The year is 2024. Congressional maps in the political battleground states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania have been invalidated, and legal fights are ongoing to determine what maps will take their place. State high courts are hesitant to act because their normal powers of judicial review have been curtailed. Entire bodies of election rules, developed [...]
The fall of Afghanistan was a sad end to the longest armed conflict in American history. It resulted in the destruction of a nation-state, over 6 million displaced the world over, and one of the worst refugee crises currently ongoing. For the millions of refugees from the crisis, their trials are far from over. And [...]
The new government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Sara Duterte is employing tricks and propaganda to entrench impunity and ward off the International Criminal Court’s long-delayed probe of crimes against humanity committed during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror. The latest of these ploys is the government’s attempt, through the Office of the Solicitor [...]
International travel in child custody matters is often complicated. On June 15, 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled in Saada v. Golan that a court need not consider ameliorative or safety measures when assessing if a child should be returned to a country where there is a grave risk. The Supreme Court analyzed the application [...]
The 1996 federal law that protects the privacy of our medical records –the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA – has from the outset contained a carefully crafted exception for personal health information that might bear directly on the commission of a crime. But with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the [...]
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Within the incarcerated population, a disproportionate number suffer from mental illnesses or disabilities. After the deinstitutionalization of mental health resources in the 1960s, many people who suffered from mental illnesses entered the prison system. According to the American Psychological Association “this trend accounts for [...]
The Emmett Till case is one of, if not the most, important events of the civil rights movement in the United States. His case, like so many others from the era, galvanized minorities and African-Americans, calling global attention to the civil rights movement and the barbaric treatment of African-Americans in the Southern United States. Though [...]
While the immediate threats to women’s access to healthcare are obvious, it could be years before the United States comes to terms with the gravity of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion. This brief essay focuses on why Dobbs is celebrated by white supremacists as an answer to “the great replacement,” a type [...]
Few periods in the history of western intellectual thought have been more productive in so little time than the work product which flowed from the Continental Congress during the summer of 1776. On April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard around the world,” would forever become part of our history – British North America was [...]
As a criminal defense attorney practicing post-conviction law for nearly twenty years, I’ve watched the Supreme Court whittle away convicted defendants’ right to contest their wrongful state convictions. The most recent example is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, which prevents prisoners from entering federal court to litigate claims that were forfeited [...]
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