I’m always writing something. There’s always some structure sitting around someplace. There’s always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It’s never not buzzing around me all the time. I’m always doing it.
Hillary Clinton is in political trouble and perhaps even legal trouble over her use of private e-mail accounts and bypassing government-issued accounts containing substantial amounts of information that belongs to the federal government. But ultimately, I don’t think this latest controversy will hurt her presidential ambitions.
People get married for a wide array of reasons and have all sorts of expectations of how marriage will change the relationship. And while it’s true that turning the person you’re dating into a legal partner does affect certain things, those who expect marriage to be a cure-all for all your relationship woes are sorely mistaken.
If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from fetal-tissue research. This is, after all, a practice that’s been legal since the 1930s.
If we can find a way to enforce our laws and keep people from coming into our country illegally while maintaining a strong legal immigration system, I think that’s going to benefit everyone. If you come here illegally, and you commit a crime, you’re not going to be able to stay in our country.
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.
Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.
The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us – inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences – must not be permitted to succeed.
Society cannot escape what is essentially a moral question: When does human life deserve legal protection from the state? And society certainly cannot escape this dilemma by denying that it is fundamentally a moral issue, no matter what position one chooses.
It would be a sign of society changing if we did finally legalize prostitution. Once it’s legal, it doesn’t mean your daughter’s going to run out and be a ho. The more we sort of bring these things into the light, you bring these hidden vices into the light, the less power they have over our society. You make it legal, it tends to go away.
Legal aid is crucial in ensuring those truly guilty of crimes are convicted after due process, and those innocent are able to clear their names, by ensuring that access to legal representation is available for everyone, regardless of ability to pay.
Just as TurboTax simplified much of the tax process, so has the colossally scary legal process been reduced to a kinder, gentler series of mouse clicks and ‘Continue’ buttons by LegalZoom, the online leader that has become so prominent in its market that it’s practically a generic.
I’d worked in the state senate in college and seen how important legal decisions were. And at the last minute, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said, ‘Why don’t you come do an internship?’ That turned into almost 15 years in the government, in the White House, and at the State Department.
Many of the concessions that leading Democrats seem willing to make – from cutting diversity visas to chipping away at family visas – would be made on the backs of black immigrants, people from Africa and the Caribbean who deserve these policies to remain intact as some of the few legal tools they have to immigrate to this country.
What I’ll say is that Cuban-Americans don’t have to deal with the same immigration issues as other nationalities because of the ‘wet feet, dry feet’ policy. For Cubans, one year after you touch United States territory, you can become a legal resident.
The ‘Total Information Awareness’ project is truly diabolical – mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.
I also urge the Obama administration – both on its own and in cooperation with other responsible governments around the world – to use all legal means necessary to shut down WikiLeaks before it can do more damage by releasing additional cables. WikiLeaks’ activities represent a shared threat to collective international security.
There is international criminal organizations penetrating our southern based borders, and we need to do something about it. Secure the border, enforce the law, no amnesty, and go forward with the legal immigration system that gives priority to American working families and wages.
‘Network neutrality’ is sometimes called ‘Internet freedom’ or ‘Internet openness’ and is a legal principle that would forbid cable and phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from blocking some websites or providing special priority to others.
The practice of law requires both continuity and growth – a deep understanding of legal principles born of reason, tradition, and experience and tested by time, but also a mind alert to present needs and the future consequences of public and private legal decisions.
From the artist’s standpoint, are you getting more from streaming than you used to, prior to the days of the Internet? No – and I don’t know if those days are ever going to come back – but at least, technically speaking, it’s the legal way to do it.
I’ve been working at performing for five years now. I’ve been working in Australia and Spain and England. When I was only 15 or 16, 1 was performing in bars; I could have had legal problems, but it’s also the only way to get to know what music is all about.
I think people should have the legal right to hurt themselves without fearing that they’re going to get locked up for doing so. But on a personal level, if someone I loved was hurting himself or herself in front of me, I would, of course, try to restrain them.
When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the ‘70s and ’80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law.
History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.
