Courts 
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
7/8/2021
How Democrats Lost the Courts
"Some Democrats are starting to suspect that the story is simpler: They’ve been chumps. They have clung to norms Republicans long ago abandoned. They have championed moderates in order to appeal to their enemies, only to watch those moderates twist in the wind."
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
3/18/19
Poor criminal defendants need better legal counsel to achieve a just society
by Connie Hassett-Walker
Why we must fulfill the promise of a famous Supreme Court decision to truly achieve criminal justice reform.
-
SOURCE: Black Perspectives
2/6/19
Silencing Black Women in the White Courtroom
by Denise Lynn
Ruby McCollum’s case is part of the long history of the carceral state’s heavy-handed and unjust policing of Black women.
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
12-5-17
Would Trump Consider a Court-Packing Scheme?
by Jeff Shesol
McConnell’s strategy of shutting down the judicial-appointments process during Barack Obama’s last two years in office gave Trump, at the time of his Inauguration, a hundred and three vacancies to fill—more than twice as many as Obama had in 2009.
-
SOURCE: Social Science Research Network "The Politics of Early Justice, Lower Court Federal Judicial Selection 1789-1861"
11-4-14
New study: Judicial nominations have always been subject to partisanship
by Michael J. Gerhardt and Michael Ashley Stein
There never was a Golden Age. These nominations were always political.
-
SOURCE: National Review
7-9-13
Victor Davis Hanson: Revolutionary Tribunals
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. In ancient Athens, popular courts of paid jurors helped institutionalize fairness. If a troublemaker like Socrates was thought to be a danger to the popular will, then he was put on trial for inane charges like “corrupting the youth” or “introducing new gods.”Convicting gadflies would remind all Athenians of the dangers of questioning democratic majority sentiment. If Athenian families were angry that their sons had supposedly died unnecessarily in battle, then they might charge the generals with capital negligence — a warning to all commanders to watch their backs. As in the case of Socrates, a majority vote often led to conviction, and conviction to a death sentence, or at least ostracism or exile. The popular courts freelanced to ensure that “the people” would hold sway over the perceived powerful and elite.
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel