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June 2009 - Posts
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The number of children raised by lesbian and gay parents has skyrocketed in the last two decades. According to 2000 census data, nearly 600,000 American households are anchored by a same-sex couple, and nearly a quarter of them are raising children. Yet, two recent cases one from New York and one from Florida are a potent reminder of the potential conflicts created by states' taking different approaches to the legal recognition of same-sex parenting. While the legal landscape has developed in a much more tolerant way for same-sex parenting than it has for same-sex marriage, significant obstacles remain, particularly when co-parents split and relocate....
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When the California legislature passed amendments to its statute of limitations on child sex abuse in 2002, no one knew that its members were initiating a revolution for child sex abuse survivors. The key innovation was the "window" legislation, which gave survivors one year (2003) to file claims even if the statute of limitations for their claims already had expired. In this column, I'll consider the growing influence of this important law and its supporters....
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Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) convinced a Northern California district court judge to grant a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Pricewert, which operates the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Triple Fiber Network (3FN). The FTC alleges that Pricewert and 3FN recruit, distribute, and host electronic code or content that inflicts harm upon consumers -- including "child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, Trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality and incest."...
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If this were the Eighteenth Century, the Uighur detainees at Guantanamo would have been sent to Australia. Instead, four of them were just sent to Bermuda, and thirteen others await possible resettlement in Palau. Five were sent to Albania in 2006. Members of an oppressed Turkic minority from Xinjaing province in western China, the Uighurs have been cleared to leave Guantanamo for some time, yet they cannot be returned home for fear of persecution. Last October, a federal judge ordered their release into the United States, finding that they were innocent of any connection to terrorism, and that the local Uighur community was eager to assist in their reintegration into society....
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The recent economic crisis in the United States has been so severe that we are now experiencing something that has happened only a few times in history: zero interest rates. In a phenomenon technically known as a "liquidity trap," the monetary authorities have pushed the interest rate that they control essentially as low as it can go, yet the economy still needs more stimulus....
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Recent cases applying the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and its cousin, the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act (TRFRA), underscore that these laws are simply wrongheaded, not to mention dangerous....
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Last week, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling that will make it more difficult for some older workers to succeed in proving age discrimination by their employers. In Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., the Court held that employees suing under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), unlike those suing for race or sex discrimination under Title VII, cannot make use of the "mixed-motive" theory that makes it easier to prove discrimination when there is evidence of both legitimate and illegitimate motives for an adverse employment action....
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It is never pretty watching a public figure fall from grace, whether you agree or disagree with that person's politics, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is in freefall. Most recently, a South Carolina newspaper, The State, revealed explicit love-letter emails (on June 24, 2009 and June 25, 2009) between the Governor and his Argentinean lady-friend. The emails have placed him somewhere between frustrated Lothario and a national joke. His political opponents are calling for his resignation. His presidential aspirations are history....
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The Bush administration will no doubt be remembered for torture, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib, as well as for catchy euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation" and histrionic catch-phrases like "the Global War on Terror." The Obama administration has introduced a new lexicon that includes words like "fairness," "values," and "the Constitution." But there are worrying signs, as the new government's policies develop, that its change in vocabulary is more striking than its change in ideas....
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This month, the United States Supreme Court held, in a close decision, that the Constitution forbids a litigant from paying to elect a judge who will hear that litigants pending case. It might surprise readers that no federal law bars such a purchase of justice, but that is indeed the case as long as the purchase comes through campaign contributions, not an outright bribe. Surprisingly, this decision was not a foregone conclusion, and its result upset many, including the Chief Justice of the United States. Yet the Constitution could hardly have afforded anything less. Justice cannot be so easily bought or sold....
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Last month, in People v. Weaver, the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court of New York State, held that before attaching a GPS device to a suspect's car and continuously monitoring the car's whereabouts for 65 days, the police should have obtained a search warrant....
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Recently, The New York Times reported on the court battle between famously reclusive "Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger, and the Swedish writer known as "J.D. California" (real name: Fredrik Colting). The fight focuses on Colting's novel "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" which is subtitled "An Unauthorized Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J. D. Salinger and His Most Famous Character." The novel was published earlier in Britain. This suit concerns plans to publish it in the United States....
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As preparation for Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Senate hearings begins in earnest, it is important for us all to think carefully about what legitimate and meaningful questioning by the Senate should look and sound like. In this column, I offer some observations on what should be considered fair game, and what should not....
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Last week, the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by a married same-sex couple from California. The suit by Arthur Smelt and Christopher Hammer sought to invalidate the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA"), a federal law enacted in 1996 that has two key provisions: Section 2 authorizes states that do not themselves permit same-sex marriage to deny recognition to legal same-sex marriages performed in other states; and Section 3 defines marriage for purposes of federal law as encompassing "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."...
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No official announcement has been made that the Obama Administration is not going to prosecute anyone other than a few low-level soldiers who photographed themselves and already have been prosecuted for torturing detainees in our so-called war on terror. But it has become clear that President Obama's announced desire to look forward, not backward, embodies such a decision. Still, we must all hope that the Obama Administration makes more than a non-decision type of decision, and does not merely resolve the matter by silence and inaction. There are, in fact, precedents, and studies, that illuminate the grave problems confronting a democracy in making a choice when faced with the options of prosecuting and punishing versus forgiving and forgetting. I discovered this material some years ago when studying authoritarian governance....
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On April 29th, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the important Sixth Amendment case of Kansas v. Ventris. In Ventris, the defendant gave an incriminating statement to a jailhouse informant, in response to interrogation (by the informant) during which the prosecution now concedes that counsel was illegally withheld. At trial, the prosecution moved successfully to introduce the defendant's earlier incriminating statement to the informant, to impeach the defendant's testimony....
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