Building Better Lawyers
The watchers on the walls defending rights and liberties are often lawyers, yet those lawyers must ascend to their posts themselves, their legal training preparing them little for the climb. Law schools must do more.
Post Tagged with: "Civil Liberties"
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The Creeping Control of the Everyday
The watchdogs of liberty must diversify their business. Private products and private services have come to dominate our lives, to induce our dependence and to encircle our worlds. If we sleep or look elsewhere, the circle may become a noose.
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Suicide at the Ballot Box: Vote Yes on Question 2
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will be asked to wrestle with that problem and vote up or down on Question 2. I urge them to vote yes. If Question 2 passes it [...]
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The Fight For Equal Treatment Is Not Yet Won
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 [...]
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The Naked Truth: What Florence Means for Future Detainees
To be sure, being stripped naked and visually inspected by strangers is a violation of basic dignity and personal privacy, especially in the absence of any suspicion of risk. Kennedy’s “balance” of privacy and security needs sure seems like more of a complete sacrifice of one for the other.
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Making Sense of the Establishment Clause Test for Public Displays of Religion
Each year, over 50,000 skiers and snowboarders visit the ski slopes at Big Mountain in northwest Montana, just 66 miles from the Canadian border. This year, the mountain has set the stage for a battle between atheists and religious groups over the fate of a six-foot statue of Jesus that [...]
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Resolving Conflicts Between Professional Ethics, Religious Beliefs, and Free Speech
For the last seventy-five years, Augusta, Georgia has predominantly been known for its connection to the Masters, one of the nation’s most tradition-laden events in all of sports. But less than a mile from Magnolia Lane, Augusta State University (ASU) has become embroiled in a legal controversy with a former [...]
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Update: SCOTUS justices fail to see need for new eyewitness rule
Members of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical last Wednesday when asked to establish a new constitutional rule prohibiting the use of unreliable eyewitness testimony at criminal trials. Under existing law, unreliable eyewitness testimony is excludable only when the source of unreliability stems from police misconduct. In Perry v. New Hampshire, Public [...]
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Supreme Court to Address the Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony
Eyewitness identification is widely considered to be one of the most powerful pieces of evidence a prosecutor can offer at a criminal trial. But psychologists continue to debate whether witnesses to a crime can accurately relay what they saw. The Supreme Court has debated the due process implications of such [...]
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Update: SCOTUS hears oral arguments in strip search case
At the conclusion of oral arguments on Wednesday, pundits were left guessing whether the Supreme Court would declare that Americans’ constitutional right to privacy bars prison officials from strip searching them if and when they are jailed for minor, nonviolent offenses. The case, Florence v. Bd. of Freeholders, explores both [...]
