Trish > Books: legal‎ (45)

Criticism of Roe became more widespread perhaps in part because opponents repeatedly make the incorrect argument that only a “right to privacy,” unmentioned in the Constitution, supported the holding. Correctly basing a woman’s right to have an abortion in "liberty" rather than “privacy" should undercut that criticism.

“…it is perfectly clear that if the identity of a speaker cannot provide the basis for regulating his (or its) speech, the majority’s rationale in Citizen’s United would protect not only the foreign shareholders of corporate donors to political campaigns but also foreign corporate donors themselves.”

“For the first time, those seeking a new Congressional districting plan went to the state courts and relied solely on state law.”

“Dealing with threats against journalists had become a sadly routine part of my work life, but each time a new one surfaced a feeling of discouragement about what the country had become would come over me again.”

“Maybe we should be better at inculcating all citizens—now all potential publishers—with a sense of social responsibility…I continued to believe the risks that came with freedom were worth the price…I also believe The Times had been right, in its North Korea reporting and other sensitive national security stories, to give the government a chance to responds before publication. Many readers saw that process as a surrender…

“…It was important to debate whether The Times had been timid then or at other times, but context was important: our newsroom regularly decided that the government’s objections were too abstract, not believable, insufficiently weighty, or given by officials too far down the food chain to know, and then resolved to move ahead with publishing. But it’s not a science. Editors sometimes get it wrong. National security is intrinsically the hardest of the calls they have to make…If we are ever forced to defend against a criminal charge, I wanted our legal narrative to be one of responsibility, serious deliberation, and a demonstrable concern about the public’s best interests.”

“The people have a right to clear air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit for all the people.”

“[Range Resources] tried to appeal to those who stood to make money with an unusual letter writing campaign. One mass mailing was addressed to a fictitious ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane.’ It urged residents to bring pressure on their local officials to allow companies wide latitude to drill where they needed to, or there’d be no gas, and ‘no gas means no royalties.’”

“Economists describe the Tragedy of the Commons like this: cattle herders sharing a pasture will inevitably place the needs of their cows above the needs of others’, adding cow after cow and taking more than their share of the common grass. This ‘free rider’ takes advantage of the commons, and consumes it until it’s gone. This, the argument goes, is human nature, which sets individual gain over collective good. Traditionally, the Tragedy of the Commons has supported the case for individual property rights: since it’s impossible for people to act together to protect commonly held assets, we might as well carve up those assets and leave individuals to look after their own. But what if the commons did not need to end in tragedy? What if people were able to work out effective practices of sharing the commons and transmit those traditions to their descendants? Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, argued that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons for the twenty-first century lies in common sense. Sharing has succeeded in the past and could succeed in the future. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. She died in 2012.”

“In the long term, there was a clear advantage for the budgets of Milwaukee Country and the Milwaukee Public Schools, which faced problems funding retiree health care and pensions far in excess of the typical local government in Wisconsin…An actuary found that the district lowered its projected obligation to retirees by a whopping $1 billion, or 42 percent, between 2009 and 2011.”

“You think a black man gets a good job in this country by sitting in front of white people and telling the truth? Please don’t make me laugh.”

“The only difference between the Egyptians [during the Bible’s Old Testament calamity]… and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshipping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing.”

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

“When our democracy is threatened from within, we must save it ourselves…We must draw together in defense of a constitutional system that binds our destinies and protects our freedoms.”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”

“In our experience, one of the main obstacles to an even-keeled analysis of impeachment under Trump is the fear and fury that he inspires in many of his political opponents.”

"Wright offered to the world in his protest novel Native Son an image of blackness that made it synonymous with dehumanization, with the absence of feeling. His character Bigger Thomas embodied a lovelessness so relentless it struck a chord of terror in the minds of black activists who had been struggling to counter similar images of blackness emerging from the white imagination.

In his autobiography, Black Boy, Wright dared to tell the world that he believed dehumanization had happened to many black folks, that ongoing racial genocide had left us damaged, forever wounded in the space where we would know love."

MASSACRE AT DJURSHOLM UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL - GIRL IN CUSTODY

CLAES FAGERMAN MURDERED - SON’S GIRLFRIEND DEMAND: “HE MUST DIE!”

“…not a single person has ever believed that Mom is the person she pretends to be. But she keeps pretending anyway. And for the most part, people are polite about it and leave her alone…Dad’s money is hardly even fifteen minutes old. And he doesn’t have enough of it to compensate…he thinks boarding school taught him what it takes to fit in, what he has to do for high-class people to think he's one of them. He’s wrong, of course.”

“We must be cautious about the social contract. Both parties must uphold their side of the agreement. We must have comprehensible equity. It is not fair if the welfare system is bankrolled by low- and middle-income earners. If large corporations pay less in taxes than their small- and medium-size colleagues, that is not what the social contract looks like…”

“Yes, me brave Irish boys, me loves you till the day that I am laid cold under the sod, and I would let the last drop of this dark blood run and drain from these black veins of mine to rescue you from the hands of a full blooded Yankee…Reader, if you are on the right side of an Irishman, you have the best friend in the world.”

“…we both began to realize that storytelling itself—bearing witness, in vivid and clear language, to things personally seen and incidents encountered—has the power to engage the attention of people who, like us, have long since given up paying attention, or have simply given up.”

“The soldier roused himself from his torpor long enough to shrug one shoulder elaborately and give Sam Bahour a look in which were mingled contempt, incredulity, and suspicion about the state of San’s sanity. It appeared to have been the stupidest, most pointless, least answerable question anyone had ever asked the soldier…[he] had no idea why he had been ordered to come stand with his gun and his somnolent young comrade at this particular fork in the road on this particular afternoon, and if he did, the last person with whom he would have shared this explanation was Sam…”

“White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end. No matter how many white people tell pollsters that ‘today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks’ (60 percent of the white working class in one poll). we know that this story of anti white bias is not true. But we do know that having it ‘better’ isn’t permanent, that it could collapse. We know equality might someday come, and it might mean giving up one’s birthright or, more terrifyingly, having it taken away. That perhaps our destiny is indeed a more equal society, but one where equality means equal misery, a social order where all the plagues of the ‘ghetto’ escape past its borders and infect the population at large.”

“What kind of justice system would exist in a setting in which each member of society were actually valued as a full human with tremendous potential, even if he or she committed a crime, or hurt someone, or broke the community’s norms were held accountable?…What would a criminal justice system for the elite look like?”