My mother Isabel, a very light-skinned African American, once told me of a lunch stand she happily frequented as a 50s-era teenager in her North Carolina Piedmont town. She went there so frequently that the benevolent owners became akin to “second parents.” One day, she motioned to some students from her high school to […]

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  After 227 years of history, how should we judge the United States Supreme Court? All of my years of studying, teaching, and practicing constitutional law have convinced me that the Supreme Court has rarely lived up to lofty expectations and far more often has upheld discrimination and even egregious violations of basic liberties. My […]

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  Germany, 1918: “A scraggly band of child rebels, we met secretly in attics … We were taught by men who claimed they were deserters from the navy to hate the rich, to tell the poor they must rise in a body and fight …” U.S.A., 2014: “I know a lot of people think that […]

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  As America went to the polls in the fall of 2008, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and the agenda of his Republican party loomed large. The image of Lincoln as a young lawyer was invoked on a snowy afternoon as a young senator declared his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois: “He tells us that […]

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  Redefining the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality is David Boies and Ted Olson’s attempt to cast themselves as the driving force behind legalizing gay marriage. The pair write that they hoped their challenge to California’s Proposition 8 would “change the course of history” and serve as a “critical step in the process of […]

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