News & Commentary

Saturday is International Human Rights Day, commemorating the day in 1948 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The significance of the day and its history is something that President-elect Donald Trump should reckon with after running a campaign that demonstrated outright contempt for human rights, particularly his “love” of waterboarding. Right now, we don’t yet know what Donald Trump will try in office. But to fight against

Alabama cruelly and excessively violated the bounds of human decency last night when it knowingly inflicted torturous pain during Ronald Smith’s botched execution. And it should never have come to this. Ronald Smith’s jury had voted to spare his life, but

This piece was originally posted by the ACLU of Ohio. It’s lame duck season in the state of Ohio and this year seems like the “super special” version. During the lame duck

This Monday, December 12, the ACLU will be joining Color of Change, 18 Million Rising, MomsRising.org, MoveOn, DRUM — Desis Rising Up and Moving, and others to deliver over 280,000 petition signatures calling on President Obama to repeal the special registration system targeting Muslim and Arab immigrants before Donald Trump takes office.

Originally posted on Wikimedia’s blog. Yesterday, the next hearing in 

Originally posted at The Daily Beast. Next month, President-elect Trump will be

In opposing the raft of bills seeking to make it more difficult to obtain an abortion, Susan Watson often commented, “Next it will be a crime to be a woman in Alabama.” And then she got to work overseeing the equivalent of seven federal court challenges to such restrictions in her first three years as the executive director of the ACLU of Alabama. After a brief illness, Susan died unexpectedly last week, and Alabama lost a champion for civil liberties. I knew Susan from my earliest days at the ACLU starting in 2000 through the present: as a plaintiff i

People who take to the streets to protest should not be subject to a different form of justice than everyone else. But lawyers for the NYPD are doing exactly that when they selectively step in and act as prosecutors in cases that involve demonstrators, reportedly to keep those protesters from suing the department for false arrest. The eyebrow-raising agreement between the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the NYPD, in which the district

When I joined the Marines 40 years ago, I took a vow to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” That’s why I drove from the suburbs of Minneapolis to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation this weekend to join other military veterans in protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. For the past few months, I have watched from afar as para-militarized police forces from nine states have targ