I recommend Bill Quigley’s “Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice” to anybody considering a legal career and interested in justice.

Also recommended is the book “Against the Tide,” by Debbie Hagan,to those who want to understand the social role of lawyers. It is the story of Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, who dreamed of running a law school in the public interest but met resistance at every step from the legal establishment.

Also recommended is a book I’m in the middle of reading, Unequal Justice, which explores the political interests behind the origins of many of the legal institutions we are familiar with, such as law schools, the big law firm, the bar exam, the American Bar Association, and the National Lawyers Guild. It’s dated (from the mid-1970s), but still very interesting and useful.

The comments section here might be a good place to compile recommended resources on this subject.

Posted under Culture, Politics

Arguments in favor of California’s Proposition 8 are a fascinating study in hate apologetics.  Just as with the “life begins at conception” anti-choice movement or the pro-creationism lobby, from the start there is an intense pressure to hide the religious foundations beneath the nearest available logic-like substitute.  It comes down to an often hilarious yet very sobering look into the kind of people who think discrimination belongs in the California state constitution.

The favored defenses of institutionalized bigotry are:

Read More…

Posted under Culture, News, Politics, Religion, Sexuality

John McCain is constitutionally incapable of being President of the United States. I am not referring to the fact that he is, as Alexander Cockburn indelicately puts it, “a half-mad former POW tormented with PTSD and dying of melanoma.” I am talking about his lack of fitness under the U.S. Constitution, which requires the President to be a “natural born citizen.” And his candidacy is challengeable in the courts.

Virtually all the Obama supporters I’ve mentioned this to either explode with rage at my suggestion that they take up the legal challenge, or roll their eyes and tell me that the issue has been settled. A minority – generally, those with legal training – agree that there’s a potential challenge, but they aren’t interested because they believe that it’s not ethical to limit voters’ choices like I’m suggesting. This post outlines the case that there is a compelling legal argument that McCain is not a natural born citizen; that it is possible to legally challenge his candidacy based on his ineligibility; that the issue has not been settled; and that a court challenge is not an unethical course of action.

McCain is not a natural born citizen

The argument for McCain’s lack of fitness was made by Gabriel “Jack” Chin, who argued that the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S.-occupied territory where McCain was born, was within U.S. jurisdiction, but outside of U.S. limits. This is significant because the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship at birth to (almost) anyone born within U.S. limits, and the immigration laws at the time granted citizenship at birth to individuals born to U.S. citizens outside of U.S. limits and jurisdiction, as long as their parents met certain residency criteria. McCain’s parents met the criteria, but because he was born within U.S. jurisdiction, the law didn’t make him a citizen at birth. And because he was born outside of U.S. limits, the Constitution didn’t make him a citizen at birth. He became a citizen at age 11 months, when Congress amended the immigration law to grant citizenship to those who, like McCain, fell through the legislative crack.

While Chin’s case is quite good, a plausible argument to the contrary has recently been presented. According to this argument, the words “limits and jurisdiction” in the old legislation does not refer to two separate concepts, but is rather a stylistic repetition of a single concept, like “cease and desist” or “hue and cry,” and that in fact they refer just to limits, not jurisdiction.

If this is true, then the legislation makes anyone born to U.S. citizen parents who meet the residency requirements a U.S. citizen at birth, and this would include McCain. It’s possible that this argument would carry the day in a courtroom, but I think it more likely not, for a couple of reasons. First, unlike “cease”, “desist”, “hue” and “cry”, “limits” and “jurisdiction” are legal concepts. Moreover “jurisdiction” is a old concept, and the fact that it refers to the area under a country’s authority or control – that is, that it extends beyond the country’s limits – would have been known in 1795, when the statute was written. It is unlikely that the drafters of the statute would have used “jurisdiction” when they meant “limits”. Moreover, Chin shows that Congress was aware at least since 1932 that children born to U.S. citizen parents in unincorporated territories were not being born as citizens, and that they acted to correct the deficiency in 1937, after McCain was born.

