NewsTrust - Law - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Things Not to Be Thankful For - Silverdome, Goldman Sachs & Congressional Recess

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Nov. 20 (Comedy News) - Detroit sells its Silverdome for less than a one-bedroom apartment, Goldman Sachs reports huge profits, and three congressmen warn New Yorkers of terrorism.

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The right's nonsensical arguments against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Opposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

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Accept the facts – and end this futile 'war on drugs'

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Nov. 10 (Opinion) - The prohibitionists are – from the best intentions and the highest motives – unleashing a catastrophe. Human beings have been finding ways to get stoned or high since we lived in caves. In our attempt to end this natural impulse, we have created a problem worse than drug use itself.

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Why women might make better judges

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati, Mirya Holman, Eric Posner - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Justice Sonia Sotomayor's elevation to the Supreme Court brought to the surface a long-simmering controversy about the relationship between gender and judging. Are female nominees for judicial positions chosen based on affirmative action? If so, are women on the bench worse judges than men—or do they come with advantages that men lack? This controversy has legs. If Justice Ginsburg is forced to retire this term because of illness, reducing the number of female justices from two to one, there will be a great deal of pressure on President Obama to nominate another female jurist. Or if Justice John Paul Stevens retires, why not three women on the high court?

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The Meaning of Freedom

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Sep. 29 (Editorial) - The question is far from academic, as illustrated poignantly by the case of brothers Bahtiyar Mahnut and Arkin Mahmud. As reported by The Post's Del Quentin Wilber, the brothers are Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who face oppression, intimidation and often

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We must stop the 'vulture funds' that feed on the world's poor

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Sep. 18 (Opinion) - Would you ever march up to a destitute African who is shivering with Aids and demand he "pay back" tens of thousands of pounds he didn't borrow – with interest? I only ask because this is in effect happening, here, in British and American courts, time after time. Some of the richest people in the world are making profit margins of 500 per cent by shaking money out of the poorest people in the world – for debt they did not incur.

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Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Charles C. Krulak, Joseph P. Hoar - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

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Campaign-spending case will be a big test for Chief Justice Roberts

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By E. J. Dionne - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - The full impact of what the U.S. Supreme Court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Will the court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

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Treatment of prisoner dents Obama promise to end such practices

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - No, this does not match the worst abuses of the Bush era, but it is close enough that it must surely disillusion and dismay those who thought a corner was turned on Jan. 20. It must leave them hoping that faith was not misplaced. Sometimes a dented promise is worse than no promise at all.

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Is half a torture investigation better than none at all?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - Holder has fallen prey to the sort of magical legal thinking that seeps through the whole CIA report: the presumption that if there's a legal memo, it must be legal.

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The Government and the Web

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Aug. 25 (Editorial) - The government must build robust privacy protections into any tracking technology used on government Web sites.

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An Immigration Prosecution Shows Abuses of Federal Power

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Jon Entine - Jul. 21 (Opinion) - What are the consequences when the wheels of justice begin to grind, assuming a logic that sometimes precludes reason and fairness.

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Congress must assert its right to oversee the intelligence community

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - Jul. 14 (Editorial) - U.S. intelligence operations require secrecy and operational flexibility, but the programs do not operate outside or above the law. All Americans need to know whose authority was invoked by Vice President Cheney when he ordered Congress be denied information the law says it must receive. Congress and the White House can stay focused on the issues before them. These are not political hunting expeditions, but specific grievances grounded in a legal system others actively chose to ignore.

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Now Can We Investigate?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By William Rivers Pitt - Jul. 13 (Opinion) - Half a dozen times since his inauguration, President Obama has seen his agenda depth-charged by a report on some nefarious activity by the previous administration. Not only have his plans and intentions been derailed by these reports - whether they be about torture, government secrecy, indefinite detention, or whatever else - he has himself become culpable for the damage done by either trying to ignore these transgressions or by adopting them himself.

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Rep. Reyes: CIA 'Deliberately Lied' To Intel Panel

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Public Radio - Jul. 11 (Interview) - The CIA last week launched a review of how it briefs key members of Congress after House Democrats complained that the CIA has been misleading Congress for the past eight years. House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes says his committee was "deliberately lied to."

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Michael Kinsley - Small Steps Could Mean Big Savings on Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael Kinsley - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - To achieve the goals of health-care reform -- universal coverage and reducing costs -- is it really necessary to overhaul our entire health-care system? The answer is probably yes. No one would design anything like our current system if he or she were starting from scratch. Why try to renovate this ancient mess of leaky pipes and rotting wood? Why not tear it down and replace it with something shiny and new?

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Two Standards of Detention

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Amy Goodman - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - Nonviolent activists like Stepanian, and Muslims like Hashmi, secretly and dubiously charged, are held in draconian conditions, while Roeder trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s decades-long campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.

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Letters - The Firefighters’ Test - Flawed or Fair? - NYTimes.com

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - First, you argue that the test for firefighter promotions in New Haven was flawed, and possibly illegal, because different groups achieved widely different results on the test. But the standard for determining the validity of such a test should not be that every group pass it at roughly proportional rates, as you prefer, but that its questions are germane to the positions it was designed for.

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School Days

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Jun. 08 (Interview) - William G. Bowen joined the faculty of Princeton in 1958. He became provost in 1967 and served as president of Princeton from 1972, the year Sonia Sotomayor matriculated as a freshman, until 1988. At Princeton, Bowen was involved in the decision to admit women to the university and recruit more minority applicants and faculty, and his 1998 book, “The Shape of the River,” co-written with the former Harvard University president Derek Bok, was the first extensive study of affirmative action in university admissions.

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Diverse Opinions

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - In making nominations to the Supreme Court, Presidents care about diversity, which is a relatively new term for an idea that is nearly as old as the Court itself. In the early days of the republic, when regional disputes were the foremost conflict of the era, nominees were generally defined by their home turfs

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Sit Down, Ted Olson and David Boies

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By William N. Eskridge Jr., Darren Spedale - May. 30 (Opinion) - Adversaries in Bush v. Gore, Ted Olson and David Boies are a power couple of super-lawyers supporting same-sex marriage. Dismayed that California voters overrode their state Supreme Court's guarantee of marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples, Boies and Olson have brought a federal constitutional lawsuit to invalidate the voters' action.

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Obama’s Anti-Roberts

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By E.J. Dionne Jr. - May. 28 (Opinion) - Liberals should support Obama’s nominee, but they shouldn’t think she’s one of their own.

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Close Read: See You in Court

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - May. 23 (Opinion) - The practice of rendition, the conditions at Guantanamo, the lack of evidence and tainting of evidence, and, above all, the prior Administration’s paralytic fear of the courts and of the Constitution—did all that make it more expedient to simply shuffle them off to Yemen or Saudi Arabia?

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Annals of Law: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - May. 18 (Opinion) - In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

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It's not just liberals who play the empathy card.

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Doug Kendall, Dahlia Lithwick - May. 18 (Opinion) - We have heard a great deal this week from the right about the stomach-churning evils of empathy. How it's a call to "emotive," lawless, unhinged judicial conduct that turns the federal bench into a cross between Oprah's studio and a lunatic asylum. The quality of empathy—which President Obama has said is a priority in a Supreme Court pick—has been derided, mocked, scorned, and brought into close contact with Michael Steele's behind. Which makes it rather problematic when you consider that conservatives have in fact been playing the empathy card a lot more effectively than progressives in recent years.

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