The Supreme Court issued a plurality opinion holding that Ehrlich Anthony Coker’s sentence of death for the rape of an adult woman was “grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Unlike other cases from the era, which focused on the procedures for administering capital punishment, the Court found the death penalty excessive for the crime of rape regardless of the procedures used to reach that determination. Notably, an amicus brief authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, outlining the feminist case against applying the death penalty in cases of rape, did not serve as the basis for the plurality’s reasoning. Instead, the Court adopted rationales that many consider to be patriarchal and patronizing toward women.

Exclusionary discipline practices, in US public schools, have a historic, disproportionate, negative impact on black and Hispanic American youth, in particular those receiving special education services. Use and overuse of exclusionary discipline limits students’ ability to access academic and social success. At its root, exclusionary discipline is a civil and human rights issue. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, social justice movements internationally and in the United States served an important means to achieve and sustain civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of individuals. This chapter provides a broad context for these civil, disability and human rights-based movements and connects to current social justice approaches in education, schoolwide positive behavioral support (SWPBIS) and the potential for SWPBIS to act as a vehicle for social justice in school discipline. Over twenty years of evidence document that SWPBIS is an empirically valid systems approach to reducing exclusionary discipline. Recent adaptations to SWPBIS align with recommendations from 2014 guidelines from the federal Department of Education to explicitly address disciplinary equity. The result has been state, district, and regional impact on disciplinary equity, and decreases in the social and academic gap between black, Hispanic, students with individualized education programs, and their white peers.