Tag Archives: law

Posted on by

I’ve argued in the past that restricting abortion creates a legal precedent for restricting pregnant women’s legal access to everything from alcohol to jet skis, because recognizing a fetus as a human being with rights inevitably circumscribes the right of the woman gestating it to bodily autonomy in making decisions which affect it. That argument was powerfully illustrated Thursday by the tragic case of Melissa Ann Rowland, who’s facing murder charges for refusing a caesarian section. A conviction here, needless to say, would represent another dangerous step towards reconceptualizing pregnant women in American law as wombs containing legally-protected human beings rather than as legally-protected human beings with fetuses.

Posted on by

In this week’s Yale Herald (it’s a sidebar they haven’t posted on-line), a leader of the Yale anti-GESO graduate student group, At What Cost, warns Yale’s administration that its heavy-handed anti-union tactics are prone to backfire in the long run:

The Yale administration is opposed to GESO, and no one is going to change that one way or another. My concern is that when the Administration enters in the fray. It lends credence to GESO’s claim.

As well it should. At What Cost, at the Academic Labor Board hearing last year, declined to support the administration’s stated plans to have the results of an NLRB vote impounded and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court either. So it appears Levin’s anti-union tactics find little sympathy even among anti-union grad students.

Posted on by

Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal wants John Kerry to sue Rupert Murdoch’s British Sun for libel for printing Matt Drudge’s Kerry intern flap. The journalistic merits of Drudge and Murdoch aside, this is yet another example of the tremendous potential for abuse under Britain’s perverse libel laws, which render those who print objectionable speech guilty until proven innocent. If Blumenthal were a true progressive, and not simply a partisan Clintonista, he would recognize that censorship – even when directed at the powerful and those who carry water for them – always comes back to hurt the most vulnerable.

Posted on by

Yesterday, several dozen undergraduates and grad students met up to discuss the ways in which Yale’s graduate student pay inequity disvalues their work and our education, to deliver a letter to Graduate School Dean Peter Salovey, and to begin planning a larger mobilization for March.

Back home in Philly, U Penn’s superior-acronym-bearing graduate student union, GET-UP, has announced plans for a two-day strike next week to coincide with parade welcoming Penn’s new President to demand that Penn agree to count the ballots from the union election held by its grad students a year ago:

Rich Klimmer, an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers based in Philadelphia, said that, by contrast, when he was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, graduate students did not do any teaching until they had finished all their coursework. He said they also were given three weeks of training on how to prepare and give lectures and how to build and grade exams.

“Now, under the corporate model of running a university, they take anyone and put them in the classes,” Klimmer said.

Money and benefits are at the root of the bid to unionize. Graduate students, who are paid on average $15,000 a year, argue that they don’t earn a living wage for this region. Many graduate students are older, returning students who have families. Deirdre Martinez, 36, a graduate student in Penn’s education school, has two children ages 5 and 7 and a husband who teaches at Temple University. She said universities such as Penn need to treat adult learners with the same respect they would expect elsewhere.

Penn, Brown, and Columbia, at Yale President Levin’s urging, have all had the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded, pending a potentially decade-long appeal process as far as the Supreme Court. This is the legal limbo into which Levin has expressed his desire to shunt GESO as well. That’s why GESO continues to demand a fair process whose results can be recognized by both sides.

Democracy, Levin often likes to remark in disparaging the more democratic Card-Count Neutrality process, means voting. If democracy means voting, then surely it demands that the votes be counted, and the results followed. That’ll take the continued struggle of graduate students across this country.

Posted on by

As Atrios points out, Bush made much the same argument Dean got in such trouble for about leaving it to the judges to render verdicts against the evildoers – and not a peep of outrage from the “liberal media.”

Posted on by

This op-ed in today’s YDN first argues, rightly, that reasonable conservatives should be more concerned with recruiting skilled men and women to join the army than with casting them out for their sexual orientation, and then argues, wrongly, that reasonable liberals should see the JAG core’s right to Yale Law-sponsored interviews, rather than the Law School’s right to enforce it’s non-discrimination policy, as a first ammendment issue. The factual error at the heart of the piece is in the suggestion that law students and military recruiters were – up until the Pentagon’s $350 million blackmail scheme last year under the Solomon ammendment – being denied their right to association. JAG recruiters, like prospective students, Jews for Jesus, and leafletting undergrads, are free to associate with law students who want to meet with them on campus. What the Pentagon is threatening the termination of a third of a billion dollars worth of lifesaving research to demand is that the Law School sponsor those interviews through its on-campus interview program – and the Law School is right to resist the pressure. The suggestion that political protest is self-indulgent, and institutions can only be changed by the elect that’s granted membership in them, belies the history of this University, let alone the US army.

Posted on by

From the Times:

A federal appeals court has upheld Alaska’s curbs on soft-money political donations to candidates for state office, holding that the State Legislature had a right to enact the restrictions in 1996 to restore the public’s faith in government.

The 3-to-0 ruling on Tuesday by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in Seattle, overturned a federal district court that had found the curbs unconstitutional. The latest ruling comes as the United States Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on Sept. 8 on the McCain-Feingold law barring political parties from raising soft money for federal candidates.

Glad to see this court reject the twisted conception of political bribery as protected speech. I once had a classmate suggest to me that a laissez-faire campaign finance system was democratic because the winner was the candidate who the most people wanted in office – this echoes Ari Fleischer’s take on Bush’s fundraising a few months back. Someone should remind the Bush administration that we already have – in theory – a system for figuring out whom the most people would like to see elected: the vote. And ideally, everyone gets the same number of those. There are some troubling provisions in McCain-Feingold regulating speech (i.e., not money) in the period before elections, deserving of critical review, but I’m yet to understand on what grounds my donating money to every viable candidate in understood exchange for largesse in office is protected symbolic speech but my paying money to a prostitute for sex or a dealer for drugs is not. That said, McCain-Feingold remains a largely ineffective (and sometimes – as in the case of the doubled individual contribution limit – dangerously counterproductive) stab at the problem. Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest one alternative here.