Lawyers From The United States

"Michelle was so mature beyond her years, so thoughtful and perceptive. She really prodded me about what the job would be like because she had lots of choices. I offered it to her on the spot, which was totally inappropriate because I should have talked to the mayor first. But I just knew she was really special. Barack never grills. That's part of what is so effective about him: He puts you completely at ease, and the next thing you know he's asking more and more probing questions and gets you to open up and reflect a little bit. That night we talked about his childhood compared to my childhood and realized we both had rather…unusual childhoods. Married in 1983, separated in 1987, and divorced in 1988. Enough said. He was a physician. He passed away. I want to say in about 1991. We grew up together. We were friends since childhood. In a sense, he was the boy next door. I married without really appreciating how hard divorce would be. I have to tell you: My daughter is in seventh heaven about me being in Vogue. Nothing else I have done has fazed her at all. But this! She's like, 'Oh, Mom. You don't understand. This is really big.' I have never heard him yell,Ever. Not once in seventeen years. He's not a yeller. Because my dad worked at the university, he could swing by and take Laura to school and pick her up from her first day of nursery school until the day she graduated from high school. They would often have breakfast and have these wonderful conversations."

"@ValerieJarrett i don't know if u saw it, but I wanted2 apologize to u 4 hurting and upsetting u with an insensitive & tasteless tweet. I am truly sorry-my whole life has been about fighting racism. I made a terrible mistake wh caused hundreds of ppl 2 lose their jobs. so sorry!"

"Hi, this is Roseanne Barr and I'd like to welcome you to my own studio, where I'm able to speak for myself to my fellow and sister Americans without the filter of the biased media," she said. "This was my statement from the very beginning and it will continue to be forever because it is the truth. When ABC called and asked me to explain my 'egregious and unforgivable tweet,' I told them I thought Valerie Jarrett was white. And I also said, 'I'm willing to go on The View, Jimmy Kimmel, or whatever other show you want me to go on and explain that to my audience.'"

"I am convinced that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be. And even they are converging into one category: companies that have been hacked and will be hacked again."

"The order appointing me special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation and kept the office of the acting Attorney General apprised of the progress of our work. After that investigation, if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime. The introduction to volume two of our report explains that decision."

"After September 11th, you had core al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with (Osama) bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed. You have al Qaeda growing in countries like Somalia, but most particularly in Yemen. And there's still substantial threat out of Yemen. And now you have the countries in the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Mali; Egypt most recently, where they're breeding grounds for radical extremists who may not stay there, but may present an attack. And, finally, you have, within the United States, the growth of homegrown, radicalized extremists who are radicalized on the Internet and then get their instructions for developing explosives on the Internet, as well."

"I think there's a good chance we would have prevented at least a part of 9/11. In other words, there were four planes. There were almost 20 — 19 persons involved. I think we would have had a much better chance of identifying those individuals who were contemplating that attack."

"I would query about what do you mean in terms of civil liberties. ... Do we exchange information in ways we did not before? Absolutely. You can say that that is a — to the extent that you exchange information between CIA, FBI, NSA and the like — you could characterize that as somehow giving up liberties. But the fact of the matter is, it's understandable and absolutely necessary if you want to protect the security of the United States."

"When we had these African bombings of those embassies, we had an intelligence service in there that helped us. We had law enforcement agencies that helped us. We had access. In Libya, you have a government that does not control most of Libya, or a good portion of Libya. And consequently, the ambassador, the State Department, ourselves — were pushing to get in there at the earliest possible moment. And that ended up being a couple of weeks down the road. But that does not mean that we have not very thoroughly investigated that and are continuing to investigate it. And I do believe the persons responsible will be brought to justice."

"It is more sinful to conceal the power of the atom than it is to reveal it."

"We see the same lack of critical thinking and inconsistency in our privacy with regard to government spying and Fourth Amendment and search and seizure issues. There are a number of issues where Americans — and I have to say conservatives — are like sheep, and they’re sheep being led to the slaughter without critically examining what it is that the government is doing and what it is that their government is allowing big corporations that are "too big to fail" to do to us. This is no different than the mortgage crisis, and some other crises in our country where some companies are just too big to fail, and they have spread so much money in so many people’s pockets on both sides of the aisle that there’s nobody left to speak for the consumers."

"Then the young samurai's mother had the child sold to a brothel, where she swept the floors and oiled the women and watched the secret ways. At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white."

"Now the problem with that theory in my opinion as a First Amendment lawyer who has been doing this for 25 years is that what you’re really saying is that a successful private company is converted into public property and regulated by the government because it is so successful and ubiquitous. And I think that’s an argument conservatives need to think carefully about. Do we really want every private company that’s successful and that has a lot of market share to be called public property for the purposes of regulation and subject to all the regulations that occur, not just the First Amendment but a bunch of other regulations. I think that’s a big question mark."

"To Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and Audre Lorde for your lessons on intersectionality and the beauty of Black girl magic. This book would not be possible without you."

"Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University historically contextualizes and updates the notion of intersectional storytelling in his recent book Race and Media: Critical Approaches. “Most creators are ‘intersectional,’ meaning they identify with multiple communities marginalized by their race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, or citizenship status,” he writes. He argues that the framework of intersectionality was developed throughout the 20th century by women writers of color like Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Those early intersectional writers sought to describe “the interlocking nature of oppression and the specificity of being both Black and woman (and often queer).”"

"Kim Crenshaw's work has helped us to center on the burdens placed on people based on their social locations, which create new suffering."

"When it comes to climate action, it's abundantly clear that we will not build the power necessary to win unless we embed justice-particularly racial but also gender and economic justice-at the center of our low-carbon policies. Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play "my crisis is more urgent than your crisis"-war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race."

"Critical legal studies scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 to describe how different power structures interact in the lives of minorities, especially black women, causing "compound and overlapping" discrimination. For Crenshaw, a key idea was that each group needed to go beyond critique to consistently explain its own experiences and create its own theories, "so it's incorporated within feminism and within anti-racism." The term immediately gained a toehold in the field of feminist and critical studies, but for the most part, Jewish women's position was excluded from consideration in relation to the interlocking issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that framed this discourse."

"As Kimberlé Crenshaw has emphasized, women need to "tell their stories, to document, explain, and theorize about the interlocking themes, meanings, and oppressions of their lives, restoring what has been invisible and erased so as to articulate "what difference the difference makes.""

"The shift that's occurred this time around "wasn't by happenstance," Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. "It has been the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black scholars"-people like Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others-"that has gotten us here. Six years ago, people were not using the phrase 'systemic racism' beyond activist circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is readily on people's lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on it, listening to conversations about it.""

"It is not necessary to believe that a political consensus to focus on the lives of the most disadvantaged will happen tomorrow in order to recenter discrimination discourse at the intersection. It is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework. By so doing, we may develop language which is critical of the dominant view and which provides some basis for unifying activity. The goal of this activity should be to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for whom it can be said: “When they enter, we all enter.”"

"After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the of in feminist theory and in politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast."

"The refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy. Consequently, “bottom-up” approaches, those which combine all discriminatees in order to challenge an entire employment system, are foreclosed by the limited view of the wrong and the narrow scope of the available remedy. If such “bottom-up” intersectional representation were routinely permitted, employees might accept the possibility that there is more to gain by collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than by each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege within the hierarchy. But as long as doctrine proceeds from the premise that employment systems need only minor adjustments, opportunities for advancement by disadvantaged employees will be limited. Relatively privileged employ- ees probably are better off guarding their advantage while jockeying against others to gain more. As a result, Black women — the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination — are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves."

"Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. ... I am suggesting that Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination — the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women — not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. Black women’s experiences are much broader than the general categories that discrimination discourse provides. Yet the continued insistence that Black women’s demands and needs be filtered."

"Trump is an unreflective beneficiary of every sort of white privilege on offer, from his inherited fortune to his mass-media celebrity to his ability to lie with utter impunity about his career, his finances, and his easily documented record of public statements. If Barack Obama had committed but one of the transgressions Trump reveled in during his 2016 presidential run—deriding John McCain's war record, to take a comparatively minor instance—he would have suffered a torrent of righteous white moralizing that would have been unprecedented even in a country renowned for its righteous white moralizing. And if he'd been caught on tape bragging about a celebrity-enabled history of sexual assault—well, suffice it to say that it would have been a high-tech lynching on a scale that Clarence Thomas could scarcely begin to imagine."

"Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include Black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in antidiscrimination law: Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category."

"If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women. Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centered on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties."

"What's really sad is that we cannot trust information from these leading health organizations like the and the because they are taking money from the very industries who are causing the problems that they are supposed to be helping to prevent."

"Targeting young people, like the tobacco industry had to keep replacing their customers who were dying with new customers. knows they have to target young people. That’s why we have these foods in schools and marketing messages at a younger and younger age for kids to get hooked on all the wrong kinds of foods."

"The meat producers don’t have to pay for the heart disease or the environmental destruction or any of the other externalities, as economists call them, that their products cause."

"Industry's high powered lobbying effort is actually about much more than just passing bills. A convenient side effect of this lobbying crusade is to apply corporate spin to maximize effect. The rhetoric surrounding the lobbying shapes the broader debate related to who is to blame for obesity and diet-related health problems. Because lawsuits are such a hot-button issue, industry can take full advantage of the popular scapegoating of trial lawyers, while at the same time invoke all-American values and shove the personal responsibility theory down the nation's collective throat."

"Driven by this basic profit-above-all-else directive, corporations are mandated, in effect, to “grow or die,” a rule also called “the growth imperative.” Of course, a food maker is no different from any other corporation operating in a free economy. However, food companies face special challenges when it comes to obeying the market's growth imperative: because there's a limit—in theory, anyway—to the number of calories humans can consume, competition is especially fierce among food makers for the finite pool of money that consumers can spend."

