Sixth Circuit Allows Cleveland School Choice To Proceed
Washington, D.C.-In an order received today by the parties, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit left intact a U.S. Supreme Court order staying an injunction against the Cleveland Scholarship Program issued in August by federal district Judge Solomon Oliver.
The effect is to allow the program to continue while the case is litigated before Judge Oliver. The parties are currently preparing final briefs, and a prompt decision is expected.
The Sixth Circuit ruled that because the Supreme Court already had stayed Judge Oliver’s injunction, no further action was necessary.
“I hope that Judge Oliver will not even consider issuing an injunction at any future point in this litigation, no matter what he decides on the merits,” declared Clint Bolick, the litigation director for the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice, which represents families receiving scholarships. “The Supreme Court has spoken clearly: while the lawyers argue, leave these kids alone.”
Most of the nearly 4,000 children in the program have remained in private schools despite the legal turmoil.
The Institute for Justice is a libertarian public interest law firm. Through strategic litigation, training, communications, and outreach, the Institute for Justice advances a rule of law under which individuals can control their own destinies as free and responsible members of society. It litigates to secure economic liberty, school choice, private property rights, freedom of speech, and other vital individual liberties, and to restore constitutional limits on the power of government. In addition, it trains law students, lawyers, and policy activists in the tactics of public interest litigation to advance individual rights. Through these activities the Institute challenges the ideology of the welfare state and illustrates and extends the benefits of freedom to those whose full enjoyment of liberty is denied by government. The Institute was founded in September 1991 by William Mellor and Clint Bolick.
