On November 3, one of my cherished mentors, Ramona Ripston, passed away at the age of 91. She had been the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California for 39 years, between 1972 and 2011. Her husband and soul mate Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who served on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court […]

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Day by day, unsealed document by unsealed document, the American people are learning in this summer of discontent a great deal about the values and vision of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a judge of relentless conservative mien who, if confirmed, will push the Court as far right as it has been in nearly a […]

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As the campaign season enters its final stages, torrents of empty rhetoric and wasted column inches are being devoted to the fate of American middle-class families. Proposals ranging from health saving accounts, student debt forgiveness, even guaranteed minimum income plans have been advanced as silver bullets. Whenever a policy debate in the United States is […]

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Responding to several highly publicized sex crimes and public fears, legislatures across the country have adopted statutes that allow the continued imprisonment of sex offenders after they have completed their sentences. Veteran investigative reporter Barbara Koeppel has spent the past 12 months reporting on this third rail of the criminal justice system. Here are her […]

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As we enter Trump’s second year in office, our “tough-on-crime” president and his attorney general have failed or refused, in their first year in office, to fill six key Justice Department posts with Senate-confirmed picks. Vital federal law enforcement agencies—the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals […]

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