Tag: Justice

Secrecy and speechifying, collegiality and hierarchy, exceptionalism and opulence on the Supreme Court.

In law school, they told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me.

The SCOTUS opinion upholding the Muslim ban might not be legally wrong, but shouldn’t the court look at what is just as well as what is legal?

Is prosecuting crimes about justice, or conviction rates? In Shelby County, Tennessee, the answer isn’t so clear.

In Harper’s, Solnit considers who has access to what spaces, and with what limitations?

Mitigation specialist Jennifer Wynn investigates the upbringings of defendants on trial — often for their lives — to humanize clients in a bid to convince at least one juror to bypass the death penalty for a life in prison without parole.

At The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv profiles Albert Woodfox, a man originally sentenced to 50 years in prison for robbery. A member of the Black Panthers and the Angola 3, Woodfox spent over four decades in solitary confinement, despite a stunning lack of evidence against him in a prison murder.

What is lawful is not always identical to what is right. Sometimes it falls to a judge to align the two. Ward’s judgment runs to more than eighty closely typed pages. It is beautifully written, delicate and humane, philosophically astute, ethically sensitive, and scholarly, with a wide range of historical and legal references. The best […]