Kristin Shapiro
Senior Fellow
Kristin Shapiro is a Senior Fellow with Independent Women’s Forum. Kristin received her bachelor of arts degree from New York University, magna cum laude, in 2004, and her juris doctorate from Northwestern University School of Law, magna cum laude, in 2009, where she graduated second in her class and served on the editorial board of the Northwestern University Law Review. After law school, Kristin clerked for Chief Judge Alex Kozinski on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Following her clerkship, Kristin practiced law as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP, a D.C. law firm, for six years, where she litigated numerous cases in the United States Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeal and district courts. Kristin then served as Assistant General Counsel in the Office of General Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives for three years, and is now an attorney for the federal government.
Louisiana: The last slave state in America
February 1, 2021
This scene of Black prisoners being marched to work in the fields on the Louisiana plantation-now-prison at Angola by an armed white guard on horseback has been enacted daily for more than 100 years. As of 2016, the ACLU determined Louisiana has the highest rate of prison deaths per capita in the whole US – a genocidal fact owed to the 1898 ratification to the state’s Constitution allowing non-unanimous juries that sentence Blacks to die in prison.
by Anthony Boult
In the year 1619, more than 300 kidnapped Africans were forced onto the slave ship, Sao Joao Bautista, in Luanda, a slave trading port in the Portuguese colony of Angola. Their transatlantic journey to the New World was filled with terror and death as nearly a third of those on board died before the ship docked in Jamaica to purchase medicine and supplies.
Executive Summary
In 2004, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez added twelve new seats to his country’s Supreme Court. He did this in order to ensure that the Venezuelan judiciary would not stand in the way of his attempts to consolidate power and confiscate thousands of private businesses. The expanded Venezuelan court then stood by as Chavez and his successor imposed socialism and deprived citizens of basic rights.
Similarly, some American politicians want to “expand” or “restructure” the U.S. Supreme Court in order to control the outcome of Court rulings.
Changing the structure of the Court to achieve certain results is known as Court-packing, and it is a brazen attack on the rule of law.
Trump lawyers quietly drafted Paxton s failed election challenge, New York Times reports Chuck Lindell, Austin American-Statesman
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton s complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court, filed in December in an attempt to nullify election results in four states won by Democrat Joe Biden, was drafted by lawyers close to the Trump campaign and shopped to Republican leaders around the country, according to a New York Times report.
One of the lawyers who wrote the draft, Lawrence Joseph, was hired by Paxton to serve as a special outside counsel at no cost to Texas to help on the Supreme Court complaint, which was filed Dec. 7, the same day Paxton retained Joseph, the Times reported.