No doubt you have noticed the ongoing question of whether and when the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, will prosecute Donald Trump for alleged crimes he committed in the period leading up to the 2020 election and thereafter. While the House of Representatives Select Committee to
Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has already publicized evidence of presidential crimes, the Attorney General has been silent on the status of investigations into the former president’s conduct regarding his effort to have the election of President Joe Biden overturned, which led to the insurrection at the nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Meanwhile, according to a poll released this week, almost 60 percent of Americans believe Trump should be prosecuted for crime in connection with the insurrection. Continue reading “Will the U.S. Prosecute the Former President for Insurrection and Other Crimes?”
Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion
For more than 30 years I taught the sociology of law to both undergraduate and graduate university students. We considered how American law developed, how it was applied to persons and groups, and with what effects on them and on the broader society.
When discussing the U.S. Supreme Court, I emphasized that the traditional law school approach to its decision-making was wrong. There, students have been
commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work. It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them. In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief. Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.
Although the American legal establishment placed a lot of faith in this account, and asked the nation to do the same, it was never a true story.
Of course, if it were, how could the Supreme Court issue so many decisions with 5-4 votes? More dramatically now, how could it be that today’s Supreme Court appears to be little more than a radical Right redoubt, one on the verge of retracting a basic right finally granted to women by the Court almost 50 years ago? Continue reading “Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion”
