Is it legal for a public US university to advise its employees to purchase from businesses owned by people of color? A public US university I'm familiar with is promoting an anti-racism initiative. As part of this initiative, a web article posted on the university's diversity web portal (which was advertised in an email newsletter to the university community) contains a list of suggested actions that employees and departments can take to advance the cause of anti-racism. One of the actions on the list is to support businesses owned by people of color. The recommendation is accompanied by links to various lists of black-owned businesses in the region. Is it legal for a public US university administration to advise its employees to patronize businesses owned by people of a specific race, both in their private lives and in the transaction of official university business?
Advising employees to take some lawful action is legal, and is speech protected by the US Constitution. Campaigning for a political candidate could jeopardize the university's tax-exempt status, but there is no law requiring a university, even a government university, to remain politically neutral. That alone answers the question. Whether or not the university could itself pursue racially-weighted business policies depends on what they are doing and what state it is in. It is generally legal to adopt policies that address discrimination, but 9 states have laws banning affirmative action. The cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger establish that &quot;blanket policies&quot; run counter to the requirements of the 14th Amendment, but race can be used as a factor in making decisions. Here is a list or affirmative action related decisions in the US. As applied to a state's affirmative action programs, the standard of legality would be having a clear goal of limited scope without other workable race-neutral means to achieve it.
Were two black men legally removed from a Philadelphia Starbucks? Maybe - its complicated. The crime of trespass in Pennsylvania relevantly involves: 3503 (b) Defiant trespasser.-- (1) A person commits an offense if, knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so, he enters or remains in any place as to which notice against trespass is given by: (i) actual communication to the actor; At face value, the store manager asked them to leave and by refusing to do so they committed the crime. However: (c) Defenses.--It is a defense to prosecution under this section that: (2) the premises were at the time open to members of the public and the actor complied with all lawful conditions imposed on access to or remaining in the premises; or If the condition imposed was &quot;buy something or get out&quot; then that would be a lawful condition and trespass would have been committed. If the condition was &quot;because you're black&quot; then that would be an unlawful condition and trespass would not have been committed. Now, the evil and insidious thing about unlawful discrimination is that there are lots of perfectly lawful masquerades that it can wear. Indeed, except in egregious cases, the unlawful discrimination can only be inferred by a holistic look at a large number of interactions to see where any particular one falls on the scale. That said, this particular case feels like racial discrimination. With respect to Starbucks, if they could show evidence that it routinely asks people of all ethnicities who did not make a purchase to leave then this would not be racial discrimination - just bad business practice. However, given the particular business model of providing a place to rest along with an opportunity to buy sub-standard coffee it seems unlikely that this was the case (I'm Australian so I completely fail to understand why Americans insist on drinking bad coffee). With respect to the police, this is a little less clear. It is not their job to determine how a court (or DA) might decide a case: its their job to determine if they have probable cause to believe a crime is or has been committed. They have a store manager who has asked people to leave and people who are refusing to do so - probable cause for trespass. That said, police have discretion as to how to handle the situation: they could talk to the manager, they could ask the patrons to leave or they could arrest them. They can use their discretion however they like: unless it is based on unlawful discrimination. Which brings us back to the beginning.
Since this apparently amends the law giving colleges and universities the power to adopt and enforced various regulations, what it really means is that if such an institution adopts a rule in violation of this law, it may not legally enforce that law. It might also give an affected student a right to sue if such a rule is adopted and enforced. As a comment by ohwilleke mentions, such a law might well authorize a court to issue an injunction forbidding the institution from enforcing the kind of rule prohibited by the law. Note that it is not at all uncommon to have &quot;or else&quot; provisions in different sections of the law. For example Section 123 of the (hypothetical) New France state code might prohibit having a faked driver's license, section 124 prohibit obtaining a license through false or misleading statements on nthe application, and section 458 say &quot;anyone who violates sections 123, 124, 125, or 126 shall be fined up to $2,000, or imprisoned for up to 1 year, or both, as a court may think just&quot;. Thus it is not always easy to find what penalties, if any, apply to a code section.
In the US at least, discrimination is legal (and sometimes even required) unless it is discrimination against specific, protected characteristics, and even then it is sometimes allowable if it is "necessary". Income, whether of an individual or that individual's family, is not in any list of protected characteristics. As such, discrimination upon it is fully legal.
Yes they can You are approaching this from the wrong direction. Their right to enforce what you can and can't do doesn't come from radio-spectrum law; it comes from property and contract law. You are on their property subject to a license that they give you to be there. One of the terms of that license is that you won't set up or operate a wireless network. No doubt there are other things you are not permitted to do; for example, you may not be able to sell goods and services. If you breach the terms of the license then you are trespassing and they are within their rights to have you removed. In addition, if you are a student (or staff), this is probably one of the terms of your contract with the university. If you breach it, they can terminate your candidature (employment). Contracts can impose obligations on you that goes beyond what the law obliges you to do. Indeed, there is no contract if it only requires what is already required.
