Now a slave is not ‘held’ by any legal contract, obligation, duty, or authority, which the laws will enforce. He is ‘held’ only by brute force. One person beats another until the latter will obey him, work for him, if he require it, or do nothing if he require it.
The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn’t going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We’re torn about these things.
Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Being a justice. If you love law the way I do… you’re given the job of a lifetime… you’re permitted to address the most important legal questions of the country, and sometimes the world. And in doing so, you make a difference in people’s lives.
Legal documents have mistrust written all over them. It’s unfortunate, but the human DNA is so tuned to kind of taking you for granted that we tend to protect ourselves legally. That’s why I don’t read them as, if I read them, I will go soft. To me, the human relationship is far more important than the professional bond I share with anyone.
Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.
There will be gay couples; it will exist. It is not very nice that people who are married – who divorce in three seconds – don’t want protection for the others. The legal system should protect everyone, not just the few people who think they are above everybody else because they are married.
The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty – and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about – the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government – I wasn’t left a lot of margin for error. It’s kept me driven.
I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn’t pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn’t last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer.
I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.
One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don’t.
With ‘GoldenEye,’ the franchise got locked into this legal fight. They couldn’t make new Bond movies for about seven years. It was my first huge production. I figured if I did at least a yeoman-like job, it would be greeted as a complete revival of the series.
In an instant, the law was transformed: from the last passenger on the safe-haven bandwagon to a pioneer into uncharted territory. For the first time in American history, it was not only legal to relinquish a baby; in Nebraska, it was okay to abandon any child of any age for any reason at any time – with the full protection of the law.
I’m for the DREAM Act. It makes so much sense. Following the implementation of the DREAM Act, we’ll have a case study we can point to where we can say that we provided a path to citizenship or legal involvement in the community for these young immigrants, and the sky didn’t fall.
While no Muslim worthy of his name would lose his respect for God, the Prophet Muhammad, and other symbols of Islam, he might well refrain from using legal prosecution or violent reaction to those who do not show the same respect. My basis for this claim is nothing other than the holiest source of Islam, the Quran.
The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?
In America, to be ID’d – sorted, tagged, and permanently filed – is to lose a bit of one’s soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It’s not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn’t make it right. I’m not American; I don’t really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I’m worried about us, the foreigners.
The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence.
Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It’s how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors.
If we want to set and enforce a limit on immigration, we have to be willing to say no to would-be immigrants who look a lot like our own ancestors, not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because admitting them would exceed our legal limit.
When I consider a problem, it is now instinctive for me to think about the institutions involved, the authorizing environment, possible coalitions, likely opposition, implementation, legal issues, resource dimensions, communications – and how the problem fits into a stream of other issues.
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they’re called shamans, sometimes they’re called mad, and sometimes they’re called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing – at least sometimes – without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles.
