Wendy Kaminer

Elena Kagan and Sarah Palin have one thing in common: they are both judged on the basis of appearance More »

Both liberal and conservative justices recently granted the government the power to detain potential sex offenders, a scarily expansive view of federal criminal jurisdiction advocated by Elena Kagan More »

If the administration's bid to deny suspected terrorists their Miranda rights is not extreme enough for Republicans, what will be? More »

If Joe Lieberman and his colleagues have their way, human rights advocates and millions of other Americans, like you, could be threatened with loss of citizenship too More »

The dean of Harvard Law School threatened free speech by publicly calling out a student for expressing an unpopular opinion in a private e-mail More »

Democrats' latest immigration reform plan, which would require every worker in the U.S. to carry a biometric ID card, shows that neither party cares about protecting civil liberties More »

Freedom from Religion Foundation v Obama reopens the contentious debate on National Prayer Day More »

That retiring Justice John Paul Stevens is leader of the Supreme Court's liberal wing is practically a cliché More »

I don't know what constitutes a non-consensual, indirect, attempted touch, but I wouldn't try it at Duke More »

Small lies are easily and often ignored, but they may reveal more about the character of individuals and institutions than large ones. More »

Karl Rove enjoys opportunities to speak and be heard that most of us will never approximate, but we should still condemn the behavior of protesters who (TPM reported) disrupted his recent book signing in Beverly Hills. The protesters were not exercising their First Amendment rights so much as they were effectively restricting the rights of others -- not just Rove but audience members who were interested in hearing from him. The heckler's veto limits speech,… More »

Two months ago, 15-year old Phoebe Prince hanged herself. Prince, a freshman at South Hadley High School in western Massachusetts, was widely acknowledged to have been a victim of bullying, and her suicide helped jolt the state legislature into passing stringent anti-bullying bills. (I discussed the Senate bill here.) Now, nine teenagers implicated in tormenting Prince are facing criminal charges, including criminal harassment, stalking, and statutory rape. … More »

For the ACLU's sake, I hope it has very good lawyers representing it in what TPM accurately calls a potentially explosive investigation of ACLU's alleged involvement in outing CIA officers to the 9/11 defendants (reported by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff on March 19th). Patrick Fitzgerald has been appointed to lead the investigation, and Isikoff writes, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero has confirmed that the ACLU "hired private investigators to track down CIA… More »

If you think health care was rammed through, just look at the Patriot Act More »

"Freedom" has long been a right-wing rallying cry for self-identified patriots ranging from John Birchers to tea party protesters to increasingly extreme members of the Republican establishment. They're particularly passionate about the freedom to own and openly carry guns and freedom from federal taxation (but not necessarily federal benefits). Otherwise, their most consistent attachments to freedom tend to be rhetorical, unless freedom means restricting… More »

Wondering at the disdain for fundamental American freedoms reflected in the Cheney-Kristol smear campaign against lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees, my fellow Atlantic correspondent Mickey Edwards notes that they "attack lawyers because they represented men accused -- not convicted, not even charged -- of being enemies of the American people." But according to former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, the government's failure to charge and try… More »

An openly gay student seeking a graduate degree in counseling at a state university is expelled for refusing to agree that homosexuality is immoral and declining to enter an anti-gay indoctrination program. An openly gay high school guidance counselor speaks out in favor of same sex marriage and is brought before a state licensing board to answer complaints against her filed by marriage opponents. If you're a gay rights advocate or liberal civil libertarian,… More »

I'm not suggesting that the demonization of certain words will end in their criminalization ever, or anytime soon. More »

What qualifies a Republican as a moderate in 2010? He votes in favor of allowing Senate debate on a pro-business "jobs" bill, mainly comprising tax exemptions for businesses that hire new workers and additional tax credits to employers who hold on to their new hires for at least a year. The bar could hardly be lower for Massachusetts freshman Scott Brown, who needs a few shows of independence from his party's extremism in order win re-election in 2012. Indeed,… More »

Are we ruled by personal experiences in evaluating allegations of workplace abuse? The pop therapeutic answer is "yes:" we are seen, in essence, as the sum of abuses we've suffered or meted out in the past. I find this view pernicious, which is why I want to respond here to one reader's grossly mistaken "sense" from the "tone of my post" on bullying, that I too have probably been accused of abusing employees. In fact, I'm a freelance writer who never had or… More »