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 [...]

Affirmative action seeks to address past discrimination on account of race, gender, or national origin. It isn’t a “free pass,” but as the law now stands, it allows educational institutions to consider these characteristics as part of the admissions process. The Senate has confirmed Katanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to [...]

Freedom of speech includes the right not to speak. In other words, the “right to remain silent” belongs to all of us, not just people under arrest. The Supreme Court established the point in 1943 when it decided that public school students cannot be required to salute the flag [...]

On January 27, 2022, Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, effective at the end of the current term, meaning late June or early July 2022, “assuming that by then my successor has been nominated and confirmed.” The Constitution says that the President “shall nominate” and [...]

This article originally appeared in the February 17, 2022 Concord Monitor. I was born Jewish on February 19, 1939, at Claremont General Hospital. My Stevens High School classmates included seven Jewish kids out of a class numbering just over a hundred. Our numbers were more than double the percentage [...]

On November 4, 2021, the Biden Administration issued two safety rules covering over 100 million employees. One came out of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which—relying on the federal law charging the agency with protecting employees’ health and safety and on substantial evidence of widespread workplace breakouts—issued [...]