Last month, tenants at a rent-stabilized apartment building called Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brooklyn filed a formal protest against their landlord’s plan to replace key fobs with facial recognition technology. The landlord claimed the new system would enhance security. The tenants, primarily women of color, countered that access to their homes should not hinge on [...]
On April 16, 2019, Governor Jarod Polis signed into law SB19-181, a bill that reforms oil and gas regulation in Colorado in several important ways. It’s a remarkable achievement for House Speaker KC Becker and other supporters who bent but did not break in the face of strong opposition from the oil and gas industry. [...]
“I believe” is the one great word against metaphysical fear. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West At least one thing is clear. Those terrorists who carried out the Easter Sunday attacks on certain Sri Lankan churches and hotels would have resonated with Oswald Spengler’s urgent affirmation. “I believe” was plainly at the conceptual core of [...]
The Canadian government has introduced a bill in Parliament which expands the basis upon which people seeking refuge can be denied access to a hearing of their claim. This proposal has been widely condemned by refugee advocates as putting at risk refugees who need Canada’s protection, simply because they have been entered into another country’s [...]
In what may have been one of the most consequential decisions since the notorious Korematsu case of 1944, when the Supreme Court upheld the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Court (in June 2018) voted 5-4 vote to uphold President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Like the Korematsu judicial ruling, Trump v. Hawaii raises [...]
“A trial is a window into the soul of a country.” –Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, China agreed to govern Hong Kong under the principle of “one country, two systems,” which guarantees that the city’s [...]
Congressional consideration of “Save the Internet Act” is the most recent battlefront in ongoing legal warfare since the early 2000’s within what is called the network neutrality debate. On April 10, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Save the Internet Act.” In response, Senate Majority Leader McConnell has claimed that this legislation is [...]
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear the case of Charles Rhines, who claims that the South Dakota jury that sentenced him to death harbored anti-gay bias. Such bias has no place in our criminal justice system because “our law punishes people for what they do, not who they are.” The Supreme [...]
The leading law-based news these days has been the ‘Mueller Report’ and its more-or-less exculpatory conclusions about U.S. presidential “collusion.” Even if evolving clarifications of this controversial report should further support the absence of presidential illegality in this specific matter, illegality that could involve certain corollary allegations concerning “obstruction of justice,” the Trump administration would [...]
The clock is ticking on the deadline set by the Constitutional Court of Taiwan to amend the law to allow same-sex couples to marry. On May 24, 2017, the court declared Taiwan’s existing marriage law unconstitutional on grounds of discrimination and gave parliament two years to amend it to include same-sex couples. If the government [...]