Assuming that McCain was not a U.S. citizen at birth, then he is not a natural born citizen. The adjective “natural” corresponds to citizenship. One who is “naturalized” is one who has gone from being a non-citizen to being a citizen. Its counterpart is “natural-born”, meaning a citizen from birth. There is a bit of redundancy in saying that someone is a “natural-born citizen”, since the information that she is a citizen is contained both in the word “natural-born” and in the word “citizen”. But there’s nothing linguistically wrong with this kind of partial redundancy. The meaning of “naturalized citizen” is not disputed, and contains the same redundancy.

Thus, McCain is not a natural born citizen. The Constitution’s Article II requires the President to be either a natural born citizen or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Jokes about McCain’s age aside, he was not around at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Therefore he is not eligible to be President.

Posted under History, News, People, Politics

Last Wednesday was my birthday. My roommate got me a bright yellow t-shirt with “VOTE FOR JESUS” in bright red “VOTE FOR PEDRO”-style lettering.

On Thursday. I wore it with pride. I was confronted by John, a white supremacist friend of mine. He told me he was offended by the shirt, because it mocked the majority Christian culture.

I told him, it’s not mockery. I genuinely support writing in Jesus for President as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

As people who know me know, I never support Democrats or Republicans for the presidency, though I will often support Democrats for other positions. I am generally a Nader supporter.

This is not some form of anti-pragmatic political purism, as some have accused. Nader is not the candidate whose views I am most aligned with. If my support for a candidate had no pragmatic component, I would support Cynthia McKinney (of the Green Party) or Brian Moore (of the Socialist Party). In Canada, where I actually vote in elections, I vote for the New Democratic Party – the social democratic party that has traditionally been a third party, but is now poised to overtake the Liberal Party as one of the two frontrunning parties (the Liberals having abandoned liberal politics).

My support for Nader is based on the fact that his platform is much more popular than those of Obama, McCain, McKinney or Moore, and is progressive.

Friday night’s debate, which against my usual practice I watched, was a perfect illustration of just how indistinguishable Obama and McCain are, when viewed against a broader background. The candidates agreed on virtually everything.

Both of them thought the surge was a wild success, apparently based on the fact that there has been a lull in the level of violence since it started. As anyone with even limited analytic ability knows, this is poor reasoning. Those who are knowledgeable and thoughtful about the situation, like Juan Cole, are skeptical that the surge caused the lull in violence. Cole suggests in his debate debrief that the reduced levels of violence in Baghdad is the result of the successful cleansing of the cities of its Sunni residents, who have been either massacred or driven out of the city. In other words, it’s not the American surge but the Shia surge that’s responsible for the reduction in violence.

Both McCain and Obama appear to favor increasing the military budget.

Both candidates apparently buy into the lies that the right-wing Zionists concocted, and the Western media has repeated ad nauseam, about Ahmadinejad threatening to wipe Israel off the map. McCain repeated it several times, and Obama never disputed it.

Among the few differences of substance that the candidates emphasized concerned leaving Iraq. They tried to make it look like an big difference: McCain wants to stay in until victory, Obama wants a timetable for withdrawal. But if you look at Obama’s plan as he has consistently articulated it, he’s talking about redeployment rather than withdrawal. He basically favors pulling troops from Iraq and putting them in Afghanistan instead. Neither candidate favors doing what the law requires: ending the occupation of Iraq.

If I had to characterize the foreign policy differences between the two, I would do it this way: McCain prefers to focus on Iraq, while Obama prefers broader aggression including Afghanistan and possibly including Iran and Pakistan. It comes down not to any difference of principle, but to the tactical or strategic question of where the main battle against al-Qaeda is located. (After the debate, I don’t know what “tactics” or “strategy” mean anymore. Strategery, anyone?)

Both apparently support possibly bombing Pakistan, although McCain thinks it’s wrong to talk about it. I guess he thinks it’s better to sing about it.

Both support missile defense. Both support offshore drilling and nuclear power plants.

What are the real differences? Style. As Noam Chomsky says, the people marketing political campaigns are the same guys that market toothpaste. McCain was on the message that Obama isn’t ready to lead. Obama was trying to tie McCain to the Bush catastrophe.

Nader is highly distinguishable from BaJohn McBama/Jorack O’Cain. He favors a lawful foreign policy, including withdrawal from Iraq and refraining from acts of aggression against other countries. He’s against nuclear energy. For an overview on Nader on the issues, and a contrast with the Republicrats, see here: http://www.votenader.org/issues/

Posted under News, Politics