Every Wednesday afternoon for years, Black Lives Matter activists and their partners chanted a simple demand outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice: “Jackie Lacey Must Go!” Elected in 2012, District Attorney Lacey presided over the largest prosecutorial office in the United States. These protests and the frustrations that fueled them helped propel George [...]
“The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.” – Rabbi Avraham Kook By any reasonable standard, the belligerent nationalism of Realpolitik or power politics makes no sense. After all, without exception, this zero-sum mantra of “everyone-for-himself” clearly undermines every country’s national security. Most perplexing, perhaps, is that [...]
It may be some time before we know everything that President Trump was up to between election day and January 6, 2021, when he urged his followers to go to the Capitol and derail the constitutional process of electoral vote certification. As well, there are likely to be long investigations into the security at the [...]
The judgment in Anjali Guru Sanjana Jaan v. State of Maharashtra gives rise to a deep interpretational incoherence of Article 19(1)(a), i.e. right to freedom of speech and expression. This doctrinal disarray stems from the fact that the Court inadequately interpreted the jurisprudential basis of pluralism set in Nalsa v. UOI. The facts of the [...]
Among the Executive Orders that President Joe Biden issued mere hours after being inaugurated as the nation’s forty-sixth president was one repealing former President Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban that had placed stringent restrictions on travel to the United States for citizens of a number of majority Muslim countries. The opening sentence of President Biden’s [...]
The Kansas Board of Regents recently voted to endorse a policy making it easier to terminate tenured faculty members. Under existing policy, a Kansas state university first must recognize a “financial exigency.” If implemented, under the new policy a university could reduce tenured faculty positions without that declaration. This would make termination of a tenured [...]
On January 8, 2021, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) took the extraordinary step of publicly revealing she had talked with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, about “available precautions for preventing an unstable President from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.” [...]
Photo Caption: In the early 60’s Ben and Dorothy Davis integrated the all-white Brookside Elementary School in Montclair, New Jersey I watched the debates in the House with respect to impeachment. I was struck by all the citations to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural by all sides in the debates, with his emphasis on healing of the [...]
As outlined below, the structure of objections to the November 2020 Presidential election often bear a similarity to arguments made in a court of law to defend a person accused of a crime. Senators with legal training (such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, among others) should be well familiar with this standard. This observation, [...]
I. Introduction Much of U.S. governance is held together by goodwill, unwritten norms, and the ideals that “that would never happen” and “no one would ever do that.” Every hope of continued reliance on these norms was “shattered” on January 6, 2021, when armed insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol. Under the direction of the President, [...]
