On 9th January 2015, in front of the Jeddah Mosque, a Saudi activist and blogger named Raif Badawi was publicly given the first fifty out of the thousand lashes he was sentenced with, for ‘insulting Islam through electronic channels.’ The disturbing incident instantaneously became viral on social media and the #JeSuisRaif movement gained momentum. Saudi [...]
I, as a white woman, have bit by bit come to understand how racism is at the heart of much of our legislation and has been for all of our history. As a young person in the late 60’s I thought that changing our laws could create equality. As a Catholic Sister dedicated to social [...]
Today, the U.S. legal system faces a public that is becoming increasingly impatient with systemic unequal protection of the law. As the peaceful arbiter of disputes in a democratic society, the judiciary cannot stray too far from that public, lest its legitimacy be lost. However, recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has pulled that judiciary further from [...]
“In the pandemic economy, face masks are like bars of gold. Hoarders are hoarding them. Governors are bartering for them. Hospital workers desperately need them.” – Michael Schulman The N95 mask is very important armor in battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Instances of hoarding and black marketing of masks are rising in India. Healthcare personnel risk [...]
The conundrum that India’s media has found itself in during the pandemic has been nothing unusual. India’s mainstream media has been mired in distrust for a large part of this decade. The fledgling state of the media has been a limited focus since the World Press Freedom Index has rated India lower in 2020 than [...]
The outrage much of the nation and world has expressed at the police killing of George Floyd has been accompanied by demands for greater punishment of all of the officers involved. These demands call attention to an often-overlooked element of the problem of police violence: those subjected to unlawful police practices largely depend on other [...]
That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck. – Malcolm X On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer tortured George Floyd to death in what his brother, Philonise Floyd, called “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.” Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in all 50 states and [...]
The results of the Kerner Commission Report were published in the midst of racial unrest sweeping across the United States in the 1960s. The commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson and made up of bi-partisan officials, set out to investigate the cause of social unrest. It concluded that the unrest was largely triggered by police [...]
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia is, in no doubt, a landmark judgment and a much-appreciated ruling by the United States Supreme Court. The court held that discrimination, as used in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, on the basis of sex is inclusive of discrimination against a homosexual or a transgender individual. On first [...]
The Supreme Court today issued a decision that the Trump administration’s rescission of DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, was unlawful because it failed to explain adequately why it ended DACA. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court determined that the DACA rescission was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure [...]
