Even if the bombings and the shootings and yesterday’s regional lockdown have been occupying the national (and even international) media, it is important to work through some of the legal implications of these events.
Guest Post by Jacob Alderdice, HLS ’14 Harvard PLAP Panel on Solitary Confinement Solitary confinement, a practice that has been under scrutiny for hundreds of years, continues to be widespread within United States prisons. Despite abundant medical literature detailing the severe and disastrous effects such isolation can cause, correctional [...]
“Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age” Feb. 19, 2013 Watch the lecture here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HAw1i4gOU4&feature=youtu.be. PLEASE WATCH IT Professor Larry Lessig, the most famous legal scholar of the internet gave his chair lecture today in Harvard Law’s Ames Courtroom, which was packed with students, professors, [...]
Reviving the trespassory model of the Fourth Amendment, the Court in U.S. v. Jones has raised more questions about data privacy than it answered. If the mere existence and transmission of data can signal a lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy, the only way to demonstrate a subjective interest in privacy will be to go off the grid. There has to be a better way.
Many on the political and legal left—including, perhaps most prominently, Glenn Greenwald—have routinely expressed their staunch disapproval of the Obama Administration’s handling of civil liberties in the realm of national security. Their bill of particulars is lengthy and spans his entire presidency; a small but notorious sampling of these charges [...]
Today’s national Civil Rights dialogue focuses largely on immigration, reproductive issues, and LGBTQ rights. Certainly, each of these issues critically requires our nation’s attention, but they should not be discussed to the exclusion of “old fashioned” racial discrimination. The African-American Civil Rights Movement is the foundation upon which these movements [...]
Rather than condemning the profligacy of the State in providing basic human rights for its most marginalized, we must continue to demand positive rights for all. Demanding humane treatment of inmates is substantively necessary, but can also be strategically valuable because it is one of the few spaces in our jurisprudence that recognizes the language of positive human rights.
Can we square the invocation of evolving standards of decency with the recognized fact that the criminal justice system in the United States is, in general, far more punitive than it once was? I think that we can, if we allow for a fuller recognition of both the compromises that go into legislation and the expression of social values in extra-legal settings.
In Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Despite Justice Kagan’s protestations, the Court was not eliminating an outlying vestige of once common, brutal punishment, but instead a practice that was common. The holding suggests the Court may be willing to take a more activist role in monitoring state criminal justice systems.
United States v. Pleau raises legal questions that deserve more attention than the case is likely to receive. The case can actually be seen as being about the location of the primary police power in the American system of constitutional federalism, and it exposes the increasing strain that the modern conception of federal power is placing on the founding era experiment in dual sovereignty. Pleau should challenge progressives to think critically about the desirable scope of the federal government’s power under the Commerce Clause.
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