Author: Nat Hentoff

Uncharacteristically, Israel silences a domestic critic. But Hamas is the real enemy.

Things may not be what they used to be at my old Boston high school, but they surely are across a resegregating nation.

“We have gone so far beyond George Orwell—yet this isn’t fiction.”

Too little attention has been paid to a practice that results in actual, destructive interruptions in schooling.

Surely today’s explosive disclosures of the NSA’s ceaselessly growing invasions of the Fourth Amendment—as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—will not fade away amid the floods of distractions in this digital age. Or will they?

In those states that still have capital punishment, prisoners on death row often depend desperately on court appeals wielding the Brady Rule to keep them alive. This is Brady: “Evidence or information favorable to the defendant in criminal case that is known by the prosecution: under the Unties States Supreme Court case of Brady v. …

News you may have missed: in July 2012, Congress passed—and President Barack Obama went on to sign—the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, which authorized the domestic use of pilotless drones by units of government, including intelligence agencies and local police. A number of police agencies had already been using drones for surveillance (that is, without …

For sixty years, I’ve been reporting on the disabled and disability rights groups. In school systems like NewYork’s, kids “with special needs” (an administrative euphemism) are left far behind, along with English language-learners. In the nation’s continually overflowing prisons, the disabled serve heavily intensified sentences. My interest in this dark side of the Fourth Amendment’s …

President Barack Obama’s cherished pilotless drones—with their corollary civilian corpses—have hardly been mentioned in the 2012 elections. Even the widely available news that Obama regularly focused on a drone “kill list” to decide whom to assassinate overseas (including three Americans so far) faded away in the news mists without any rousing congressional speeches or Sunday …

In all the continuing debates, pledges, and dead ends involved in education reform, the many ever-present school dropouts are seldom urgently dealt with. What happens to those youngsters? When I cover the imprisonment of youthful offenders, I find one answer. The majority are dropouts. The others? Who knows or cares, except maybe their families? In …

For years, public school systems and principals around the nation have rigorously exercised a “zero tolerance” policy that imposes severe, automatic punishments for students accused of dangerous or other harmful actions. An outrageous but not uncommon imposition of zero tolerance that I’ve been following concerns a then-freshman student, Andrew Mikel II, suspended from Spotsylvania High …

When he was not yet president, Barack Obama insisted: “To build a better free world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries” (foreignaffairs.com, Summer 2007). He …

Since leaving the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor has been devoting much of her time and passion to spurring the education of our young as to what it means to be American—even while civics classes continue to diminish with results, she says, that are “predictably dismal.” (See also my column, “Our Constitution: How Many of …

On May 4, Bob Barr, a conservative Republican constitutionalist, wrote a blog post whose headline should define a fundamental issue in the 2012 elections: “With Bin Laden Dead, It’s Time to Restore the Bill of Rights” (The Barr Code, May 4, 2011). I was not surprised at the source of this call. When President Bill …

In my reporting on schools over the years, I’ve become aware that some students have hearing problems that have made them appear shy or uninvolved. One day, after a while spent wondering about the continually silent girl in the back of the room, I asked her to please come to the front of the room. …

During the accusatory furor by Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers during the run-up to the midterm elections-which still continues, by the way-I am not aware that any recent partisan critic has called attention to a disturbing exercise of unilateral presidential powers by President Barack Obama. Far from being secret, the exercise of power in question …

Since the 1950s, I’ve been reporting on education from the pre-kindergarten to college and university levels. But I’ve been remiss in not exploring law schools—though I’ve lectured at some of them. I will report on them from now on, however—after sixty-nine of the two hundred law school deans in the country wrote the Senate Judiciary …

Having often walked up the marble steps to the massive bronze front doors of the Supreme Court while interviewing Justice William Brennan for a New Yorker profile and for my book Living the Bill of Rights, I was startled to see in the May 3 Washington Post that the doors have been permanently locked. We …

Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education (Rutgers University Press) is a new book that should be of interest to at least some public school students and their parents. Its publication performs a ne eded public service. In this anthology, editors Torin Monahan and Rodolfo Torres and other academics around the nation ask: …

Years ago, while on the education beat, I was in the office of Tony Alvarado, then head of the New York City school system. The standardized test scores on reading had just come in, and they were collectively higher. But Alvarado looked glum. “When,” he asked me, “are we going to teach them how to …

I was startled to first see deeply buried in the June 13, 2009, New York Times that a federal district court judge in San Francisco had allowed the continuation of the trial of former senior Justice Department official John Yoo on charges of being a key enabler of the torture of American prisoners for the …

In 1938, I was bar mitzvahed and also learned about Kristellnacht (the “Night of Glass”) in Berlin—the prelude to the Final Solution. As the Holocaust went on, I had a personal extra-parochial interest in Hitler’s extermination of the Jews because I was growing up in Boston, then the most anti-Semitic city in the country. A …

Here I come again with an act of free inquiry into a life issue that will cause some readers to ask why the editor publishes this heretical contrarian. I have been an absolutist atheist for some seventy years, never looking back—nor to the heavens for guidance. I am also pro-life, obviously not for religious reasons …

“The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers’ document,” said Woodrow Wil­son before becoming president of the United States. “It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spir it of the age.” During the First World War, the spirit on the home front was fear, and President Wilson …

To some readers of Free Inquiry, this atheist’s most controversial columns have examined the growing culture of death—for example, my questioning of who will decide when our quality of life is defined by doctors and hospitals as so irreversibly dismal that termination will be a kindness to us. In this culture, doctor-assisted suicide has become …

In 1970, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned: “If we create today traditions of spying on people, the time may not be too far distant when a person can hardly speak his mind to any other person witho ut being afraid that the police or someone else will hear what he says and therefore know …

An array of reports and studies—not to mention Jay Leno’s impromptu questioning of college students on NBC’s Tonight Show—make it alarmingly clear that from grammar school to graduate school, and across the country at large, many Americans are educationally left behind in their knowledge of the basic constitutional, individual liberties. You know—the liberties we are …

Last year, during a panel on the judiciary in Washington sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation, Justice Antonin Scalia contemptuously expressed—as the The Washington Post reported—“disdain for the news media and general reading public [for] inaccurate portrayals of federal judges and courts”— including the highest court in the land, whose decisions can affect millions …

Reporter Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize this year for revealing how George W. Bush has used “signing statements” as he signed certain bills into law. Those presidential signing statements absolve him from having to actually obey those laws. Acting on what he regards as his “unitary executive” power to bypass …