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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. 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 October 17, 2022
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Supreme Court May Outlaw Affirmative Action
In 2003, the Supreme Court held in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger that the 14th Amendment allows public universities to consider race as a factor to assemble a diverse student body. The Court reaffirmed that holding in 2016. There are now two cases pending on the Court’s docket that it may well use to overrule Grutter and gut affirmative action. The Court will hear oral argument in these two cases on October 31.
The Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, asking the Court to overturn Grutter. The group says its mission is helping “to restore colorblind principles to our nation’s schools, colleges and universities.”
“Colorblind” is a euphemism for allowing the conditions that created the racial inequality and unequal opportunity to continue.
UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote education journalist Nick Anderson in the Washington Post, was “founded to educate the enslaving elite of this Southern state, allied for generations with the cause of white supremacy, roiled by racial tensions in recent years over the fate of a Confederate monument and treatment of Black faculty members.”
On October 4, the Court heard oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan, which the conservative majority will likely use to uphold Alabama’s racist gerrymandered district map. During the argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mentioned the “race-conscious” goal of the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who were “trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against … were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.” “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea,” Jackson said.
With the radical right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court, it is likely that the Court will outlaw affirmative action, using the so-called “colorblind” rationale.
Guest – Jason Williamson is Executive Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at New York University School of Law. He teaches a course in Social Justice Lawyering and runs the Racial Justice Clinic.
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Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s-1970s
The 1960s and 1970s weren’t just the time when protesters took to the streets to fight for civil rights, and against the Vietnam War. It was also a period when radical lawyers defended dissidents and worked closely with them to bring their messages into the nation’s courtrooms and into the public sphere.
Luca Falciola has just published a book about the militant attorneys who fought for social change arm-in-arm with activists. Breaking from the traditional role of attorneys, they identified with their clients and their causes, and challenged the conservative rules and trappings of the legal profession. The book is titled Up Against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s-1970s, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
At the heart of this work is the history of the National Lawyers Guild. Founded in 1937, the Guild was established as an alternative to the American Bar Association which was not racially integrated. Since Law & Disorder Radio began airing in 2005, its cohosts have been longtime Guild members and leaders. Many of our guests are Guild members as well.
Guest – Luca Falciola is a lecturer at Columbia University. His publications include the award-winning book about the Movement of 1977 in Italy, and several articles on various aspects of contentious politics between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Marjorie Cohn
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Law and Disorder October 10, 2022
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A Unified Movement of Peace
The world today is threatened with war, poverty, displacement and hunger like no other time since 1937 when World War II began with the Japanese invasion of China. Within four years the war had spread leading to the death of tens of millions of people. This included 50 million Russians, 400,000 Americans and finally hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in 1945 when the US initiated the nuclear age with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrating American power to the Russians. This initiated the Cold War which is now in a second stage. It must be stopped.
The American wars in Vietnam and Iraq were based on lies. We were told in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson that the Vietnamese had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a lie. In 2003 we were lied to by President George W. Bush who told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is based on the ubiquitous lie that the Russians were unprovoked. It threatens to spin out of control. Why are we again in this situation and what can we do about it? What is desperately needed is a unified American peace movement.
Guest – Ray McGovern former CIA intelligence analyst, Ray briefed President George H. W. Bush every morning on intelligence matters, particularly with respect to Russia. He is a founder of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and a contributor to the blog Common Dreams.
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Doctors Lose Licenses For Properly Prescribing Opioids
The CDC wrongly thought pain management doctors were over prescribing opioids. The CDC issued guidelines in 2016 put limits on the amount of opioids doctors could prescribe thinking that high doses of Oxycontin lead to addiction and death. These guidelines were disastrous for chronic pain patients. Many were driven to buy illegal drugs on the street which were laced with poisonous fentanyl. In 2021 this led to 100,000 deaths in the United States.
Several insurance companies encouraged the CDC to impose limits on doctors prescribing Oxycontin and to taper their patients. Opioids are very expensive. The insurance companies were fortified in their erroneous belief by the efforts of a certain organization of doctors who are not pain management specialists.
