Here We Go Again

November 18, 2015 by

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin, 1755. “On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called ‘hand-wringing’ over intrusive government spying.” N.Y. Times, November 17, 2015. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded surveillance of both foreigners and United States citizens. We gave up liberty and privacy to secure safety. Recently, after the Snowden revelations about the scope of liberty and privacy that was sacrificed in the name of security, some in […] More...
 

Cat-and-Mouse Games Close to My Heart

December 28, 2012 by

Since any statute of limitations has clearly expired, sharing the following information does not concern me: the scene is South Boston in the mid-fifties. Almost daily, my then-eight-year-old mom stopped in at Jennie’s local grocery store with my nana – but not for milk or eggs or bread. While my nana slipped into a back room with Jennie to lay a wager, my mom importantly took Jennie’s place at the check-out register, armed with instructions to let the ladies in the back know if anybody came into the store looking for Jennie. My mom was aiding and abetting a numbers […] More...
 

The Supremes Take On Gay Marriage

December 12, 2012 by

I hated Con Law in law school. It wasn’t the results that I minded so much. At the time we were still in the afterglow of the Warren Court’s expansion of individual rights. The Court was in sync with the civil rights movement. It had recently struck down, for example, the laws prohibiting racial intermarriage that were still on the books in sixteen states. What I hated about Con Law was the attempt by professors to explain Supreme Court decisions as the logical application of legal principles, when it was pretty clear many were just result oriented political decisions. Ideology cloaked as legal reasoning. If you wanted to strike down a state law on equal protection grounds, you applied strict scrutiny. If you didn’t, you applied a rational relationship test. More...
 

Can the Law Catch Up with Technology?

November 27, 2012 by

In April of this year I had coffee with a neighbor I was interviewing for an article in the Dilworth Quarterly, a neighborhood newsletter for which I contribute occasional feature pieces. Like most of my coffee dates with interview subjects, we swapped stories, found some common ground, and fig ured out a way to bring a Dilworth aspect to the piece, which was a little challenging since the article’s focus was my neighbor’s highly touted and recently published biography of General David Petraeus. Yes, it was coffee with Paula Broadwell, and needless to say, since my interview and article profiling […] More...