Jan 13
Posted 131 days ago by Anne King
Christopher Emdin’s thoughtful recent piece on arrests in public schools inspired me to put together a roundup of recent scholarship on the school-to-prison pipeline. All of these pieces are sobering reads, but the authors offer concrete ideas for how we can begin to dismantle the pipeline
Posted 131 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Jeffery Clements was at Demos this morning for an event marking the New York launch of his new book, Corporations Are Not People. As a lawyer and cofounder of Free Speech for People, Clements has been one of the leading voices in the campaign for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. But this book, rather than simply providing a limited guide on the harms of corporate political spending in elections, offers a much more profound reexamination of the role corporations play in American public life.
Posted 132 days ago by Jessica Jackson
The hit reality TV show Toddlers and Tiaras is designed to provide an inside glance at the life of pageant children as they compete. The show contains some horrifying clips, including a 4 year old being dressed as Dolly Parton in an outfit complete with fake breasts and a toddler dressed as the hooker in Pretty Woman. At what point should Americans turn off the TV and cease to support the network’s encouragement of some mothers’ exploitation of their children for fame? Is there a point at which Child Protective Services should step in?
Posted 132 days ago by Mark Wilson
While we were away on the holiday break, President Obama used his constitutional authority to appoint Richard Cordray as the director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). There are certainly some questions about the degree to which the Senate’s pro forma sessions permitted (or did not permit) President Obama to exercise his interim appointment authority. But there’s an even bigger question, here. Why did he have to resort to an interim appointment?
Jan 11
Posted 133 days ago by Peter Dunne
This post considers the legacy of the Los Angeles Riots and the Stephen Lawrence murder in the United Kingdom. It argues that despite initial steps taken to address the institutional racism which was so prominent in both incidents, little concrete progress has been made in the intervening years. It also addresses some of the recent consequences of this inaction.
Jan 10
Posted 133 days ago by Yevgeny Shrago
For the next three weeks, I’ll be doing a clinical with the New Orleans City Law Department, which involves a deep dive into the city’s licensing regime. I’ll try to share some of the more entertaining things I’ve gleaned from my work and see what sorts of insights it might give for larger liberal policy.
In New Orleans, the city code thankfully ensures, in a single sentence, that bread flour not be mixed with any “unwholesome, deleterious substance.” There’s a little added definition, but decisions about what constitutes such a substance seem to be left up to the health inspector’s discretion. In the next three sections, the code specifies, in painstaking detail, not just the materials that the paper wrapping the bread must be made of, but the weight of the paper, and the minimum number of loaves that can be delivered to a restaurant while wrapped in this paper. Based on their relative treatments in the text, it seems like the New Orleans city council that passed these laws though that the paper needed to be more strictly regulated than what actually went into the bread.
Such weirdly specific regulation can be detrimental to the cause of positive government regulations. Read more
Jan 6
Posted 138 days ago by Jonathan Peters
If you build censorship requirements into the infrastructure of free expression, you shouldn’t be surprised if governments start using them more expansively and more frequently. That’s because, to put it bluntly, government officials can almost always find a good reason to limit access, to filter and to block. We’re not China or Iran, but that’s all the more reason not to start going down the same road.
Posted 138 days ago by Peter Dunne
This post looks at the issue of sexual orientation and military service. It observes that many people feel LGBT service men and women are particularly deserving of equality rights because they have given service to their countries. The post argues that this is flawed logic and could be dangerous if taken to its logical conclusion. LGBT individuals are not entitled to equality because they have served their country. They are entitled to equality because they are equal with all other persons.
Posted 139 days ago by Najah Farley
Although new prosecutor-elect Fatou Bensouda of the International Criminal Court is already facing veiled criticism, there are high hopes for her term, when it begins in a few months.
Jan 5
Posted 139 days ago by Anne King
After ten years of No Child Left Behind, what lessons have we learned about assessing the effectiveness of public education?
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