Criminal justice has always held a prominent place in the work of civil rights. From the trials of the Scottsboro boys; to the wrongful convictions in Tulia, Texas, in the 1990s; to the NAACP’s recent successful intervention on behalf of the Scott sisters, rooting out injustice in the criminal-justice system has long defined the essence…

The decision by the federal district court in Florida that strikes down the new health care law as unconstitutional is just another example of why, despite the urgent call of President Obama, our country may not be ready for a “Sputnik moment.” It was exciting to imagine, during the compelling call to arms in President…

I started carrying around a pocket version of the U.S. Constitution in my purse in 1998 after I visited South Africa for the first time. It was only four years after the first full democratic election in that country. When the ANC was voted the ruling party in 1994 and Nelson Mandela was elected president,…

Much was made of President Obama’s identification of “empathy” as a key attribute of a Supreme Court nominee. Republican derision of empathy as a desirable quality in a Supreme Court justice was, of course, a mere tempest in a teapot. Republican presidents have also touted the importance of empathy, including George H.W. Bush, who introduced…

It sometimes strains the mind to adapt to the “new normal” that constitutes our contemporary legal framework since the advent of the so-called war on terror. In just 10 years, terms like “indefinite detention” and “torture” no longer describe crimes per se — at least not to many former and some current government lawyers, sitting…

America’s prisons, like many of our public schools, reflect our country’s most shameful and profound failings. This week the U.S. Supreme Court takes on one aspect of our nation’s love affair with incarceration. In Schwarzenegger v. Plata, the state of California has challenged an order issued by a three-judge federal court under the Prison Reform…

It’s been almost two years since the end of the administration of George W. Bush. Nine years since 9/11. Nine years since the massive roundup of Muslim and Arab men without probable cause. Seven years since the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. Eight years since lawyers at the Department of Justice published the torture…

It’s a cruel irony of life that, as Billie Holiday sang, “Them that’s got shall get,” but practices in today’s job market suggest that those in the best position financially have a better chance of being hired to fill the limited openings available. That’s because credit checks are increasingly becoming a standard practice for employers.…

1. A Power Shift That Will Last a Decade There’s often too much hype surrounding midterm elections, but there’s never enough hype to cover a midterm election that happens right before state legislatures throughout the country take on the task of redistricting. As the U.S. Census Bureau completes its once-in-a-decade count, state legislatures will pull…