Monday, January 25, 2010

Gripping article about John Paul Stevens and today's court

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/26bar.html?hp

Highlight:

Thursday’s decision in the Citizens United case was more full-throated.
“The majority blazes through our precedents,” he wrote, “overruling or disavowing a body of case law” that included seven decisions.
Justice Stevens, who served in the Navy during World War II, reached back to those days to show the depth of his outrage at the majority’s conclusion that the government may not make legal distinctions based on whether a corporation or a person was doing the speaking.
“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”
The reference to Tokyo Rose was probably lost on many of Justice Steven’s readers. But the concluding sentence of what may be his last major dissent could not have been clearer.
“While American democracy is imperfect,” he wrote, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4:31 AM

    Keep posting stuff like this i really like it

    ReplyDelete