Last week, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted a request by Proskauer and our co-counsel, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) to block efforts by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) to be released from a court-supervised desegregation plan first imposed on the district in the 1970s.
MALDEF has represented Latino plaintiffs in the desegregation case since it was first filed in 1974. Thereafter, MALDEF’s case was combined with a lawsuit filed on behalf of African American students who similarly claimed that there was a longstanding pattern of racial segregation in TUSD’s school operations and curriculum. In 1978, a court agreed that there was intentional discrimination against Latino and African American students, and ordered the schools to be desegregated under court supervision.