There are many legitimate reasons to critique the recently enacted Dodd-Frank financial-services reform bill. Most of its shortcomings fall into the “it doesn’t go far enough” category. And in one instance — the unfortunate decision by Congress to exempt automobile dealers from the bill’s new oversight requirements — it doesn’t go at all. The enactment…

As they say in the Budweiser commercial, “Here we go!” The Shirley Sherrod incident provided one of the most fertile and significant opportunities to focus attention on the toxic racism of the far right, the dynamics of race and class in the rural South, the cynical use of the “reverse racism” charge to ignite opposition…

Now that the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted along party lines to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court (and full approval by the Democratic-controlled Senate seems like a shoo-in), a new chapter in the court’s history will begin. Kagan will join a court whose conservative majority has aggressively…

I regularly receive e-mails from the Tea Party movement. Sometimes I delete them, but mostly I read them. They’re interesting. Here’s a sample of some of the statements contained in the Tea Party e-mails I’ve received: The Army of Darkness will not be defeated easily; they lust for control of our beloved Nation. The guy…

It’s sometimes dispiriting to try to make sense of the Supreme Court’s choices of which cases it will hear. Some cases that cry out for the court’s consideration are rejected (such as a federal court’s decision that a town’s racial profiling is constitutional, or a federal court’s decision that survivors of one of the worst…

The second day of the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court was marked by some substantive dialogue, respectful banter and even an exchange of ethnic humor between the nominee and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to have forgotten the previous day’s tensions.  But for many…

It’s already well-known that Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be confirmed as the next Supreme Court justice of the United States. But first … the show! Elena Kagan is one in a long line of Supreme Court nominees who were confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee for another position before they were nominated to the…

If you’re convicted after spending a reported $30 million on legal fees to keep from going to jail, it makes sense to go all in and take your case all the way up to the Supreme Court. It paid off for Jeffrey Skilling, who prevailed in challenging the constitutionality of the legal doctrine used to…

For many Americans, a notice to appear for jury service is an annoyance. Being selected for a jury can mean days off work with only a tiny stipend, listening to the details of lurid criminal activity or the mind-numbing medical testimony in a personal injury case. Many people selected for jury service ask to be…

On the second day of his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, then-Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall got into a verbal tussle with Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Only a year before Marshall’s hearing, the Supreme Court had decided Miranda v. Arizona, the case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors would be unable…