About Abortion (with Carol Sanger)
Since the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, abortion has been legal in the United States. But terminating pregnancy remains a controversial issue, and it plays a surprisingly...
United States of America
The Travel Ban as Religious Discrimination: Judges’ Engagement of Political Discourse and Recent History
On March 15, 2017, two federal district courts, in Hawaii and Maryland, enjoined the enforcement of President Trump’s second executive order restricting travel from six predominantly Muslim countries. In both...
The Religious Views of Judges and Human Rights Adjudication: A Reply to Bamforth and Barber
Two blog contributions have recently discussed the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court and what should be made of his conservative and theologically-derived views supported by...
A Legal Battle for Transgender Rights in America Is Postponed, But Not For Long
On March 6, 2017, the United States Supreme Court sent back to the lower courts a case that would have decided whether national anti-discrimination laws covering schools protect transgender students....
Access, Affordability, and the American Health Reform Dilemma, Part III: How an ACA Repeal Would Devastate Appalachia
Throughout the 2016 American election cycle, most Republicans, including President Donald J. Trump, ran on platform vowing to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known colloquially as “Obamacare.”...
Access, Affordability, and the American Health Reform Dilemma, Part II: The Affordable Care Act’s First Seven Years
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) turned seven last week, with a proposed legislative effort to gut many of its core protections looming. Then, in a...
Access, Affordability, and the American Health Reform Dilemma, Part I: Genesis of the Affordable Care Act
The debate over the government’s role in health care is not a new one, nor is the existential crisis that surrounds it. On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the...
Judge Neil Gorsuch: A Reply to Nicholas Bamforth
At the start of March, Nick Bamforth wrote a blog post for this site examining Judge Neil Gorsuch’s ‘Academic Pedigree’. With the hearings on Gorsuch underway, I thought it might...
Midazolam and the Lethal Injection – ‘In re: Ohio Execution Protocol Litigation’
On January 26 2017, a federal court in Ohio ruled that its current execution method is unconstitutional. This was on the basis that the use of the first drug in...
What the Trump Presidency Means For Gender Discourse Development
The Trump Administration’s gender-related policies have been characterized by some as a “war against women.” An analysis of these policies—as set within the broader socio-political context of President Trump’s campaign...
Judge Gorsuch’s Academic Pedigree
In articles published on 4th February 2017, the Times and Guardian newspapers drew attention to the intellectual influence of Oxford legal theorist John Finnis on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge...
Norms and Conventions Meet Donald Trump
I previously promised evidence that Donald Trump disrespected norms designed to discipline presidential candidates and has since flouted constitutional conventions designed to keep partisanship within reasonable bounds, ensure governmental competence...
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