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Ann Rostow: Slip Slidin’ Away By Ann Rostow– The  New York Times, recently called attention to the Roberts Court’s significant shift in favor of Christian litigants. A report on the subject, “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait,” was just published by Lee Epstein and Eric A. Posner, and although mine is a lazy approach, I can explain it most clearly by simply regurgitating the official abstract: “The Roberts Court has ruled in favor of religious organizations far more frequently than its predecessors—over 8...

When I was in high school, my economics class read The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. The book is a passionate appeal to help those living in the worst poverty in the world. Sachs writes that we should not worry too much about the people in second-to-last place, such as the poorly paid workers in labor-intensive industries who were then the focus of considerable debate and activism on U.S. college campuses. Sweatshop workers, Sachs conceded, were on the bottom rung of the ladder. But subsistence farmers were not on the ladder at all. Once we helped them get a foothold, they could begin asc...

By Ann Rostow– Kids Say the Darnedest Things! Here’s a situation that reminds me why I enjoy legal news. On the surface, it’s a made for TV movie, a little girl in South Carolina who has a GLBT grandfather writes a short essay about trans rights for a school project. The mean teacher won’t include it in the booklet, and the girl’s mother sues in federal court on First Amendment and other grounds. What’s not to like? Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the school censors in a decision that, frankly, makes sense to me. Much as I fin...

By Ann Rostow– Once More unto the Breach— As this issue goes to press, the House is poised to pass our signature civil rights legislation, the Equality Act, for a second time. Last session’s efforts went nowhere in the Republican controlled Senate, where the Act was not brought to committee. But this time around we should at the very least get some hearings and attention.  Will we get the required 60 Senate votes to defeat a filibuster? Well, you can count, can’t you? The answer to that is no. Even our friendly “moderate” Republicans are reluctant to support us. Mitt Romney worri...

[ Editor’s Note: We are going to be mixing in more of our archival articles, especially by those who have passed on, many of them great talents, and sadly we are not seeing them replaced by equal quality often enough. Alan Hart was one of those. He saw some of the Israeli-Arab wars up close and personal, including front line reporting from the Suez Canal when the British intervened. The year was 1967, when I was heading from Berkshire School to NC State, on the front end of my travels. From his “While covering the six-day war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Hart was the first tel...