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by
Elie Mystal
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July 2 - July 25, 2023
Prosecutors have qualified immunity too.
Seneca Village was located in what is now thought of as the west side of Central Park.
Eminent domain is such a core concept of sovereignty that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that it doesn’t even require a constitutional provision.
Private property is not the natural or inevitable result of settled society.
Unlike private property, eminent domain does flow naturally and inevitably from the concept that ownership exists only insofar as the state is able to secure and defend the territory.
when white people want your shit, they will take it, and Black people will rarely be justly compensated for the destruction of their wealth.
Robert Moses was a deeply racist man who built highways, bridges, parks, beaches, and even housing projects by bulldozing the hopes, dreams, and often literal homes of people in his way.
Moses would target a community, have state assessors declare it a “slum,” and acquire the land through eminent domain at cut-rate prices.
eminent domain so often takes advantage of vulnerable people
instead of displacing two white families who didn’t even use their land as their primary residence, the city went forward with a new plan that included displacing over two hundred Black people in Seneca Village who had built up an independent Black community on some of the only land they were allowed to purchase.
The tool prosecutors used, and still use, to ensure all-white (and almost always all-male) juries is the peremptory challenge.
the Challenger space shuttle blew up on live television before Black people had a tool to avoid being excluded from criminal juries in America.
defendants have a right to object to exclusion of Black jurors, and if they do, the burden shifts to the prosecution to provide a race-neutral reason for the exclusion of Black jurors.
There are literally training videos on YouTube you can find that teach lawyers how to get around Batson challenges.
Batson assumes that lawyers acting in bad faith will be distinguishable from those acting in good faith.
But I think the way to attack peremptory challenges is not through the equal protection clause, but through the Sixth Amendment itself.
white jurors cannot sit in impartial judgment of Black people.
The moral argument against the death penalty is actually a lot harder to make than the legal objection to the practice. I
(the exact language “cruel and unusual” is copied and pasted from the 1689 English Bill of Rights)
Unfortunately, we share the country with people who will not let us have nice things. These people are called originalists,
The Constitution does not require me, or my country, to be forever hobbled by their sociopathy.
It makes no sense that we’ve been able to remove ourselves from an eighteenth-century view of who gets punished but remain locked in an eighteenth-century view of how to punish people.
evil hiding behind the banality of cowardice.
The withholding of death drugs by the people who make them is one of the best stories about corporate responsibility we have in the modern era.
They’re saying Russell Bucklew and all other death row inmates deserve to die and nobody should give a shit if it hurts.
Those four amendments do not perfect the original Constitution; they’re not the final pieces of the puzzle that complete a picture by filling in some obvious holes.
It’s pretty easy to dress up “whites win always” with legalese and sell it back to an audience of white people, especially when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have already done most of the work.
I could make a case that the only amendments I need in order to run a free and fair society are the Fourteenth and the First.
they argue with a straight face that we should be locked into a nineteenth-century white man’s idea of racial justice.
Understand, Black people did not get a vote in the drafting, adoption, or ratification of the Constitution in 1787. We did not get a vote in the drafting, adoption, or ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments. We did not consent, tacitly or otherwise, to this slave state. And we were systematically denied political power in this country until roughly 1964
This is why the Conservatives are pulling history books out of the schools - so no one will argue the need for Black voters to vote & hold political power.
political rights, civil rights, and social rights. Political rights are the rights to participate in the democracy: the right to vote, or hold elective office. Civil rights are the rights to participate in the economy: the right to own a home, or buy land. Social rights are the rights to participate in society: the right to get married, or throw a party.
The core logic of Plessy is that laws that are facially race-neutral are constitutional, even if they have a discriminatory effect.
“facially race-neutral” because arguably it restricts white teams as much as Black teams. This is a logic that conservatives will come back to, again and again.
downloaded the white supremacy widget that is originalism but didn’t watch the YouTube video on how to make it work.
The right to participate in society with equality and dignity is also protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that is what Loving stands for.
Federalist Society heroes hate being reminded that white people are not a protected class.
Lots of white people like to act like they are the “default” people in this country and, well, the law treats them as such.
I’d love to see a legal ruling that counts poor people as a suspect class.
The Supreme Court excels at using new jargon to smuggle in the same old bigotry.
Obergefell was one of the biggest missed opportunities in modern constitutional history.
I’ve decided that my children are entitled to a reliable, consistent, repeatable answer every time I deprive them of life, liberty, or the Nintendo Switch.
substantive due process is really about fundamental fairness.
Sometimes, I swear, it can seem like liberals spend all their time inventing ways to get their asses kicked.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are shameless.
[T]he Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause is not a “secret repository of substantive guarantees against ‘unfairness.’”
What!!!!!
Thomas, and the rest of the conservatives, absolutely believe substantive due process exists; they just think the Fourteenth Amendment is hiding rights for businesses they think are people, instead of minorities they wish were not.
Who are these people, and how are there always so many of them?
It’s not because they were handing out contraceptives; it’s because they were handing out equality.
Various guarantees create zones of privacy.”
Many of the rights explicitly protected in the Constitution don’t make sense unless this unenumerated right to privacy is also protected. What good is a protection from unreasonable searches if there is no protection from being unreasonably monitored?
