This guest comment by Ann Kneeland appeared in The Register-Guard, March 28th, 2018. On March 7, Circuit Court Judge Karsten Rasmussen ruled to keep the Freedom from Aerial Spraying of Herbicides Bill of Rights Charter Amendment off the ballot in Lane County. The judge’s decision is yet another canary in the coal mine singing out that, under [...]
This article by Simon Davis-Cohen appeared in The Progressive March 8th, 2018. n January 16, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen confirmed that the Department of Justice intends to pursue criminal charges against local and state officials who defend “sanctuary” policies. “The Department of Justice is reviewing what avenues may be available,” Nielsen told the [...]
This letter to the editor by Austin Babrow appeared in the Athens News March 8th, 2018. Do you remember in fall of 2011, when the fracking landmen came to town offering bonuses for signed mineral-rights leases, when they were caught on tape claiming that chemical-laden fracking water was essentially Dawn dishwashing liquid? Where were the [...]
How a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent This article by Adam Winkler appeared in The Atlantic magazine, March 5th, 2018. Somewhat unintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom of speech and the [...]
This letter to the editor by K. Hridaya Sivalingam, PhD appeared in the The Laconia Daily Sun, February 28th, 2018. Friends and neighbors have asked me why I am voting yes to Article 29, the Community Rights-Based Ordinance in Ashland. The reasons are many, but the simplest is that I’m tired. I’m a resident, a taxpayer, [...]
A Blog Posting by Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from February 5, 2018. Times are a’changin. When liberals begin talking about local control and states’ rights, you know that something is afoot. Local control and states’ rights have long been a bastion for conservative republicans, the right-wing and racists. Today, states and [...]
This essay by Rivera Sun appeared on her website, February 4th, 2018. It happened so subtly, we missed the corporate coup. Like shadows, corporations surrounded our country and slowly strangled it. They crept into Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the FDA, the military, the Department of the Interior: everywhere you look, a corporation [...]
CELDF’s Executive Director Thomas Linzey, Esq. and attorney Daniel E. Brannen, Jr, Esq. co-author, published A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability in the Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, January 2018. This article began as a series of legal briefs filed in [...]
This letter to the editor by Tejasinha Sivalingam appeared in The Laconia Daily Sun, January 25, 2018. The Ashland deliberative session on Feb. 3 will be of historic significance due to its consideration of a petitioned warrant article for a Community Rights Based Ordinance (CRBO). Ashland’s deliberation on this Community Rights Based Ordinance is part [...]
A Blog Posting by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from January 15, 2018. Being punished for advocating and promoting fundamental rights is as American as pizza, tacos, and apple pie. On this day of remembrance for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is fitting that we commemorate the way the system he struggled to change – [...]
