By David R. Dow | For the second time in a generation, the Supreme Court has intervened in a political dispute it could have avoided. For the second time in a generation, the justices resolved that political dispute by dividing along ideological lines. For the second time in a generation, the Court squandered the only thing it has as the basis of its authority: the respect of the people, and the public’s perception that it is not merely another political institution. Read more →

By David R. Dow | According to reporting from Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, President Trump was already exploring the possibility of pardoning himself, even before a riotous mob incited by Trump’s tweets and baseless charges of a stolen election stormed and defiled the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, the day Congress was meeting to fulfill its duty under the Twelfth Amendment to count the states’ electoral votes for President and Vice-President. Read more →

2016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times ahead, we turn to our authors, who continue to offer their time and insights to give us perspective and commentary on the condition of our world. Our blog, the Broadside, wouldn’t be what it is without them. As always, we’re so grateful to them. We’ll need their thought-provoking essays as we head into 2017. Before the year comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the Broadside’s most-read posts. Happy New Year! Read more →

By David R. Dow

Before the rumors of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death were even confirmed, he was already being lauded as a transformational figure, eulogized as a jurist who made originalism a respectable mode of constitutional interpretation. This view cut across ideological and professional categories, with a broad diversity of journalists, academics, practicing lawyers, and politicians—including Jeff Toobin at the New Yorker, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern at Slate, Geoffrey Stone at the Daily Beast, Bruce Miller on the New York Times Op-ed page, and, with perhaps a single exception, nineteen legal academicians polled by Politico—all quick to say that whether one agreed with Scalia’s view or not, he had accomplished something significant. Adam Liptak’s reflection for The New York Times, the day following Scalia’s death, quoted the estimable Richard Posner’s observation that Scalia has been the most consequential justice of the past quarter century. Read more →

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's guilt was not in question, but that fact did not resolve the moral question of whether to execute him. That he was ultimately sentenced to death despite opposition to that sentence from the relevant community does not reflect failure on the part of the defense team. It reflects the fundamental absence of fairness in our machinery of death. Read more →

Will a national conversation about the execution of a possibly innocent man bring about the end of the death penalty? Read more →

David R. Dow visited Rick Perry's "The Response" this past weekend, and found the rally less than inspiring. Read more →

The American Law Institute recently abandoned its support of the death penalty, but the author of Executed on a Technicality has doubts about how this will affect the state that accounts for almost half of the executions in the U.S. Read more →

David Dow, the author of Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row, is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He is also the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network (TIN), which helps... Read more →