|
|
Cohen is the author of Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America
When protesters gather in Chicago this week to express their views about the NATO summit, people will be able to videotape the police and post videos of any police misconduct. Recording the police used to be illegal in Illinois. But this month, a federal appeals court ruled that a state wiretap law prohibiting it conflicts [...]
The cringe-inducing low point of the John Edwards trial so far was when a campaign aide testified about an airport encounter between Edwards and his breast-cancer-stricken wife. Reacting to a National Enquirer report that he was having an affair, Elizabeth Edwards “collapsed in a ball” in a parking lot then got up, tore off her [...]
If the Supreme Court upholds Arizona’s law getting tough on undocumented immigrants, as many observers expect, it would not just be approving one state’s crackdown. It would be giving a green light to other states to pass similar laws — and it is likely that at least some would. That would be unfortunate: what Americans [...]
If you are a smoker, you may want to rethink that plan to get a job with the city of Fort Worth, Texas. There are already private employers, including many medical centers, with policies against hiring workers who smoke. But Fort Worth may be about to become the first American city to say categorically that [...]
Tennessee was the center of the national debate when it prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for the crime of teaching evolution. Now, 87 years after the Scopes “monkey trial,” Tennessee is once again a battleground over the origins of man. This month, it enacted a controversial new law — dubbed the “monkey bill” — giving schoolteachers [...]
It was big news last week when prosecutors charged George Zimmerman with second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. But Zimmerman could walk free if a judge decides his actions fall under Florida’s “Stand your ground” law, which gives broad leeway to people to shoot in self-defense. There is no way to undo what [...]
It might seem that in the United States, being pulled over for driving without a seat belt should not end with the government ordering you to take off your clothes and “lift your genitals.” But there is no guarantee that this is the case — not since the Supreme Court ruled this week that the [...]
If you’ve led a law-abiding life, chances are you have never encountered “nutriloaf,” a foul-tasting brick served to prisoners who get out of line. How foul-tasting? Depending on the recipe, somewhere on the spectrum from unpleasant to vomit inducing. A Milwaukee inmate who threw up violently for days after eating nutriloaf asked a federal appeals [...]
The Supreme Court hears arguments this week in a high-stakes challenge to President Obama’s health care law. The court will consider complex constitutional questions, but the biggest issue is a more basic one. Will the court’s conservative Justices, who have railed against “judicial activism,” practice what they preach? If they are faithful to their proclaimed [...]
In many congested cities — New York City most of all — rent-control laws protect tenants who are lucky enough to have such leases from major rent increases. But the Supreme Court could be on the brink of striking down rent control. If it does, the court will hand landlords a huge victory and put many tenants [...]
What do you do with a federal judge who approvingly forwarded an e-mail “joke” suggesting that President Obama was conceived when his mother had sex with a dog? That is the question some members of Congress, lawyers’ organizations and public-interest groups are now asking. The right answer: try to get him to understand why he needs [...]
This has been a tough few weeks for privacy rights on the Internet. Google changed its privacy policy so it can combine the information it collects from different sources – including gmail, searches, and web browsing – to make a more complete dossier on who we are and what we do online. And the Wall [...]
Last week the Supreme Court took a case that could dramatically scale back or even end affirmative action. In Fisher v. University of Texas, a white woman named Abigail Fisher is suing the University of Texas (UT) for denying her admission using criteria that take race into account. A few years ago, her suit would [...]
In 2010, Pamela Fink, an employee of a Connecticut energy company, made a new kind of discrimination claim: she charged that she had been fired because she carries genes that predispose her to cancer. Fink quickly became the public face for the cutting edge of civil rights: genetic discrimination. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which [...]
Alejandrina Cabrera meets all the requirements for serving on the San Luis, Ariz., city council — except one. Cabrera, whose first language is Spanish, speaks limited English — too little, it turns out, to legally run for elected office in Arizona. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled last week that Cabrera did not meet the state’s requirement that elected [...]
The drive to legalize marijuana has long been a fringe cause, associated with hard-core libertarians and college-age stoners. But it could go mainstream in a big way in this November’s election, when Washington could become the first state to legalize recreational pot use. If it does — or if voters in any of several other [...]
Americans have been fighting for decades over abortion, but a new battle has been raging lately — and it’s one with a distinctly retro feel. This time, the war is over birth control: whether insurance companies or government should have to pay for it — and yes, even whether it should be legal. It is [...]
At one of the Republican debates last week, Juan Williams of Fox News asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry if federal officials should still be “scrutinizing” state voting laws. Perry’s angry response: Texas is “under assault by the federal government” over voting issues. Perry was objecting to federal investigations into Texas’s voter ID law, which requires voters [...]
Do the people of Oklahoma need to be protected from Sharia law? Clearly: no. There is no evidence that religious Islamic law — whose rules on matters like inheritance and divorce — is sweeping across the Sooner State. But in 2010, Oklahoma voters seemed to feel otherwise. They passed a referendum banning the state’s courts [...]
Connecticut just became the first state in the nation to require employers to provide workers with paid sick days. The new law — which also allows paid leave for a sick child or spouse — is controversial. Opponents attack it as big government run amok and say it will kill jobs. But it is the [...]
