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by Marc Jampole IN ITS CONTINUING attempt to characterize as illegal the Trump Administration’s ban on immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim countries, the New York Times has either allowed itself to be manipulated by a long-time supporter of torture or doesn’t really mean when its editors frequently write that the Times thinks torture is […]
Read Moreby Marc Jampole IT DOESN’T SURPRISE me that in the weeks after his death, the mainstream and rightwing news media have treated Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as if he were Robert E. Lee, who is traditionally presented as an admirable hero who served his country well. Both were brilliant and prominent men whose distorted […]
Read MoreThe influential legal scholar and philosopher Ronald Dworkin was born in Providence, Rhode Island on this date in 1931. An erudite contributor for several decades to the New York Review of Books, and a professor at Yale, Oxford, and NYU, among other institutions, Dworkin believed in the rightness of an interpretive approach to law, including […]
Read MoreAharon Barak became president of the Israeli Supreme Court on this date in 1995. He would serve until 2006, and was the principal creator of the “Constitution Revolution” (his phrase), by which Israeli courts were empowered to treat Israel’s Basic Laws as the country’s constitution and strike down laws that the courts judge to be […]
Read MoreSanford Levinson, a progressive critic of the U.S. Constitution and a supporter of the idea of a Second Constitutional Convention, was born on this date in 1941. A professor at the University of Texas Law School, Levinson is widely quoted for opposing the expanding powers of the U.S. Presidency (which he has described as “constitutional […]
Read Moreby Marc Jampole I’m still flabbergasted at the naiveté — or perhaps lack of experience in the world — displayed by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion upholding the right of upstate New York government officials to say Christian prayers before town meetings. Kennedy writes that the case comes down to whether people are […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor A follow-up to his article, “My Son, the Homeland Security Threat“, in our Spring 2012 issue. One can only assume that when U.S. District Court Judge Edward R. Korman issued his decision in the case of Abidor v. Napolitano on the morning of New Year’s Eve, having heard the case two and […]
Read MoreNew York’s Struggle Over Stop-and Frisk by Lawrence Bush from the Autumn, 2013 issue of Jewish Currents There were 4.4 million stop-and-frisk police actions in New York City between 2002 and 2011: that’s nearly 8,500 per week. They increased dramatically over the course of the decade, from 97,296 in 2002 to 685,724 in 2011. Close […]
Read MoreStephen G. Breyer, the son of Anne and Irving Gerald Breyer of San Francisco, was sworn in as associate justice of the Supreme Court on this date in 1994, joining Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second of three Jews on the current Court. Breyer, with degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law, clerked for Justice […]
Read MoreAmerican women at last won the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted on this date in 1920. Among the Jewish women involved in the suffrage movement were Gertrude Weil, a lifelong activist in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who organized suffrage leagues in the 1910s and civil rights actions in […]
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