Adam Serwer

In a bit of good news on the Drug War front, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has voted to make the Senate’s recently amended crack sentencing guidelines retroactive, meaning that around 12,000 offenders will be eligible to seek a reduction in their sentences. That’s despite the administration’s preemptive retreat on the issue, which begged the commission […]

Georgia: But as the full cost of the immigration reform emerges in the form of an estimated millions of dollars worth of crops rotting in fields, it could alarm other states that have passed or are considering similar strict measures. Georgia labor officials estimate a shortage of some 11,000 workers in the agriculture sector, and […]

Decisions on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate have fallen along partisan lines, with Republican appointees voting to overturn it and Democratic appointees upholding it. Until today. A three judge panel made up of two Republican nominees, Judges James L. Graham and Jeffery Sutton–one appointed by Ronald Reagan and the other by […]

The Supreme Court’s most recent appointees agree more often than everyone else: It can be treacherous to predict a justice’s path based on early service, and presidents have been disappointed by the positions their nominees take when they reach the bench. But this year, the four youngest justices separated neatly into the court’s ideological wings […]

State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh went before the Senate yesterday to defend the administration’s use of military force in Libya without congressional authorization. Koh’s interpretation of the War Powers Act allowed the U.S. to continue military operations in Libya absent congressional authorization. President Obama accepted Koh’s interpretation over the advice of Attorney General Eric […]

Jonathan Last takes on my response to Ross Douthat: Finally, Sewer [sic] seems to have misunderstood the origins of sex-selective abortion: It begins not with lower- and middle-class families, who need to worry about girls being a financial drain, but rather with wealthy elites, for whom finances are a much lower-order concern. The behavior then […]

Matthew Yglesias and Nate Silver have been arguing whether or not Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s successful push for a marriage-equality bill in New York is the result of structural or personal factors, and whether or not Cuomo has shown leadership that President Barack Obama hasn’t. I’d say I largely agree with both of them. Obama faces […]

Ross Douthat had a head scratcher of a column yesterday positing that sex-selective abortion is the “result” of women’s empowerment, offering India as an example: The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as […]

I meant to link to the Justice Policy Institute’s report on private prisons last week, but Andrea Nill Sanchez has a good summary of the report’s conclusions about tremendous influence private prison companies have amassed by throwing money around: According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct […]