principles.
• The court pronounced that “addressing and assessing matters of tikanga simply cannot be avoided”.

Vernon Rive has previously received funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation.