Civil Liberties
It’s difficult to see any way that the town of Narragansett’s orange sticker anti-partying ordinance, in its current form, will survive the Constitutional challenge filed by the ACLU. Under the ordinance, police are instructed to affix a notice to a home where they determine a too-loud party is occurring. Penalties will follow any subsequent noise-related…
I must say that I’m sympathetic to RI State Council on the Arts Director Randall Rosenbaum’s point regarding arts in the public square: Artists and advocates such as Rosenbaum emphasize that art is not just about being obviously beautiful; it’s also about opening the people’s eyes to new interpretations of beauty. I happen to think…
Since it looks like the red light cameras are a go again, I wonder if some local entrepreneurial band will take a cue from Britain’s The Get Out Clause and turn nanny-statism to their advantage: Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from [Manchester, England], decided…
I see that the following news item on the legendary Brigitte Bardot caught Jay Nordlinger’s eye, as well: The headline was arresting: “Brigitte Bardot on trial for Muslim slur.” She had incited “racial hatred.” Oh my goodness, how? What did she say? I prepared for the worst. BB had said, “I am fed up with…
It looks like the attempt by the National Education Association to place restrictions on school committee members’ communication with the public in the Chariho district has come to an end. NEA Assistant Executive Director Peter Gingras, who last year filed a Labor Relations Board complaint against the Chariho School Committee making the vague assertion that…
Even liberal law professors are not impressed with the speech that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave last Friday criticizing the President’s use of executive power to conduct intelligence gathering. This is from Georgetown Law Professor Marty Lederman…Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has been one of the very best, most careful and most thoughtful legislators in…
I owe Monique an answer to a question she asked a few weeks ago on my view of including in Foreign Intelligence Security Act reform legislation an immunity provision for telecommunications companies who cooperate with executive branch surveillance requests. To understand why telecom immunity is an important issue, you need to start from one basic…
Roger Williams University Law Professor Carl T. Bogus argues against the existence of an individual right to bear arms in Tuesday’s Projo…The traditional view is that the [second amendment] grants people the right to keep and bear arms only within the constitutionally-mandated militia — that it guarantees the states armed militia to provide for their…
I may have been wrong about the Dems reaching the outskirts of reasonableness on the issue of Foreign Intelligence Security Act reform. The text of the Democratic FISA reform bill that passed the House in mid-November empowers the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General, without a court order, to authorize the surveillance of…
Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein is taking a bit of a beating from the left side of the blogosphere for his reporting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation passed by the House of Representatives on November 15th. Here is a once-modified version of what Klein wrote to touch off the controversy…The Democratic strategy on…