In general, employers in the United States are free to fire you for your speech. The First Amendment does not apply to anyone except the government (other than a narrow set of circumstances where private parties act on behalf of the government or take on government roles, like when private universities employ campus police). If the officer was being fired from a job at a private company, this would not be an interesting question -- the answer would clearly be "no, there is no First Amendment claim here." That’s not to say labor laws might not come into play (for instance, federal law prohibits firing an employee for organizing a union, and some states prohibit firing for off-duty political speech); however, labor law protections exist by statute and are not derived from the First Amendment. What makes this interesting is that the government is involved. Unlike private employers, government agencies are bound by the First Amendment. In Pickering v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that this does restrict them in their role as employer and that they can't necessarily fire an employee for speech. Pickering imposes a balancing test, where the harm to the employee's First Amendment rights is weighed against the government's interest in efficient operation. Courts have given particular leeway to police departments punishing speech that would undermine public trust and confidence in the department. A police officer expressing racist views, even privately, can seriously hamper the effectiveness of the department if the speech gets linked back to them. For instance, see Pappas v. Giuliani, where the Second Circuit upheld the firing of an NYPD officer for anonymously mailing racist diatribes from home in his off-duty time. Another answer suggests that the main question is a public safety one: whether the officer could be trusted to carry out his duties without bias. But that's not the only legitimate consideration for the government employer. The courts have repeatedly held that public perception of an agency is a legitimate concern, especially when it comes to agencies (like the police) whose job requires maintaining good relations with the community. In Pappas, the officer was assigned as a computer operator who had no contact with the public, but he was still a police officer whose speech had a high potential to undermine NYPD community relations.
The spectrum of &quot;illegal&quot; is broad. One way in which racial epithets are (indirectly) illegal is via anti-discrimination laws, indeed labeled &quot;harassment&quot; by the EEOC Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy), national origin, older age (beginning at age 40), disability, or genetic information (including family medical history). Harassment becomes unlawful where 1) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or 2) the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Anti-discrimination laws also prohibit harassment against individuals in retaliation for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or lawsuit under these laws; or opposing employment practices that they reasonably believe discriminate against individuals, in violation of these laws. If an employer tolerates racial epithets, they are likely to be the target of a harassment lawsuit. There is no limit on who utters the epithet, thus a customer can be the trigger for a suit. In cases not involving supervisory employees, liability arises if the employer &quot;knew, or should have known about the harassment and failed to take prompt and appropriate corrective action&quot;. Analogously, racial epithets in educational institutions are actionable. Framed in terms of a random epithet by a non-employee or campus visitor (where the institution has minimal leverage over the offender), the institution must act, when it becomes aware of such circumstances arising, and cannot just say &quot;What can we do??&quot;. A second (remote) possibility is through the fighting words doctrine, that the government can limit speech that is &quot;likely to incite immediate violence or retaliation by the recipients of the words&quot;. This arose initially in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire – one of the holdings was that The Court notices judicially that the appellations &quot;damned racketeer&quot; and &quot;damned Fascist&quot; are epithets likely to provoke the average person to retaliation, and thereby cause a breach of the peace. There have been numerous refinements of the doctrine over the decades, so the mere utterance of a racial epithet would not run afoul of properly-restrained &quot;breach of peace&quot; laws. One of the two most-relevant current opinions is Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, where the court held that the government cannot forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action but uttering an epithet is not advocacy of force or law violation. The second is R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 US 377 where defendant was charged with violating an ordinance that prohibits the display of a symbol which one knows or has reason to know &quot;arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender&quot; SCOTUS ruled that &quot;the First Amendment does not permit a state to use content discrimination to achieve a compelling interest if it is not necessary to achieve that interest&quot; (emphasis added), holding that A few limited categories of speech, such as obscenity, defamation, and fighting words, may be regulated because of their constitutionally proscribable content. However, these categories are not entirely invisible to the Constitution, and government may not regulate them based on hostility, or favoritism, towards a nonproscribable message they contain. Thus the regulation of &quot;fighting words&quot; may not be based on nonproscribable content. It may, however, be underinclusive, addressing some offensive instances and leaving other, equally offensive, ones alone, so long as the selective proscription is not based on content, or there is no realistic possibility that regulation of ideas is afoot. A further holding is that the law is is facially unconstitutional because it imposes special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on the disfavored subjects of &quot;race, color, creed, religion or gender.&quot; At the same time, it permits displays containing abusive invective if they are not addressed to those topics. Moreover, in its practical operation the ordinance goes beyond mere content, to actual viewpoint, discrimination. The court has not clearly identified a context in which a law against a racial epithet would be constitutional, they have simply identified other bars that would have to be cleared for such a law to be permissible. No utterance, devoid of context, is illegal, so to discover where such an utterance could be part of a prosecutions, we would need a lot of specific context in the hypothetical.
It may be discrimination, but it is not discrimination based upon any reason that the company is prohibited from engaging in. This conduct is legal in pretty much all U.S. jurisdictions.