Welcome to Law and Disorder Radio
Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder May 13, 2024
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Free Speech: Protest Testing The Limits Of Protection
As controversy rages over protests, encampments, and arrests at hundreds of college campuses around the country, in reaction to the war in the Middle East, free speech is once again at the forefront of national debate. Time and again in American history, the nation has been gripped by the complex question of whether certain speech is or is not protected by the First Amendment. Recently, college presidents have been under fire for failing to protect free speech or for going too far in tolerating free speech. Some have been forced to resign and others have called in the police. Students have been attacked; others have been suspended; student political organizations have been banned. What’s going on and where does the First Amendment fit into all this?
Guest – Nadine Strossen, a leading expert on constitutional law and the First Amendment. Nadine Strossen is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 until 2008. She is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education and is on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin. The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers,” and in 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship selected her for its Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.
She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (2023). Her book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was named a New York Times “notable book” of 1995, and was republished this year as part of the New York University Press “Classic” series.
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Law and Disorder May 6, 2024
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Police, Politics And Violent Repression Against Pro-Palestine Student Protest
During the Occupy Wall Street protests of late 2011 and early 2012, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a domestic terrorist threat. That was even though the Bureau acknowledged that organizers were calling for peaceful protests. Massive resources were deployed to track the movement, and FBI and counter-terrorism agents around the nation coordinated with local and federal law enforcement to track and gather intelligence, effectively serving as an arm for private business.
More than a decade later, college administrators are calling local armed police—some in riot gear—to arrest and in many instances brutalize hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters in actions and encampments sweeping the nation. More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested over the last two weeks on campuses in states including Texas, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Connecticut, Louisiana, California and New Jersey. At UCLA, last week, after pro-Israel supporters carrying symbols of radical Jewish groups, not of student age, allegedly threw fireworks into a solidarity encampment, students defending the camp were attacked with stones and sticks. Yet, after an hour of violence, police standing nearby failed to intervene.
Guest – attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and the Center for Protest Law and Litigation in Washington, DC. Mara is one of the nation’s leading litigators defending protesters and winning numerous reforms in police practices at mass assemblies and demonstrations.
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Legacy of Protest At Columbia University
One of the great events of the 60s is the Columbia student takeover of several key buildings on their campus in protest of the university’s complicity in the war against the Vietnamese people. The takeover was also a protest to building a gym in a public park in Harlem adjacent to Columbia University, considered to be a racist act.
The student actions at Columbia brought down a terrific repression. Hundreds of students were arrested and beaten. Our own Michael Ratner, a cofounder of Law and Disorder, and a law student at Columbia, was also beaten by the police. For Michael, there was no turning back. He went on to become one of the great movement lawyers of his generation.
Guest – anti-Vietnam war activist Eleanor Stein, like Michael, she was a student at the law school. Eleanor Stein went on to become an attorney, she is a climate change, environmental justice and human rights activist and advocate. She teaches climate change and human rights at the State University of New York, at Albany, and has just recorded a Continuing Legal Education session on this subject for the CUNY Law School. In addition, she facilitates international forums on climate change and energy. And for years, Professor Stein was an Administrative Law Judge at the NY state agency that regulates the energy industry.
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Law and Disorder April 29, 2024
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Nationwide Peaceful Protests Against Genocide In Palestine
Around the nation, peaceful campus protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are spreading. And they’re meeting with a rash of arrests by local police departments, dozens of school suspensions, and evictions from student dormitories. Many of those evicted have been students of colors, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. In New York, the NYPD arrested 108 students at Columbia University, and gave them 14 minutes to gather their belongings and leave their dormitories. New York University erected a plywood wall around Gould Plaza, an outdoor campus space in Greenwich Village, where police had earlier arrested protesting students.
All this because they took part at the large protest. Officials at Harvard University closed Harvard Yard in anticipation of possible protests and suspended the student group Palestine Solidarity Committee. Police arrested 9 students at the University of Minnesota for their refusal to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment. The California campus of Cal Poly Humboldt was shut down after students occupied a building. Shutitdown4Palestine.org
In an April 23 letter to the New York Times, nearly 60parents of students at Columbia and Barnard, from a variety of religious faiths ad social backgrounds wrote that they “find the actions taken by the administration deeply troubling and contrary to the principles of liberty, justice and academic freedom that are fundamental to the mission of higher education.”
Guest – Brian Becker is the director of the Answer Coalition, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and host of The Socialist Program.
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Julian Assange Extradition Case Update
Regarded by many as the greatest journalist of our generation for exposing American war crimes Julian Assange is about to be extradited at America’s request to a federal criminal court in Virginia to be tried for his journalistic activities which exposed extensive murderous American crimes and embarrassed US government particularly the CIA.
Julian was a young computer genius in Australia. He figured out a way to receive information from whistleblowers anonymously. This was done in order to protect them when his publication company WikiLeaks revealed to the world the activities of the CIA, the American military and U. S. diplomats.
As published by WikiLeaks the Vault Seven revelations exposed the CIA had developed technologies to turn our cell phone into listening devices, even when turned off and tap our personal computers, and even control our automobiles. WikiLeaks exposed American torture in Afghanistan. They published a video of an American gunship helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians, even children, and two Reuters journalists on the streets of Baghdad.
Julian was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he holed up for seven years. Then five years ago the British police at America’s request removed him from the embassy and put him into solitary confinement in the notorious Belmarsh Prison.
Now the United States has succeeded in getting a compliant British court to extradite Julian , despite the law, preventing extradition of political prisoners, especially to a country that has the death penalty, and no guarantee of free speech for foreigners.
Guest – Vincent De Stefano is the National Organizing Director of the U.S. Julian Assange Defense Committee. Mr. De Stefano is on the Southern California ACLU board of directors and executive committee and he has worked with Amnesty International for more than four decades.
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