Like me, I imagine that many young, idealistic, progressive law students begin their legal educations under the impression that federal courts act—to use Professor Michael Klarman’s witty, if not slightly sardonic turn of phrase—as counter-majoritarian heroes. As such, federal judges are just chomping at the bit to protect marginalized minorities [...]
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.
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.
You know oral argument isn’t going well when a justice of the Court asks you to defend your decision not to throw in the towel already. Yet that is precisely what happened to Donna Andrieu, an assistant district attorney from New Orleans, charged with defending her office’s decision to withhold [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Fueled by the lingering (and largely erroneous) perception of a liberal judiciary, Republican presidential candidates are calling for new legislation to curb the power of federal judges. As the Washington Post reports, a majority of the Republican field is calling for some sort of judicial reform, including the abolition of [...]
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 [...]
When 96-year-old Dorothy Cooper was born, women were legally barred from voting. With the passage of Tennessee’s new voter identification law, women’s access to the polls is once again in jeopardy. As of last year, Tennessee law requires voters to present a valid, government-issued ID before casting a vote in [...]
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