Arizona can’t ban Mexican-American studies anymore, judge says

Conservative lawmakers led by then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and then-state Sen. John Huppenthal, who later succeeded Horne, derided Tucson’s Mexican-American studies curriculum as an anti-American politicization of public school classrooms. To shut the classes down, they spearheaded the passage of a state law in 2010 that prohibited classes aimed at students of a specific ethnicity, that fostered racial discord or that encouraged the overthrow of the U.S. government.

In Wednesday’s judgment, however, Tashima wrote that conservative lawmakers passed the ethnic studies restrictions “not for a legitimate educational purpose, but for an invidious discriminatory racial purpose and a politically partisan purpose.”

No officials may carry out any part of the law, the judgment says. Tashima ruled in August that the law violates the students’ First Amendment rights by restricting information and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by targeting Latinos.