When the CDC guidelines were exceeded, the Department of Justice threatened to indict doctors and got them to stop practicing medicine. The doctors gave up their medical licenses and licenses to prescribe narcotics. Some were prosecuted. Some went to prison. Some endured large fines. Seventeen hundred out of 6000 pain management doctors were removed from the practice of medicine.
Doctors who refused to taper were victimized. These doctors correctly believed that their patients were dependent on high dosages of opioids but were not drug addicts. These doctors understood that denying their patients high dosages of opioids would lead to suicides and deaths by overdose from street drugs.
The United States Supreme Court recently ruled in the case of The United States v Ruan that doctors have the right to treat their patients as they see fit without government interference, they ruled 9 to 0 that doctors who prescribed opioids in good faith did not have the requisite mindset, mens rea, to be found guilty of over prescribing.
Guest – Kelly Dineen Gillespie is a professor of law and the Director of the health law program at Creighton University School of Law. She teaches health law and bioethics. Dr. Gillespie holds a PhD in health care ethics as well as a law degree. Before attending law school she worked as a nurse in neurosurgery and transplant ICUs. She co-wrote two friend of the court briefs in the significant Ruan v United States case on behalf of professors of health law and policy before the US Supreme Court regarding criminal distribution under the Controlled Substance Act as applied to doctors‘ prescriptions. In June 2022, the Supreme Court adopted much of the reasoning advanced in these briefs in a unanimous decision supporting doctors.
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Law and Disorder October 3, 2022
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Analysis: States Respond To Overruling Of Roe v. Wade
Since June, when the right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and retracted the constitutional right to abortion, many states have enacted onerous restrictions or outright bans on abortion. In states like California, the right to abortion has been safeguarded by legislation and judicial interpretations of the California Constitution. But if in the future, Republican governors in California appoint a majority of conservative “justices” to the state supreme court, the right to abortion will be imperiled.
On November 8, voters in three states – California, Michigan and Vermont – will decide whether to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions. People in Kentucky will vote on an amendment that specifically excludes the right to abortion from constitutional protection. In August, Kansas voters rejected a similar amendment that would have explicitly said that its constitution does not provide the right to abortion.
Guest – Law and Disorder co-host and legal scholar Marjorie Cohn discusses why it’s crucial that states amend their constitutions to protect the right to abortion. Marjorie is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, who writes a regular column at Truthout called “Human Rights and Global Wrongs.” She has published several books and does political and legal media commentary for local, national and international media outlets.
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Attorney Deborah LaBelle: Planned Parenthood v. State of Michigan
Deborah LaBelle is a Michigan attorney and writer whose work centers on constitutional and civil rights in class actions and community representation utilizing a human rights framework. Ms. LaBelle has been lead counsel in over a dozen class action lawsuits that have successfully expanded the civil and constitutional rights of her clients in both federal and state courts, including before the U.S. Supreme Court and in international fora.
Ms. LaBelle has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Lawyers Guild’s Law for the People Award, the National Trial Lawyer of the Year Award from Public Justice Foundation, and the Federal Bar Association’s Wade McCree Jr. Award; Michigan ACLU Civil Libertarian of the Year Award; as well as several others too long to list here.
She is currently co-counsel (with me and others) on the Flint Water class action litigation – a case in which we successfully argued to the Michigan Supreme Court that our state constitution has embedded within it the fundamental due process right to bodily integrity.
What brings her here today, is Ms. LaBelle’s most recent involvement in the historic case of Planned Parenthood v. State of Michigan. This case was triggered by the nation-wide crisis created by the U.S. Supreme Court in its reversal of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson. Dobbs awoke a long-dormant 1931 felony statute in Michigan which criminalizes all medical and legal actions taken to support a person who seeks or needs an abortion. This month, in the Planned Parenthood case, the Michigan Court of Claims issued a historic state-wide injunction against that criminal law, holding that it violated the now-recognized Michigan constitutional right to bodily integrity. While this injunction is still in effect (and inevitably on its way to being appealed), we have seen another pro-choice victory in Michigan, that is, successfully getting Proposition 3, a constitutional amendment referendum, on the ballot that would explicitly recognize the constitutional right to abortion in Michigan.
Hosted by Attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Marjorie Cohn and Julie Hurwitz
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