Guest post by Elaine Sylvester 12 people were killed when a gunman entered a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and proceeded to open fire on the captive audience. Like many news-hungry Americans, I spent a sizable percentage of the days after combing the Internet for insight into the cruelties that we witnessed from afar. And [...]
Query: What is the connection between famine (on the one hand) and the current tangle of issues regarding the undersupply or oversupply of lawyers and legal services (on the other)? Answer: The problem in both instances may be one of distribution. As to famine… Thomas Keneally’s new book Three Famines traces the great [...]
Two cases from the mopping-up phase of the recent Supreme Court term—J.D.B. v. North Carolina and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn.—have me thinking about kids and the Constitution. These two cases join prior Court decisions that delineate the constitutional rights of minors—cases such as Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1st Amendment—children [...]
Two Fridays ago, I attended the daylong Washington, DC, Judicial Conference on implicit bias. Implicit bias, as I observed in my prior post on Connick v. Thompson, is bias that is unconscious rather than conscious. The fact that bias is implicit, however, does not mean that it is not invidious. Implicit bias [...]
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brown v. Plata puts Governor Jerry Brown in the hot seat. Prison reform in California is now mandated by law. The good news is that California can look to other states for help. One of those states, somewhat surprisingly, is Texas. This is not just [...]
Have you ever wondered about the women who ran the households of the Founding Fathers while they Declared Independence, fought the Revolutionary War, drafted and ratified the Constitution, and then governed the fledgling United States? We know quite a bit about Abigail Adams, in large part because of the vibrant letters she [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I raised the issue of implicit racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in Connick v. Thompson. Recently, I was paging through the April issue of the DC Bar's Washington Lawyer. There, on page 9, was a full-page ad for the upcoming (June) 36th Annual Judicial Conference of the [...]
To say that the recent Supreme Court case of Connick v. Thompson has racial undertones is akin to observing that the Pacific Ocean is wet. Yet a majority of the Court (in an opinion written by Justice Thomas) resolutely and steadfastly averts its eyes from race throughout the entire opinion. It is [...]
I shouldn’t quibble. When a law professor writes an academic article that is published in a law review, she is lucky to have it cited in other academic articles published in other law reviews. This is, after all, what we do. To have it not just cited but reviewed by someone who [...]