For better or worse, the paradigmatic television show of the coronavirus pandemic is Netflix’s documentary miniseries Tiger King, an excruciatingly intimate reflection on a feud between two tiger-fanciers. On the one side is Carole Baskin, the rather sanctimonious leader of a big cat sanctuary in Florida. And on the other is Joe Exotic, the “colorful” [...]
In 1907, Congress passed a law that punished US citizen women for marrying “foreigners.” In March of 1931, Congress rejected this discrimination. But in March of 2020, Congress reincarnated it by passing a law that punishes both US citizen men and women who are married to non-citizens. The March 2020 CARES Act was designed to help support American families [...]
Students in our National Security Law course quickly learn that this area of the law is governed primarily by abstract constitutional rules, specific statutory grants of authority, and relatively little useful caselaw. Indeed, perhaps in no other area of the law has the Supreme Court deferred so explicitly to the perceived advantages and competence of [...]
Interpreting the word games at play in workplace safety guidelines, President Trump’s recent executive order on the food supply chain, and company motives is something like unpacking a Russian doll. The name of these Russian nesting dolls is Matryoshka or Babushka. Babushka means grandmother or old woman. This name is ironic because a lot of [...]
The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. –Bryan Stevenson “This book is important. But it is a candle in a hurricane.” This is a statement from one of the participants in the prison reading group I lead each month. In the [...]
“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.” – Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I [...]
Amid the stay-at-home orders, the issue of child custody exchanges has emerged as a concern among separated families. Some parents have found co-parenting to be easier during the pandemic. Many other co-parents have not been so lucky. Families are looking for guidance on whether to follow custody orders during the pandemic. Co-parenting continues to be [...]
“The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.” –The Talmud Amid growing horrors of the Coronavirus, it is easy to forget a very basic human lesson: We are all creatures of biology. By extrapolation, we are all stunningly fragile, closely interrelated and irremediably interdependent. [...]
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that it creates is a decadent civilization.” Aimé Césaire wrote this in his critique of colonialism. Close examination of the legacy of colonialism helps explain the disparate impact of the current healthcare crisis based on race and class. The sick and dying in the US are [...]
The health degree of a society’s well-being is determined by the ideas which take actual shape in the course of its daily self-constitution. In order to reform and even redeem such a society, we have to reform those defining ideas. The quality of our human life is a function of our determining ideas. Law plays [...]
