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Martin Garbus has represented Lenny Bruce, Daniel Ellsberg and Nelson Mandela.
He is now defending Steven Donziger, who is charged with criminal contempt of court for failing to follow a judge’s orders
Donziger’s legal team won an $8.6 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador in 2011 after a decades-long battle over pollution in the Amazon rainforest
In his six decades as a crusading lawyer for free speech, Martin Garbus has represented Lenny Bruce, Daniel Ellsberg and Nelson Mandela. So why, at 86, is he waging a quixotic battle for a disbarred attorney charged with a misdemeanor?
His answer: There’s never been a case like this.
Podcast: The 3WHH on Our (Non)-Colorblind Constitution
All it took was a
NY Timesop-ed article on the (misunderstood) legacy of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the 1896
Plessy (“separate but equal”) case to set off a classic “Lucretia” rant in an email this week:
I find the NYT piece more damaging to the cause of equality before the law even than critical race theory. I think
[the author] perpetuates that subterfuge that makes it possible for milquetoast lefties to ignore the radicalism of the militant left. . . In other words, Canellos pretending that any of the principled rationale from Harlan’s
Opinion | How Plessy v Ferguson Turned Dissent Into a Badge of Honor nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Brown v. Board of Education and the Constitution
George Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, Jr. after their victory in Brown v. Board of Education.
The Supreme Court’s decision in
Brown v. Board of Education sent a shockwave through much of the legal community. Scholars noted serious Constitutional problems with the ruling, and significant departures from principles of jurisprudence. More than 80 congressmen and senators signed the “Southern Manifesto,” charging that the justices “undertook to exercise naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” Several states in the South passed resolutions of interposition, denouncing, in the words of Virginia, “the deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of powers not granted [to the federal government] . . .”
The Mindlessness of the Left
Herewith a series of propositions and observations that all add us to the same conclusion the left is utterly unprincipled, and will change their views on a dime when it suits their drive for power.
• As recently as 2009, Democrats had 60 U.S. Senators. You will search in vain to find a Democrat who complained then that the Senate was “undemocratic,” favored small states “unfairly,” or that we needed to add two new (Democrat) states to make it “fair.” Instead of wondering why Democrats can’t compete in states where they often used to compete effectively (and quite recently), they want to change the rules.