Blog Posts

Connecticut takes pride in creation of the nation’s first public defender system. Representation of the indigent accused of crimes is important work. Why, then, does the state seem content to let this proud legacy collapse amid the ugliest sort of squabbling?
In recent...

You’ve seen the videos and you are shocked. Tyre Nichols was stopped by Memphis police officers, dragged from his car, and savagely beaten by police officers. When he fled, they chased him. He was hunted down, beaten some more as he screamed nightmarishly for his mother, and then...

The other day I raised what I consider to be the dishonest rhetoric involving white supremacism. If you're white and you disagree with a person of color, some other emergent and privileged identity, or the progressive agenda embracing diversity for diversity's sake, you are immediately smeared as a...

Public service is thankless, and nowhere so much so as in Hartford, where good men and women go to battle ceaselessly over crumbs. Rarely do people ascend the political heights that Hartford has to offer to enhance their reputations – what has that anthill to offer? But good men’s...

The long knives were out this morning in Hartford. A source, believed to be from the office of Governor Ned Lamont, whispered to a friendly reporter: “Be sure to ask the governor what he would do if he had the authority to act regarding Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo. The...

Donald Trump’s suits against Facebook and Twitter are, unfortunately, about as likely to succeed as were his challenges to the 2020 election. In the election cases, his claims appeared to be frivolous. The social media complaints are far from frivolous, at least in intent. But the legal...

Among the world’s mysteries is the transformation of naked power into authority. Yes, from time immemorial, there have been those with the means to impose their will on others. But we say, or at least we used to say, that when the state acts, its agents possess not mere power, but...

F. Lee Bailey is dead.

There’s nothing surprising about this. Death comes for us all. But he once promised me he’d live to be one hundred years old and invited me to his party. For twenty years, I called him a friend. All at once, where once there was...

It was obvious to me one year ago that the pandemic would yield a time of extraordinary social tumult. Indeed, just over one year ago, I wrote in these pages about the general strike theory of the pandemic, how the viral contagion would be turned into an occasion to try to recast the...

A good friend of mine is a physician. In a recent conversation, I was describing a new book I had just read, referring to a powerful critique of Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous defense of the right to have an abortion, first published in 1971 in Philosophy and Public Affairs....