Rhiannon Hamam
Collective Political Activity | Reclaiming the First Amendment
Rhiannon Hamam
Ask almost anyone what the First Amendment guarantees, and they’ll answer, simply: “free speech.” Ask a pundit or professor, and they might add, as the legal scholar Noah Feldman recently did in a conversation with Katie Couric, that “you have free speech even when you’re saying the most unpopular things. Free speech really is freedom of speech for the ideas that we hate.” This framing has been repeated endlessly over...
We Can No Longer Afford Illusions | The Supreme Court and the Left
Rhiannon Hamam
That the Supreme Court is ethically compromised has become almost comically obvious. Recent sweeping decisions, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the dismantling of affirmative action, to the extension of innocent Americans’ prison sentences, have been handed down in the midst of myriad scandals involving justices and their wealthy, purportedly uncorrupt friends. The high court, now dominated by conservatives, is not just independent but dangerously rogue. For Issue...
Depravity Be Damned
Rhiannon Hamam
The first legal document on which I ever signed my name as a licensed attorney was a writ of habeas corpus for a man who had been in jail for six months without ever appearing before a judge, without ever being legally charged with a crime, and without ever speaking to an attorney. I had learned about the Sixth Amendment in law school; in multiple classes I had read Supreme...
