Law

I want to be an advocate for racial justice. Now what?

Mark R. Warren is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. He is a sociologist and has published widely on community organizing and on efforts to build alliances across race and class to revitalize urban communities, reform public education and expand democracy. Warren is the author of Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice and you can read his previous OUPblog post on racism here.

In these videos, he discusses his book, race relations in schools, and activism.

Paycheck Fairness Act Fails in Senate

By Mariko Lin Chang

Last week, the Senate Republicans defeated the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill would have strengthened the Equal Pay Act by providing more effective protections and remedies to victims of sex discrimination in wages, including prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their wages with another employee, requiring employers to prove that wage differences between women and men doing the same work are the result of education, training, experience, or other job-related factors, and providing victims of sex discrimination in wages the same legal remedies currently available to those experiencing pay discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.

Was the bill perfect? Probably not (few, if any bills could be considered perfect). But the Republican senators threw the baby out with the bath water.

On the Horrors of the Guatemala Syphilis Study

By Lorna Speid
The news that prisoners and the mentally ill were deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in experiments conducted by the US in the late 1940s has sent shock waves around the world. What is most shocking is that this experiment occurred in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials which brought to light the Nazi experiments that were so abhorrent. The Nuremberg Code of 1948 set basic standards for studies to be conducted in humans. We are told that there may be 40 additional experiments yet to come to light which involved experimentation on people on US soil that were never told that they were taking part in experiments.

An Open Letter on Taxes to Bill Gates, Sr.

Dear Mr. Gates:

You have, by dint of your intelligence and sincerity, become a major spokesman for wealthy Americans calling for higher taxes. Since the nation’s budgetary problems will only be solved by combining spending reductions with tax increases, this is a compelling claim.

However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Allow me to call three details to your attention:

The Proposed New Copyright Crime of “Aiding and Abetting”

Tweet By Michael A. Carrier The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has caused concern for many reasons, such as secret negotiations and controversial provisions.  Today, more than 70 law professors sent a letter to President Obama asking that he “direct the [U.S. Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to […]

The Free Lunch Campaign: A Lost Opportunity

By Edward Zelinsky
The United States is in the midst of a “free lunch” campaign in which Republicans and Democrats alike promise painless resolution of our budgetary problems. As a result, neither party will have an electoral mandate for the hard choices necessary to tackle our fiscal quandaries. Both parties are squandering an important opportunity to mold public opinion and set the stage for meaningful budgetary discipline.

The English Language Unity Act: Big Government Only a Tea Partier Could Love

By Dennis Baron
Tea Partiers seem intent on throwing more and more of the American government overboard. Yet there’s one area where both these wing nuts and many ordinary conservatives support more big government, not less: they want the government to make everyone in America speak English.

End Of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research?

By Frederick Grinnell
On August 23, 2010, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction blocking NIH-funded research on human embryonic stem cells (hESC). According to Judge Lamberth’s ruling, NIH-funded research on hESC violates the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, originally passed by Congress in 1996, which prohibits use of federal funds for research in which human embryos are destroyed. The judge rejected the…

Advice to President Obama’s Deficit Commission: Tax Social Security Payments

By Edward Zelinsky
President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is reportedly forging an internal consensus concerning the federal Social Security system. The President’s bi-partisan deficit reduction commission is purportedly developing a package of reforms including higher retirement ages for Social Security eligibility, reduced cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security payments, and higher taxes.

Facebook says, “All your face are belong to us.”

By Dennis Baron
Facebook wants to trademark the word “face.” The social networker which connects more than 500 million users has already shown how we can all live together as one big happy set of FBF’s by forcing other sites to drop “book” from their names, and now, in application no. 78980756 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook is asserting its ownership of the word “face” as well.

To Be a Child Soldier

By Susan C. Mapp
The United States is currently in the process of trying a child soldier who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past 8 years. Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer. Omar was 15 years old at the time, well below the minimum age for child soldiers. The head of UNICEF, a former U.S. national security advisor, has stated…

Suffering for Suffrage, 90 Years Since

I have a younger brother, so as a little girl, I was the boss. The authority I exerted was based on age and size, so it never occurred to me that gender could be an influencing factor. I think it was actually School House Rock or Mary Poppins that taught me women had to fight […]

The Appeal of Prop 8 and the Long Road Ahead

By William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren Spedale
“Judge Walker’s opinion exposes these longstanding claims for that they have always been—desperate efforts to justify a longstanding discrimination that a persecuted minority was no longer willing to tolerate. Every American should read Judge Walker’s opinion, not so much for its fine constitutional analysis, but rather for its remarkable factual findings. These findings are profound and ought to be debated publicly as well as judicially.”

Gypsy Rose Lee Vindicated by Catalina Ban on Bull Fighting

By Noralee Frankel
In late July, Catalonia a region in Spain outlawed bull fighting. The vote in parliament was spurred by a petition signed by 180,000 people. The burlesque queen and author, Gypsy Rose Lee would have been pleased. What has a famous strip tease artist have to do with bull fighting? In 1950, Gypsy Rose Lee was blacklisted from radio and television, not for sexuality, but for her liberal politics. She had been a very successful moderator of two silly game shows, all the rage in the fifties. Unable to work on the new media, she left for Europe where she performed her strip tease.

The Deep Politics of the 14th Amendment

By Elvin Lim
In 2004, the Republican’s hot button political issue du jour was same-sex marriage. 11 states approved ballot measures that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Last week, a federal judge struck down California’s Proposition 8 (passed in 2008) because it “fails to advance any rational basis for singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.” However, Republicans politicians are not taking the bait to revisit this hot button political issue, despite Rush Limbaugh’s encouragement.

Let the Decision Fall

By LeeAnna Keith
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas took dead aim at Supreme Court tradition in his recent concurring opinion on gun control in the city of Chicago. McDonald v. Chicago, named for an African American plaintiff, raised the question of whether the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms imposed limitations against the states. A plurality of justices insisted