As usual when right-wing politicians want to block a strongly Democratic voting bloc from exercising their right to vote, Republicans in New Hampshire and elsewhere are trotting out the tired excuse of preventing fraud to support new bills that will curtail the ability of students, African-Americans, and other core Democratic groups from voting.
Whether you believe the Constitution is a living document, or whether you believe the Constitution is rigid and should only be interpreted according the expressed intent of the framers, we can all agree that the Constitution protects free speech (except apparently Samuel Alito). The Supreme Court sent a resounding message this week when it upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to speak in the most offensive possible voice at the most sensitive of times, at military funerals.
The African American community overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in the 2008 elections. African Americans are also the ethnic group most opposed to same sex marriage, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Thus, when President Obama and Attorney General Holder announced last week that the Department of Justice would stop defending [...]
The Washington Post this week reminds readers that abortion rights can’t defend themselves. Apparently if Democrats and Pro-Choice groups do not keep an extremely watchful eye on their anti-abortion counterparts, those rights, or at least the ability to exercise them, can vanish quickly. Republicans in the Virginia House began with [...]
When I was a third-grader in public school (in Long Beach, NY) our class play was Johnny Tremain — the story of a 14 year old boy caught up in the American Revolution. I decided to take the book version out of the school library to read the whole story but the librarian told me I wasn’t allowed to. That book was in the boy’s section. The girl’s section, as I well knew, contained collections of fairy tales and biographies of Presidents’ wives, Florence Nightingale, and Clara Barton.
As noted in an earlier Amicus post, a key reason given by Attorney General Eric Holder for why the Justice Department will NOT defend DOMA in court is that the administration believes that gays and lesbians should be subject to “some level of heightened scrutiny.” So what exactly does that [...]
Contrary to the suggestion of one Amicus author, the Justice Department today announced that it will stop defending parts of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. The Washington Post, citing many of the same arguments put forth in that Amicus post, calls the move risky. Amicus will of course continue to cover the developments on the legal and social fallout from this decision.
The HLS Middle East Law Students Association presents: Developments in Material Support Law
March 3, 2011 at 6pm, Austin North at Harvard Law School
This panel will explore the implications of the the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project and the current landscape for material support prosecutions in the US.
Co-sponsored by the Human Rights Program at HLS, the Islamic Legal Studies Program at HLS, Justice for Palestine at HLS, the National Lawyers Guild – HLS Chapter, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, ACLU-HLS, and ACS.
What started in Wisconsin is spreading to the rest of the country. Governors, especially Republican governors, are using state budget deficits to present state employees with a Hobson’s choice: diminish the bargaining power of unions of state employees or allow the state government to be insolvent. Solving deficits from the expenditure side puts the sacrifice on the backs of the poor and middle class. Raising taxes accomplishes the same goal without the same consequences.
Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice and a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the Washington Post that the Pro-Choice movement needs to change its tack. She says that the focus purely on women’s independence in making medical choices [...]
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