Good Riddance to Anthony Kennedy—Now #PackTheCourts
A bad judge and a worse writer leaves American democracy with a political organizing crisis.
Read MoreTag Archives: Supreme Court
AKA “Notorious RBG”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman in history to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1933. In 1954, she was one of nine women in a class of more than 500 at Harvard Law, before graduating at the top of her class at Columbia Law in 1959. […]
Read MoreQuick Takes: Supreme Court to Devastate Organized Labor?
by Ralph Seliger photo credit: AFSCME Council 31 A CASE now in consideration before the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to undermine the right of public employees to be represented in collective bargaining. Officially known as Janus vs. AFSCME Council 31, the case takes the form of a lawsuit brought by an Illinois state employee named Mark Janus, […]
Read MoreNotes from Charlottesville: Free Speech is Not an Absolute Right
by Ralph Seliger IN RECENT WEEKS, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has drawn criticism for helping the “alt-right” get its permit to demonstrate in Charlottesville. After the fact, the ACLU backtracked, declaring that if it had known in advance that many of these white supremacists would be coming armed, its position would have been […]
Read MoreThe Fight for Labor in the Public Sector
LESSONS FROM AN ENDURING LOCAL, SSEU 371 by Alexander Bernhardt Bloom From the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents THE PHONES rarely stopped ringing in the wing of the union’s headquarters assigned to Grievances. This was a good place for me to begin, explained Shirley. Here I’d get to know the members and their work through their […]
Read MoreFebruary 1: The First Black Secretary of State
Francis Lewis Cardozo, the son of a free black woman and a Sephardic Jewish father who became the first African American in history to hold statewide office when he became South Carolina’s secretary of state in 1868, was born in Charleston on this date in 1836. Cardozo’s parents were forbidden by law to marry but […]
Read MoreJanuary 20: The ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded on this date in 1920 by a committee that included Felix Frankfurter, who would become a Supreme Court justice nineteen years later, and Morris Ernst, who served as the organization’s general counsel for thirty years (1929-59). Ernst had, three years earlier, co-founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau, […]
Read MoreJanuary 18: Curt Flood and Marvin Miller
Three-time All-Star baseball player Curt Flood (a .293 lifetime hitter in fifteen seasons), who reached out to Marvin Miller to sue Major League Baseball in 1969 in defiance of the “reserve clause” — a case that reached the Supreme Court and helped transform the status of professional baseball players — was born in Houston, Texas […]
Read MoreThe Jewish Jefferson
by Dusty Sklar Discussed in this essay: Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet, by Jeffrey Rosen. Yale University Press, 2016, 266 pages. YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, as part of its “Jewish Lives” series, has just published Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his Supreme Court confirmation. It’s not a full-blown biography, but […]
Read MoreJune 26: Same-Sex Marriage Becomes Law of the Land
The U.S. Supreme Court’s three Jewish members, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Elena Kagan, joined Sonia Sotomayor and Anthony Kennedy in declaring on this date in 2015, by a 5-4 vote, that outlawing same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Twelve years earlier, also on June 26, the Court said in Lawrence v. Texas that laws […]
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