Erin Sheley is a legal scholar and law professor who contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard over more than fifteen years. Her writing for the magazine focused on legal affairs, constitutional issues, class action reform, Second Amendment rights, and judicial controversies. She brought academic legal expertise to her analysis of courts, legislation, and public policy debates.
WHEN I LEFT HOME for my freshman year of college three years ago, my mother and father did what every diligent parent since Polonius has: They sat me down for the Talk. Unlike most 18-year-olds about to set off into the world, however, I did not receive the usual warnings about drugs, alcohol, or…
Brock Turner’s victim's account of her experience of sexual assault on the Stanford campus is now justly famous. The statement, running to more than 7,000 words, was released to the media on June 3, the day after Turner received a six-month jail sentence and probation for his three felony…
In a recent investigative piece on Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Globe casts light on the practice, common in certain hospitals, of “double booking" surgeons. In the name of efficiency, a particularly in-demand surgeon will participate in two procedures scheduled at the same time by…
Moderation is too rarely a stance to gain impassioned support in policy debates, and even less so when the subject is the state of American criminal justice. The disproportionate number of young African-American men behind bars at any given time (approximately 11 percent of those between ages 20…
In late January, a group of American university professors launched the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the first American effort of its kind. Part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, the boycott calls for its adherents to,…
Early in November, the popular online dating company eHarmony settled with the New Jersey Attorney General's Division on Civil Rights (DCR) over allegations that the company violated the state's anti-discrimination law by limiting its matching service to heterosexual couples. In 2005, gay New…
In last week's vice presidential debate, Joe Biden criticized Dick Cheney's notion that the office of the vice president does not exist wholly within the executive branch of the government, blaming Cheney for "aggrandiz[ing] the power of a unitary executive." This is not the first time Biden has…
Three weeks ago at the Democratic National Convention, Lilly Ledbetter delivered a soliloquy on "fair pay" for women--a cause the Democrats are certain to highlight in the coming weeks of this increasingly woman-centric campaign. She's the "grandmother from Alabama" and former supervisor at a…
It was delicious poetic justice when famed plaintiffs' attorney William Lerach, formerly of the firm Milberg Weiss, was sentenced to two years in federal prison for paying shareholders of large corporations millions of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for their cooperation as name plaintiffs in…
By now everyone is well aware of the Supreme Court's determination in the Heller case, announced in its last session of the term, that Washington, D.C.'s effective ban on handguns violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The two big questions now occupying the legal community are…
THERE IS MUCH TO find loathsome about Justice Kennedy's opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Louisiana statute allowing capital punishment for child rapists is unconstitutional. Most morally disgusting is the Court's conclusory recognition of "an incongruity…
This Supreme Court term marks a crossroads for death penalty jurisprudence. For the first time since 1890, the Court is considering the constitutionality of a particular means of execution--the lethal injection cocktail currently used by most states. And it is expected to rule, in a second case, on…
In March 1999, Samantha Comfort of Lynn, Massachusetts, tried to enroll her daughter Elizabeth at the only Lynn public school close enough to her job that she could pick the kindergartner up on time each day. The school refused to take Elizabeth--not because it didn't have space for another child,…
When Blackstone described the right to carry arms as part of the natural right of "self-preservation," he could not have envisioned the situation of a professional woman coming home late to an empty Washington, D.C., apartment. Yet in a city declared by its police chief to be in a state of "crime…
ON TWO CONSECUTIVE DAYS last week, the New York Times advanced its crusade against military action in Iraq with page-one "news" stories--the first detailing a leaked war plan, the second predicting dire effects for the U.S. economy. While these prominently featured pieces occasioned much comment,…
LAST WEEK Al Gore was on the campaign trail again. Before a gathering of supporters in New York City, he slipped back into the role of self-styled defender of the common man and spotted owl, comparing the Bush administration to everything from Enron to a hungry fox in a chicken coop. Enthusiastic…
Cambridge, Mass. HARVARD SQUARE is looking strange these days. With red, white, and blue fluttering from every street lamp and storefront, the city affectionately known as the "People's Republic of Cambridge" seems to have undergone a complete makeover. In the wake of September 11, this new…
WHEN THE FIRST FEMALE CADETS signed their names in the matriculation roster of the Virginia Military Institute in 1997, proponents of women’s rights trumpeted the event as a great victory for equality. Satisfied with this conclusion to the years-long legal battle that forced the venerable all-male…