Tag: law

The Legal Resistance

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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As most readers know, I’m a volunteer along with more than a hundred other people at Unbreaking.org, which currently describes itself on the main webpage as

Documenting damage and resistance. Unflooding the zone. 

I signed up because I have lots of writing and editing experience, but once I started looking at what needed doing, I realized that a skill I first learned in law school and honed in my years as a legal editor at BNA was particularly valuable: I can look at court documents of all kinds and figure out what’s going on and what’s important about it, if anything.

What this means is that I’ve not only been paying attention to the legal news – which I’d do anyway because looking at legal stuff is the easiest way for me to understand what’s going on – but actually reading about some cases in detail, particularly ones related to the security (or lack thereof) of people’s data.

This is work that is both inspiring and depressing.

It’s inspiring because so many lawyers and judges are working so very hard to combat the ongoing destruction of our democracy and the parts of our government that used to work pretty well.

Every time the grifter’s government does something outrageous, somebody sues. Our attorney general here in California has brought all kinds of cases, usually in company with attorneys general from other states. For example, they’re suing – and winning so far – over efforts to shut down food stamp payments in states that refuse to hand over data on food stamp recipients.

Several clinics and hospitals that do gender-affirming care have fought back when they got subpoenas from the Justice Department demanding that they turn over data on their patients and won.

And 29 states and the District of Columbia refused to provide voter rolls. They’ve been sued for those records, but so far the courts are ruling in their favor.

It’s interesting how many of the cases revolve around the government trying to get their hands on data about citizens and how strongly some of the states and their lawyers are protecting that data.

In a reasonable world, the federal government would be interested in protecting the data of the people who live in this country, but in the mirror world we live in they’re out to exploit it or use it to harm us.

But it’s still depressing. Some of that is just the mind-blowing things we’re having to fight about. It’s also the knowledge that the Supreme Court is packed with right wing extremists.

I mean, I was glad they threw out the tariffs, but that was one small victory from a court that has overwhelmingly ruled in ways that undermine our democracy.

But there are other reasons why legal work can only do so much for the resistance. Continue reading “The Legal Resistance”…

The Changes We Need

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I keep seeing memes go by on social media that list changes we need to make once we get the fascists out of office. There are some good items on those lists and the people sharing them have good intentions, but at least two of the items drive me nuts: term limits for the Supreme Court and ending the electoral college.

It’s not that I disagree with those ideas – the electoral college should have been tossed out long ago and while I’m generally skeptical about term limits the lengths suggested are reasonable – but rather that they aren’t going to happen.

The Constitution provides for appointment for life for Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) and it also sets up the electoral college. To get rid of those things, you need a constitutional amendment.

Getting a constitutional amendment is hard and in the current political climate probably impossible even if we throw all the bastards out in 2028.

However, there are things we can do that do not require amending the Constitution, and one of them would do a much better job of fixing the current disaster of the supreme court than term limits.

We need to expand the court.

There is no limit on the size of the court in the Constitution. The size of the court was set at nine members – eight associate justices and a chief justice – in 1869. At the time, the population of the United States was about 39 million, or roughly 10 percent of what it is now.

We actually need a larger court to get to all the issues the Supreme Court should handle. We need more judges on the federal district courts and the courts of appeal as well.

Further, term limits wouldn’t even apply to the current judges we need to get rid of, because any amendment would likely exempt them. We need to change the Supreme Court immediately and expansion would do that. Continue reading “The Changes We Need”…

Exams and Cheating

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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At the beginning of R.F. Kuang’s novel The Poppy War (which I just started, so this isn’t a review), the main character Rin must strip naked and be patted down before taking an exam. She can’t even wear her own clothes into the exam room.

I immediately harkened back to reports that the Texas Bar and those of several other states were prohibiting those taking the bar exam from bringing their own tampons or pads with them to the exam. Since those reports came out, the Texas Bar has relented to the extent that it will allow women to bring their own products in a clear plastic bag (a la the ones you use for your liquids at the airport).

In both cases, the authorities are obsessed with preventing the test takers from cheating. I don’t know if there is a good argument for the exam in the world of Kuang’s novel, though given the amount of ugliness and corruption hinted at so far, I suspect the test is mostly a tool for keeping out the riff-raff, and might not be the best way to determine who should receive higher education.

But I have taken a bar exam – the Texas one, in fact – and can tell you that it is essentially a hazing ritual, a tool to make you put in a lot of wasted hours studying for the test, which is not the same as studying how the law works, so that you can show you are willing to do a lot of meaningless work to put “Attorney at Law” after your name.

When I read about the tampon rule, my first reaction, even before reacting to the misogyny and silliness, was “they’re giving an in-person bar exam during the pandemic? In Texas, where the pandemic is pretty much out of control right now?” Continue reading “Exams and Cheating”…