"At a time when our nation is suffering from an epidemic of diet-related health problems, we cannot allow whitewashing by the industry to continue. The assumption that eating dairy is essential to the diet has obstructed our ability to criticize federal government support for unhealthy forms of dairy. The large and powerful players in the dairy industry are the masters of spin. For decades, lobbyists and marketers have promoted milk as “nature’s perfect food.” But consumption patterns have shifted away from plain fluid milk to highly processed forms of dairy that are little more than vessels for salt, sugar, and fat."

"The promotion of dairy products in schools is especially troubling, where children are a captive audience and greatly influenced by the foods served there. That’s why the dairy industry wants to maintain its strong presence in schools, despite local and federal efforts to improve the nutritional quality of school food."

"Federal government administers, oversees, and approves almost every aspect of the dairy checkoff program. These funds are used to promote junk foods, which contribute to the very diseases our federal government is allegedly trying to prevent."

"We are deeply troubled by the Taliban’s continual repression of its people. Particularly painful, with its unavoidable connections to history, is the order requiring all Hindus in Afghanistan to wear an identity label on their clothing. This is an extension of the Taliban’s policy of religious intolerance and a stark reminder of the exclusionary tactics employed by the Nazis as a precursor to genocide. The Taliban rulers in Afghanistan have adopted a policy that more than 60 years ago spelled the beginning of the end for six million Jews. The Holocaust began with the ostracizing of the Jewish people and their forced separation from society, which can be the only purpose of labeling "others" as outsiders. In Nazi-occupied Europe, the badge of shame was the yellow Star of David worn as a patch. In Afghanistan, the Taliban rulers today are ordering Hindus to wear a similar label to enable Muslims to identify them. This is a clearly a policy founded on intolerance, mistrust and religious hatred. One would hope that we have learned from history. Following the recent desecration of statues in Afghanistan, it has now progressed to marking people. We cannot help but ask, "What comes next?" We call on the international community and all religious leaders to immediately speak out against this practice."

"Those born within the Republic, whether black or white, are citizens by birth - natural born citizens. There is no such word as white in your Constitution. Citizenship, therefore, does not depend upon complexion any more than it depends upon the rights of election or of office. All from other lands, who by the terms of your laws and a compliance with their provisions become naturalized, are adopted citizens of the United States; all other persons born within the Republic, of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty, are natural born citizens."

"I repel the suggestion made here in the heat of debate, that the committee or any of its members who favor this proposition seek in any form to mar the Constitution of the country, or take away from any State any right that belongs to it, or from any citizen of any State any right that belongs to him under that Constitution."

"I find no fault with the introductory clause, which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen; but, sir, I may be allowed to say further that I deny that the Congress of the United States ever had the power, or color of power to say that any man born within the jurisdiction of the United States, not owing a foreign allegiance, is not and shall not be a citizen of the United States."

"The Christian as revolutionary is constantly welcoming the gift of human life, for himself and for all men, by exposing, opposing, and overturning all that betrays, entraps, or attempts to kill human life."

"The ecclesiastical authorities, for all practical purposes, acted as servants of the State in the confrontation with Jesus. In one version, the chief priest protests: "Caesar is our king, we have no other king but Caesar." In the dispute over jurisdiction between Pilate and Herod, they warn: "If you release him, you will not be Caesar's friend." The ecclesiastics were, practically speaking, surrogates of the State. That is an all-too-familiar situation for chief priests to be found in."

"Christ as King means humanity free from bondage to ideologies and institutions, free from revolutionary causes as well, free from idolatry of Caesar, and, not the least of it, free from religion which tries to disguise such slavery as virtuous."

"The mark of the Christian is, simply, that he is a matured and freed human being. The direct political implication of this risen character of the Christian is that ... the Christian is an incessant revolutionary. He is always, everywhere in revolt—not for himself but for humanity."

"Churchly enterprises ... are vainglorious about reputation, status, prosperity, success; they are eager to conform, solicitous of patronage from the political regime, derisive of the biblical witness, accommodated to American culture. ... It is not that such "churches" have abandoned the gospel they once upheld and have become acculturated and conformed, but that they have been from their origins American cultural productions or Babylonian shrines."

"While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time."

"If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified."

"The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day—today—so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one."

"In this story, there is no other place actually known to human beings, except this world as it is—the place where life is at once being lived; there are no other places for which to search or yearn or hope—no utopia, no paradise, no otherworldly afterlife."

"Babylon's fallenness is expressed consummately in Babylon's delusion that she is, or is becoming, Jerusalem. ... This is the vanity of every principality—and notable for a nation—that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone else is determined."

"Kierkegaard cautioned that the crisis for biblical faith concerning conformity to the world, in one form or another, occurs wherever the anomaly of an established church appears. In the United States, the Constantinian Accommodation has been marvelously proliferated. Practically all churches and sects are, in effect, established and, in turn, conformed to the dominant social philosophy or secular ideology or civic religion. Biblical faith, here, in consequence, is strenuously distorted and persistently ridiculed—in the name of God, of course."