News & Commentary

It's always so exciting when I'm enoying Sunday morning coffee and I see a victory for civil liberties (and the ACLU) in a Sunday paper.

The people of Maine heard this message repeated throughout the legislative and referendum campaigns on marriage equality last year--from psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, parents, and children.  It got through to a

I got a call last night from a friend in Washington, DC who had heard that we might have a last minute chance to convince Senator Olympia Snowe to be the 60th vote on healthcare reform, and that she might negotiate out both the Nelson and Stupak amendments. 

With the legislature in full swing now, the work on our bills is going at lightening speed.

Apparently, this fall, the only “intellectually respectable” institution that had still supported capital punishment, the American Law Institute, changed their minds. New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak reports that:

January 11th marked eight years to the day that prisoners of the so called "war on terror" first began arriving in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.   It's appalling the camp is still open and that 198 detainees are still being denied basic legal rights.

It’s 2010 people and abortion rights are being threatened at every turn!!  What’s wrong with this picture?

This month, the federal government implemented a new policy that bans employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Job descriptions for employment in the federal government will now have an expanded Equal Employment Opportunity law which states:

Tomorrow at 1 pm, the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services will hold a public hearing at the Statehouse, in the Judiciary Committee room, to hear comments on a proposed rule on eligibility requirements for counsel (attached below).  For the first time, Maine will have concrete uniform standards to determine who is eligible to represent indigent criminal defendants at the state's expense.