Legislation

We opposed legislation which would have authorized a civil action against parents who demonstrate “willful or wanton disregard” in their exercise of “supervision and control” over a child who has committed the offense of cyberstalking or cyberharassment.

We urged amendments to legislation which would allows allowing hotels to eject patrons who use “verbally abusive language.”

As a piece of explicit voter suppression legislation, we opposed this bill which sought to criminalize “ballot harvesters,” but was so broadly worded that it could have subjected every single voter in Rhode Island to potential prison time if passed.

Though we strongly supported the goal of ensuring more eligible voters are added to the voter rolls, we opposed legislation which would have allowed the DMV to make determinations about a person’s citizenship for purposes of automatically registering them to vote.

We strongly supported a bill which will ensure that information on school-based arrests or SRO-related incidents on school campuses, including the number of SROs employed by a school, is made publicly available.

We strongly supported a piece of legislation which would have expanded the definition of race under our state anti-discrimination laws to include “traits historically associated with race,” importantly including hair texture and protective hairstyles.

At a meeting of a state legislative commission designed to examine the impact of the criminalization of sex work, we testified in favor of decriminalization of these offenses and provided a number of other policy recommendations on the topic.

This importance piece of anti-discrimination legislation would have amended the state Fair Employment Practices Act to prohibit an employer from requiring that an employee enter a non-disclosure or non-disparagement agreement as a condition of employment.

We supported this legislation which would have generally prohibited employers from using credit history as a component of the hiring process, noting that it could place unnecessary barriers to individual’s seeking employment.