It has stifled suffrage, blamed immigrants for chaos, and suppressed civil rights. It’s also how Donald Trump views the entire world.
law
Posted inEditor's Pick
Strangers in a Cruel Land
The wretched state of U.S. immigration enforcement, becoming more wretched by the day.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Women Are Less Likely to Be Exonerated Using DNA Evidence
In a recent piece for Mother Jones, Molly Redden looked at why it can be particularly hard for wrongfully convicted women to be exonerated (Women make up about 11 percent of the people convicted of violent crimes, but just 6 percent of those exonerated of violent crimes). Despite their good intentions, most innocence projects fail to bring […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The ‘Stunt’ That Helped Pass a Barrier-Breaking Law
In 1990, a group of activists and legislators fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gathered on the steps of the Capitol to make a statement. Writing for Curbed about the act’s 1990 passage and its impacts over the last quarter century, Patrick Sisson details how the group dramatized the difficulties faced […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Another Supreme Court Death Penalty Ruling, Issued 43 Years Ago Today
In a headline-making decision issued earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled against three Oklahoma death row inmates in Glossip v. Gross, upholding the use of a sedative called midazolam for lethal injections. Interestingly, Glossip v. Gross isn’t the first time the court has issued a major death penalty decision on June 29. 43 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued another 5-to-4 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Cass Sunstein Remembers Thurgood Marshall
You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like? He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Privacy vs. Equality in the Supreme Court
There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The 1944 Court Decision That Changed Hollywood
The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history: Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Link Rot, or Why the Web May Be Killing Footnotes
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Law Is Human and Flawed
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 […]