16th March 2012
The Exoneration of Bennett Barbour
“Virginia knows it has DNA evidence that may prove the innocence of dozens of men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Men just like Barbour. So why won’t the state say who they are?
6th March 2012
Lawrence v Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional
“That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.
30th November 2011
Her Honor
“At the center of the growing furor over the number of justices allegedly too biased to hear the health-care case sits Elena Kagan, the newest justice, on the Court just over a year. While liberal watchdog groups are claiming that Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from the case because of his wife’s affiliation with a tea-party group that explicitly targeted the new health-care law, several conservative groups have raised similar claims about Kagan, contending that she must sit this one out because she worked as President Obama’s solicitor general when the litigation was still pending. Calls for her recusal boiled over in recent weeks when newly disclosed e-mails revealed that as she was solicitor general under Obama, Kagan celebrated with her Justice Department colleague, Laurence Tribe, when the health-care bill was passed, writing, “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing.” Her opponents say this confirms that Kagan both strategized about and advised the administration on the law, and also expressed opinions on its constitutional merits, in violation of the recusal rules.
