I like most kinds of music, but heavy metal is another story. So, I took no note of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” tour, which began in Germany in November 1981, moved on to the U.K., and arrived in the United States at the beginning of 1982. By [...]

On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order outlawing birthright citizenship. In a previous article, I wrote that the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “states a rule, not a principle” (Concord Monitor, May 2, 2025). It can be changed by constitutional amendment, but [...]

In 1654, 23 Jews fled the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil and arrived in New Amsterdam, which became New York ten years later. Jews have been coming to America ever since in search of safety. In 1883, Emma Lazurus, the descendant of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States [...]

On May 15, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the subject of birthright citizenship. If you haven’t been following this controversy, two pieces of information may be helpful. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, [...]

Lawyers, me included, have long known of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which used to be a one-location New York law firm and now has over 1,000 lawyers and offices in other American cities and around the world. It was seen by many as the gold standard for [...]

On May 1, 2024, the House of Representatives voted in favor of H.R. 6090, known as the “Antisemitism Awareness Act.” You can’t judge a law by its name, and, despite its appealing title, this bill is a bad idea that should not become law. The House vote of 320 [...]

This article originally appeared in the December 18, 2022 Concord Monitor. This Supreme Court doesn’t much care for stare decisis, meaning respect for precedent. We know that from the Dobbs case, overruling Roe v. Wade, and by the end of this term we will know it again with the [...]

This article originally appeared in the October 9, 2022 Concord Monitor. During 2020, the first year of the pandemic, governors in several states, including Nevada, California, and New Hampshire, issued regulations limiting the number of people who could assemble in an indoors space. When religious groups challenged the Nevada [...]

“On a huge hill … truth stands, and hee that will reach her, about must, and about must goe.” John Donne, The Hill of Truth  In 1973, the Court decided in Roe v. Wade that the Fourteenth Amendment gives women the reproductive right to terminate pregnancy. In 1992, in [...]

There’s a doctrine called sovereign immunity, which goes back to the concept that the king cannot be hauled into court no matter what. In today’s terms, it means that you can’t sue a state or the federal government if one of its workers, say a state police officer or [...]