Law and Politics

Prosecutors recommended that Roger Stone, an associate of Donald Trump, be given a heavy penalty after being convicted of seven felony counts, including lying to authorities. But after intervention from the Justice Department, and tweets from the president, he’s getting three years and four months in jail, much less than what the prosecutors asked for. What can his case tell us about presidential interference and prosecutorial discretion?

What is Congress' contempt power, and how can lawmakers us it to force cooperation with their investigations? Episode 32 of "What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law" answers these questions.

I've been keeping an eye on elite bashing of working class and rural whites for years now, and I published my first article about it as long ago as 2011.  But the election of 2016 brought the disdainful badmouthing by the chattering classes to a fever pitch, and I've occasionally blogged about the phenomenon, including here and 

The legal dispute between the FBI and Apple over a locked iPhone is clouded in technical details that are hard for many to understand, an unclear area of law, and a terrible tragedy in San Bernardino that provokes unease and fear.

To make matters worse, the FBI and Apple are engaged in a very public battle using open letters, blog posts and hearings before Congress with terms like patriotism, marketability and backdoors.

I have previously written that Senator Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen, eligible to the presidency, because he was a citizen at birth.  Though born in Canada and having a father of Cuban heritage, his mother was a U.S.

Silicon Valley billionaire investor Tim Draper recently unveiled a plan to divide up California into six separate states because, in his view, "California's diverse population and economies [have] rendered the state nearly ungovernable." In the space below, I begin to identify some of the political and constitutional hurdles this proposal faces.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has drawn national attention to economic inequality, and several new studies and a book just published also invite us to consider the acuteness of this inequality, as well as its causes and/or consequences.   These publications all highlight education, to one degree or another, as a key indicator of class and class mobility.

Two recent news reports from very different parts of the world shared this theme: Affluence can have its drawbacks.

I responded last month to Martha McCluskey’s ClassCrits post, “Class as a Category of Vulnerability and Inequality.” In that initial response, I asserted that progressives need not choose between advocating mobility (the upward variety!) and advocating mobilization (collective action, labor rights) when it comes to class.