News & Commentary

When we first undertook the project to completely redesign ACLU.org almost two years ago, we knew we had an enormous task ahead. The site was a circa 2008 monument to the “include as much content as possible” design aesthetic – most pages were brimming with links, sidebars, tags, related items, and a multitude of paths to more content. Alas, this profusion of options made it much harder to actually find anything, and on a site with over 40,000 pages and hundreds of issue areas, making everything easy to find is critical.
To add to the (fun part) of the challe

Bob Bates’ badge looked real enough, but the man wearing it had less than half the training of his fellow deputies, far less accountability to his supervisors, and a gun that was just as deadly. Real guns loaded with real bullets, but behind a badge that was bought rather than earned. This is a big part of the reason that Eric Harris is dead today.
Bob Bates, a reserve deputy in t

This piece originally appeared at Salon.
Kirk McConer was arrested and jailed w

How long can we expect to see new reports and videos of unarmed Black men being shot by police in incidents all across the country? Aspects of two of the most recent shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and North Charleston, South Carolina, suggest some answers to the question, and the answers do not bode well.
The videotaped shootings of Eric Harri

Another unarmed Black man is shot by a white police officer, this time in North Charleston, South Carolina, and we are again left wondering how it is that this can continue happening in this country with such heartbreaking regularity and what can we do to prevent future incidents. But mostly I am left wondering how long we can continue hearing these reports without confronting the tragic and uncomfortable racial truths which would be thrust front and center if only we had the integrity and courage to face them.
The police officer’s account of the

No one should be locked up because they don’t have the money to buy their freedom. But this is the plight of countless men and women currently imprisoned in our immigration detention system.
Last May, Maria Sandra Rivera fled her

Over the last four years alone, more than 500 Indian children were forcibly removed from their homes by state officials in Pennington County, South Dakota, which then subjected their parents to child-custody hearings that violated federal law.
In these hearings, some of which

This was originally posted on Just Security.
Last year, after concluding that many