Post Tagged with: "Civil Liberties"

• 8 Justices Agree Constitution Protects Free Speech

  By Noah Kaplan, Courts, First Amendment, Issue Areas March 3, 2011 9:54 pm no comments

  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.

   

• Virginia Dems "Bamboozled" By Abortion Law

  Issue Areas, Reproductive Rights March 1, 2011 3:40 pm 2 comments

  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 [...]

   

• Essay: Why the ACLU’s President is a Card-Carrying Member

  Issue Areas, Outside Author February 28, 2011 5:11 pm no comments

  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.

   

• Terror on Trial

  By Caitlin Connolly, Human Rights, Issue Areas, Privacy and National Security October 1, 2010 10:46 am 1 comment

  Which is more terrifying: the imminent threat of an attack on American soil or a steady but intangible loss of civil liberties in the name of national security? This lesser-of-two-evils debate will take center stage in the controversial “terror trials” of Guantanamo detainees that kicked off Wednesday in New York [...]

   

• Article: Ricci v. DeStefano: Declaring Civil War within Title VII – By William Yeomans

  Amicus, Courts, Issue Areas, Labor and Employment, Outside Author, Race and Immigration February 25, 2010 8:19 am 2 comments

  It is the height of folly to make hard and fast predictions about the impact of freshly minted Supreme Court decisions, especially when the Court announces a new standard. Yet it is safe to predict that Ricci v. DeStefano, while not as devastating as some advocates have feared, will discourage [...]

   

• Article: The Dim Side Of The Bright Line: Minority Voting Opportunity After Bartlett v. Strickland – By Ryan P. Haygood

  Amicus, Courts, Issue Areas, Outside Author, Race and Immigration, Voting and Elections February 25, 2010 8:16 am no comments

  When he left Congress in 1901, George White, an African American Republican from Tarboro, North Carolina, announced that it was “perhaps the Negro’s temporary farewell to Congress.” Mr. White’s premonition was right. Voters from North Carolina would not send another African American to Congress until 1992, nearly a century later, [...]