Beyond the Ivory Tower

Recent News

• In the Los Angeles Times, Jon Michaels, author of Constitutional Coup, used the career of William Rehnquist as a model to underscore the vital importance—to the public, to legal history, and, perhaps eventually, to their fellow justices’s opinions—of bold, defiant dissents by the four liberal Supreme Court judges—even through a possibly decades-long upcoming era in which they may be consistently outvoted.
• Monica Muñoz Martinez, author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, spoke with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show about the historical context for the Trump administration’s violent and racially-charged policies for asylum-seekers crossing America’s southern border.
• A New Yorker feature on the universal basic income idea and its enthusiasts on both left and right was informed by, among others, Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy.

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July 9: Why Gerrymandering Matters

In America’s hard-fought and closely contested presidential election of 2016, only 59 percent of voting-age citizens cast a ballot, equaling about 86 million lost votes. Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with 63 million votes, just 28 percent of America’s voting-age citizens. In the 2014 midterm elections, only 38 percent of American citizens participated, equaling about 140 million lost votes. In closely contested U.S. Senate races across the nation in 2014, candidates typically won seats with votes equal to about one-fifth of the state’s citizens of voting age. Turnout is yet lower in local elections. A 2014 study by two University of Wisconsin researchers found that turnout in 144 mayoral elections across the nation averaged only 25.6 percent of the citizen voting…