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November 2008 - Posts
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"We do not torture," President Bush has stated emphatically, time and again, whenever information about the abuse of detainees has roused the public. ...
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In September, Texas judge Charlie Baird sentenced a woman to ten years' probation for injury to a child by omission. The woman, twenty-year-old Felicia Salazar, admitted that she had failed to protect her 19-month-old child from a brutal beating by the child's father, Robert Alvarado, and that she had failed to seek medical care for the child's injuries, which included broken bones. In addition to other, more ordinary probation conditions (including 100 hours of community service and psychological counseling), the judge ordered Salazar not to conceive and bear a child while on probation....
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A number of significant developments are cause for the United States federal courts to give thanks on this Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps most important are the expansion of Democratic Party majorities in the 111th U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President, because the federal judiciary appears to fare better by several metrics when Democrats control the other two branches. However, it seems premature to predict exactly how the new Congress and chief executive will address the federal courts, especially given the economic crisis that the nation presently confronts....
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President-elect Barack Obama has inherited an incredible and wide-ranging host of problems facing the United States, including the flailing economy and war in Iraq, to cite just the most obvious examples. These problems demand immediate, full-throttle attention, to be sure, and unprecedented amounts of money. It would be a mistake, though, to lose sight of the other issues that have been neglected or intentionally stymied by the outgoing administration, but could be addressed in straightforward ways without a significant budget impact. Workplace equality is an excellent example of just such an issue. During the last eight years, the Bush Administration has acted several times to block Congressional attempts to expand or restore important workplace equality protections; the Administration also has acted to undercut existing protections. Under this regime, important civil rights bills have been left to languish, and workers have been left to labor under conditions of avoidable inequality....
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On November 14, the Supreme Court granted review in an interesting and important First Amendment case. The case concerns a film about then-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton entitled "Hillary: The Movie," which was made available through cable TV video-on-demand (as well as in a few theaters), and the advertisements for that film. The question before the Court is whether the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was constitutionally applied to the film and its ads, or whether the First Amendment trumps that law in the context of this application....
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This week, the California Supreme Court decided to hear a case posing two important questions. The first is whether the voter-adopted state constitutional ban on gay marriage passed in the November election, Proposition 8, was validly enacted. The second is - assuming Proposition 8 was indeed validly enacted -- what is the status of the same-sex marriages that were entered into between the California Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling last spring and the enactment of Prop. 8? ...
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The case of Jarek Molski v. Evergreen Dynasty Corp. is not likely to make the history books, but it is emblematic of a longstanding and deep division in our attitudes regarding access to courts and our collective ideals for the role of the judicial system in our democracy. ...
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President-elect Barack Obama recently reiterated his campaign promise to close the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay. In an interview with "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday night-his first extended interview since the election-Obama declared: "I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that." ...
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Now that the election is over, political pundits are trying to predict how the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress will govern. In this column, I will make a few predictions about whether we can expect any changes in the civil justice system after Inauguration Day. ...
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As was widely reported last week, President-elect Obama's transition team has been asking potential appointees to Cabinet and other high-ranking positions in the incoming administration to complete a detailed questionnaire about potential conflicts of interest and matters that could "be a possible source of embarrassment to" the applicant, his or her "family, or the President-Elect if it were made public." ...
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In May 2004, after re-reading the late James David Barber's seminal study on predicting presidential behavior, and as the 2004 election approached, I wrote a column entitled Predicting Presidential Performance: Is George W. Bush An Active/Negative President Like Nixon, LBJ, Hoover and Wilson?" Barack Obama's victory has me looking at Barber's work again. ...
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With the election of Barack Obama, there is finally some hope that the United States can turn to a more rational set of policies relating to religion. Sixteen years of President William Jefferson Clinton and President George W. Bush meant that southern evangelicals (and many other religious groups) had unprecedented access to the White House to lobby for government support for their favorite causes. ...
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This past February, the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog drew attention to Senator Barack Obama's views on what his ideal Supreme Court nominee would be like, focusing, in particular, on two key comments by Obama. ...
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The 94 United States District Courts around the nation periodically experience resource shortages - including vacancies among their 678 seats for active judges. The U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado is the most recent district to suffer this fate. ...
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The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear an appeal in a criminal case involving DNA, District Attorney's Office v. Osborne. William G. Osborne - a man who, fourteen years ago, was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in Alaska - argues in a civil rights lawsuit against the District Attorney's office that the State must now provide him with physical evidence from the crime scene, so that he can perform a DNA analysis that would not have been technologically possible at the time of his trial. ...
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Why are voters denied the chance to vote for a President of one party and a Vice President of the other? Why, in this election, did we rule out a McCain/Biden (or Obama/Palin) win? After all, earlier this spring, Joe Biden made an offhand comment that he could envision serving as McCain's Vice President. ...
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The world is meaningfully different now than it was just two days ago. The possibility of something momentous and the reality of it once stared at each other across an enormous chasm. That chasm has vanished. ...
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How momentous is the election of the first African-American President of the United States? Never mind what it says about how far we have come since slave traders brought millions of unfortunate souls across the Atlantic, or since the Constitution brokered what William Lloyd Garrison called a "covenant with death" and an "agreement with hell." The well-deserved feel-good moments will pass quickly, whereupon President Obama will find himself leading a nation, and a world, in crisis. ...
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