Who Should Defend An Indefensible Law?

April 29, 2011

Lawyers who defend accused criminals or unpopular causes often field the question, “How can you take on such a case?” The standard answer is that everyone deserves a day in court, which is true, and the standard rebuttal is that not every lawyer must take every case, which is also true. So the contradiction stands. We can accept the principle that every side in a case deserves good representation, but …

Texas Excises A Symbol Of Hate

July 20, 2010

The Texas Board of Regents did the right thing last week when it stripped the name of a long-dead white supremacist from a dormitory at the University of Texas. But it could have done even better. The all-male dormitory formerly named for William Stewart Simkins will henceforth be known, blandly but inoffensively, as Creekside Dormitory. I think the Regents should have renamed the building for James Byrd, Jr., a victim …

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Alito Takes The Bait

January 29, 2010

Never in living memory has a president chosen to bait the U.S. Supreme Court in his State of the Union message. But that is what President Obama did this week, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the bait. Obama and fellow Democrats are livid over the high court’s 5-4 ruling last week that corporations and labor unions have a constitutional right to advertise for or against political candidates. To …

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The Power To Fix Mistakes

September 21, 2009

For 58 shameful years prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the words of Justice Henry Billings Brown defined “equal protection” in American race relations. Writing for the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Brown declared in 1896 that states could require racial segregation in public places, because “separate, but equal,” accommodations are permitted under the Fourteenth Amendment. “The object of the amendment was undoubtedly …

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