The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.
— Adam Cohen
As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.
Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.
Ballot formats should be standardized nationally rather than left to the often bad judgment of local officials.
If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.
Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.
It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.
There is no room on the federal bench for a judge who does not treat all people as equal before the law.
If the FBI gets the 'back doors' it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.
If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the major achievement of President Obama's first term.
The Senate should refuse to confirm nominees who do not take Congressional power seriously.
Even a single Justice can have a profound impact on the country.
The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.
DMs are a lot like email - and should have the same privacy protections as a mailed letter.
Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right - and the national government should protect it.
The press should not get special privileges - if they drive recklessly or put people in danger, they should be subject to every reckless driving and endangerment law on the books - but they should also not be singled out for special punishment.
A federal Voters' Bill of Rights could press the states to put non-partisan managers in charge of elections.
If we are going to have self-driving cars, the technical specifications should be quite precise.
There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.
Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.
Too often, animal-rights supporters seem to care about animals to the exclusion of people.
If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.
A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.
It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.
The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.
The Supreme Court's most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of 'judicial activism' - of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.
Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.
Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.
When the gun lobby fights gun-control legislation, its logic is clear: it does not like laws that prevent people from owning or using guns.
For technology companies, information about what people do online is extremely valuable - it can be used to sell targeted advertising or sold to data clearinghouses.
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.
Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic - including blacks, hispanics and students.
'Hard Times' does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel's subjects managed to find silver linings.
A key reason that elections are run so badly is that in most states, political partisans are in charge.
It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.
The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.
An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.
Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or radical political meetings, abortion clinics or AIDS doctors.
One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.
There is no way to undo what happened in the Zimmerman-Martin encounter, but some good can still come of it: it could lead states to repeal their misguided 'Stand your ground' laws.
Conservative Justices have a history of not standing by their professed commitment to judicial restraint.
Defending Congressional authority should not be a partisan issue.
As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.
Gun violence in the U.S. is an epidemic.
If the courts regarded tweets and other social media information as private, it would not prevent the law enforcement from getting information it really needs. But the government would have to get a search warrant, which requires it to show that it has probable cause connecting what is being searched to a crime.
Supporters of tough voter ID laws are not afraid of vote fraud - they are afraid of democracy.
There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.
