The Feed

On any given day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has the power to throw the environmental movement into complete disarray. Tucked into a nondescript neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the court isn’t well known to the public, but it’s often called the second most important court in the United States. It has ...

“Florida Lawmakers Approve Overhaul of State’s Problem-Ridden Voting Process” (news article, May 4) paints a sunny picture of Florida’s elections bill. But this legislation falls woefully short of achieving the kind of election reform that Florida citizens need. It fails to reach the bare minimum of reversing the damage caused by Florida’s 2011 law, which ...

It isn’t your mother’s Mother’s Day any more. There’s a new and lively conversation underway about what it takes to maximize mothers’ contributions, both to the economy and to their families. Policies that make it possible to be a good mother and a responsible employee are firmly on the nation’s agenda. The momentum is palpable. ...

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law welcomes the opportunity to discuss the need for comprehensive campaign finance reform, including public financing, to address Albany’s persistent corruption problem. We further welcome the chance to debunk misinformation about the public financing systems in New York City and Connecticut.  As an integral part of comprehensive ...

The Boston Marathon bombing has brought out the xenophobes. Often when America suffers some large, inexplicable tragedy, we want to blame “foreigners” and look for ways to fortify ourselves against them. It’s more reassuring to believe that an evil lies outside our borders — in “them” — than to face the possibility that it’s randomly ...

Bob Kuttner has been among the country’s most visible advocates of stimulus, having written several books and numerous columns arguing the case for an aggressive program of public investment as the best way to deal with the economic crisis. His new book,Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity versus Possibility (Knopf, 2013) is his latest shot at ...

We live in a world of ever-shrinking individual privacy. More and more can be learned about us by friends and strangers alike by a quick search on the Internet. Businesses track our searches and our transactions and sell that information to others who can readily piece together a profile of our likes, our interests, the ...

NEW YORK – The United States Supreme Court recently began deliberations in a case that highlights a deeply problematic issue concerning intellectual-property rights. The Court must answer the following question: Can human genes – your genes – be patented? Put another way, should someone essentially be permitted to own the right, say, to test whether ...

  History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports: Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, ...

In early 2010, during the debate over the construction of the financial reform bill that would become Dodd-Frank, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) received a curious letter from then- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Everyone thought that increasing the amount of capital banks were required to hold would be an essential part of financial reform–the question was how to ...