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Sarah Palin came to praise Hillary Clinton and to bury liberal feminism. It’s too bad for the rest of us, but don’t cry for Hillary; she provided the shovel. Relying on pre-ideological appeals to female solidarity, blaming sexism when she got stuck in...
By Wendy Kaminer, Barack Obama is poised to become “our first president who is a civil libertarian,” Jeffrey Rosen wrote hopefully and not without reason, less than 6 months ago. But it didn’t take long for the audacity of politics to expose the naivete...
By Harvey Silverglate As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals...
By, Wendy Kaminer Hillary Clinton has a new excuse for continuing a campaign that is most likely doomed and clearly destructive: genetic determinism: “ I’ve come to believe that hard work, determination and resiliency are encoded in our DNA,” she declared...
The Boston Globe reported this morning that although Attorney General Michael Mukasey will still speak at this year's Boston College Law School commencement, the school has decided that it would nonetheless "deny Mukasey the Founder's Medal...
I’m old enough to have concluded, not so long ago, that I probably would not live to see Americans elect a truy reflexive – yet thoughtful – civil libertarian as President. I had hoped that Bill Clinton would be such a President, at least until he actually...
By Harvey Silverglate So the truth about waterboarding finally comes out, thanks in no small part to the Boston Globe 's Charlie Savage among the most astute journalists to chronicle the sins of omission and commission made by the Bush administration...
In response to Juvenal's maxim "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- "Who will watch the watchmen?" -- comes the apparent reply, no one. Think Progress reports that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established on...
By Wendy Kaminer It's foolish to seek logic in appeals to religious faith, especially those made while campaigning, but I can’t help interrogating Fred Thompson’s refrain that our "basic rights come from God and not from any government."...
In this week's Boston Phoenix, Harvey Silverglate writes about how a troubling new obstruction-of-justice statute, and a precedent set in a Connecticut kiddie-porn case, could be used to prosecute the CIA if the government brings obstruction charges...
By Wendy Kaminer Thank god for religious minorities: when members of minority faiths run for office they have little choice but to defend religious liberty and give at least a nod to separation of church and state. Appealing to our tradition of pluralism...
By Wendy Kaminer Friendly, occasionally funny, less doctrinaire than many of his fellow conservatives and more approachable than the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani and robotic Mitt Romney, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is the right wing preacher/politician...
By James F. Tierney In the August 15, 2007 Boston Phoenix , Harvey described the criminal case against Powers Fasteners as a likely form of extortion, in which Attorney General Martha Coakley's motive in pursuing the company was to extort civil settlements...
By James F. Tierney Despite having questioned Governor Deval Patrick's fidelity to freedom earlier today , we applaud his recent decision to appoint Francis Fecteau, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge in Worcester, to the state Appeals Court. Fecteau...
By Harvey Silverglate When Massachusetts residents elected Deval Patrick governor just over a year ago, it was a sign that this state had finally become fed up with sixteen years of Republican pols who treated the office as part plaything, part stepping...
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