On November 15th, New York Supreme Court Judge Michael D. Stallman denied an application by Occupy Wall Street protesters for a temporary restraining order preventing police from removing them from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Judge Stallman found that the First Amendment does not extend to the protesters’ practice of camping in the park [...]
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You know oral argument isn’t going well when a justice of the Court asks you to defend your decision not to throw in the towel already. Yet that is precisely what happened to Donna Andrieu, an assistant district attorney from New Orleans, charged with defending her office’s decision to withhold [...] Turnaround for Children, a New York-based nonprofit, has been partnering directly with high-poverty schools and districts to transform the physical and emotional environments in which children spend the school [...] This past Monday, Fourth Amendment watchers began gathering at the Supreme Court on the eve of oral argument in United States v. Jones. Narrowly, the case was to resolve a circuit split on whether law enforcement can surreptitiously place a GPS device on a car, and then monitor movements for [...] Arizona was back in the news last week with Governor Jan Brewer’s highly controversial move removing the chairwoman of the state’s “independent” redistricting committee. Seeing the process now corrupted by an ideologically aligned governor and legislature, what can the voters in Arizona to make the process more independent and more immune from partisan [...] In a succinct and persuasive paper entitled “If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online?“ David Jefferson explains why online voting is unrealistic. A computer scientist by trade—and chair of Verified Voting’s board of directors—Jefferson elaborates technical differences between purchasing textbooks on Amazon.com and registering your vote [...] On Tuesday, Mississippi voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” The ballot initiative is the result of efforts by the anti-choice movement to ban abortion in the state and [...] The proliferation of super PACs and their organizational push for 501(c)(4) support has generated debate about disclosure. Last week, however, the debate shifted back to another familiar disclosure question: whether the government may disclose the identity of those petitioning for a ballot issue. The question had risen through the Ninth [...] On November 8th the Supreme Court is to hear oral argument for the case United States v. Jones, which questions the constitutionality of warrantless GPS tracking. The blog Threat Level has asserted that this case is one of the most significant Fourth Amendment cases to be heard in a decade because [...] Many studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of women in any given legislature or policy-making body and the extent to which that body takes up issues deemed important for women. On Sunday, the newly-formed United Nations entity, UN Women, announced that it was accepting applications for grants, with a focus on projects seeking to empower women in Arab countries transitioning to democracy. It’s only where real action occurs that women start to be empowered and involved in a way that strengthens a country’s democracy, making it responsive to the needs of all its population, not just the [...] |
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