Adam S. Cohen | |
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| Born | 1962 (age 61–62) |
| Education | Harvard University (BA, JD) |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist and author |
| Notable credit | The New York Times |
Adam Seth Cohen (born c. 1962) [1] is an American journalist, author, lawyer, and former assistant editorial page editor of The New York Times . [1] He also worked in the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Cohen graduated from Bronx High School of Science. He obtained his bachelor's degree in the interdisciplinary honors Social Studies program from Harvard College in 1984 and received his J.D. degree in 1987 from Harvard Law School where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review . [1]
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Cohen clerked for Judge Abner Mikva on the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then served as a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. [2] Cohen subsequently worked as a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York City. [3] While at the ACLU, he focused on school finance and educational equity issues and was part of the legal team that brought an Alabama state court class action in 1991, claiming that the public school system violated the state constitution by failing to provide an equitable, adequate or "liberal" education. [4] In 1993 the state courts ruled in favor of the ACLU and the children plaintiffs in Harper v. Hunt , finding that poor schools were not equitably funded. [5] The lower court decision was reviewed in the federal courts. [5] During his tenure as Alabama attorney general, Jeff Sessions, later President Donald Trump's attorney general of the United States, fought against the findings of the Alabama courts. [5] Sessions was ultimately successful in his campaign to prevent schools in poorer Alabama communities from being funded at the same level as schools in wealthier districts. [5]
After leaving the ACLU, Cohen spent seven years as a senior writer for Time magazine, until he left to become a member of The New York Times editorial board. [6] During his tenure at the Times, from 2002 until 2010, Cohen's editorials focused on tech and legal affairs. [7] After leaving The New York Times, he became a lecturer in law at Yale Law School and a fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, teaching courses in media and internet law. [7] He also wrote a legal column which appeared in Time.com every Monday. [8]
Beginning in 2011, Cohen also served as special policy advisor to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. [9] [10] In 2014 Cohen joined New York City Mayor de Blasio's administration as chief speechwriter. [11] In 2015 he moved to the mayor's Center for Economic Opportunity, as a special policy advisor. [12] Along with Elizabeth Taylor, the literary editor of the Chicago Tribune and Cohen's co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Cohen is also co-editor of The National Book Review . [13] [14] In 2017, Cohen was a Pulitzer Prize juror in the category of criticism [15] and in 2018 he was a juror in the category of Feature Writing. [16]
Cohen is the author of five books. The most recent, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, argues that the United States Supreme Court turned away from protecting the poor and weak and from advancing a more just and equal society across broad and diverse areas of law (education, poverty, campaign finance, democracy, workers' rights, corporations, and criminal justice), reversing the course the law had been on under the jurisprudence of the Warren Court. [17] This reversal occurred in the aftermath of Chief Justice Earl Warren's retirement and President Richard Nixon's successful bid—deemed a ruthless and baseless "squeeze play" by Cohen—to force liberal Justice Abe Fortas off the court by threatening federal investigations of Fortas and his wife. [18] Nixon went on to appoint four conservative justices (new Chief Justice Warren Burger, future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then-conservative Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, and Associate Justice Lewis Powell). Calling the book "impressive and necessary", The New York Times praises Cohen's "sweeping review" as showing that "the Court has repeatedly engaged in judicial activism against the poor", aggressively exacerbating income inequality in the United States. [19] "Cohen sums up the result of fifty years of jurisprudence in the areas he explores, writing that 'the post-1969 Court has been working unrelentingly to protect the wealthy and powerful, and to make [the United States] more hierarchical and exclusionary - and it has been succeeding. When it comes to the law, and its many consequences for society, we are all living in Nixon's America now.'" [17]
Asked to explain how he reconciles the post-Warren Court's progressive-leaning decisions on gay rights (marriage equality), curbing executive powers during wartime and (some) reproductive freedom decisions with his narrative of a reactionary court, Cohen responded, "Well, you might just say that in a capitalist system like ours, wealth and money and the current income and wealth distribution are really where the rubber hits the road. Look at how corporations actually have gotten a lot better on things like affirmative action, inclusion, gay rights, and things like that, but they haven't gotten good at distributing their money to the poor. That's really the thing that separates the corporate mentality from a more progressive outlook." [20]
In April 2023, in response to reports of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's failure to disclose a series of luxurious presents and benefits he received from conservative activist billionaire Harlan Crow, Cohen penned an Op Ed in The New York Times, drawing an unfavorable comparison to the bipartisan agreement on ethics that had marked the resignation of Justice Abe Fortas from the Supreme Court in 1969. [21]
Cohen's previous book, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, was named to the longlist for the 2016 National Book Award, [22] and is slated to be made into an Amazon film, Unfit, starring Dakota Johnson. [23] [24]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit human rights organization founded in 1920. The organization strives "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and has over 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget of over $300 million. Affiliates of the ACLU are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires U.S. states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who are unable to afford their own. The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.
Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg authored the majority opinions in cases such as United States v. Virginia (1996), Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. (2000), and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005). Later in her tenure, Ginsburg received attention for passionate dissents that reflected liberal views of the law. She was popularly dubbed "the Notorious R.B.G.", a moniker she later embraced.
Abraham Fortas was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1965 to 1969. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Fortas graduated from Rhodes College and Yale Law School. He later became a law professor at Yale Law School and then an advisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fortas worked at the Department of the Interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was appointed by President Harry S. Truman to delegations that helped set up the United Nations in 1945.
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case involved Mildred Loving, a Black woman, and white man Richard Loving. In 1958, they were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Felix Frankfurter was an Austrian-born American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 until 1962, during which period he was a noted advocate of judicial restraint in its judgements.
Arthur Joseph Goldberg was an American statesman and jurist who served as the 9th U.S. Secretary of Labor, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the 6th United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes in the coming decades regarding sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell. It is widely believed to have been weakened by Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), which involved compulsory sterilization of male habitual criminals. Legal scholar and Holmes biographer G. Edward White, in fact, wrote, "the Supreme Court has distinguished the case [Buck v. Bell] out of existence". In addition, federal statutes, including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, provide protections for people with disabilities, defined as both physical and mental impairments.
Carrie Elizabeth Buck was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, after having been ordered to undergo compulsory sterilization for purportedly being "feeble-minded" by her foster parents after their nephew raped and impregnated her. She had given birth to an illegitimate child without the means to support it. The surgery, carried out while Buck was an inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, took place under the authority of the Sterilization Act of 1924, part of the Commonwealth of Virginia's eugenics program.
George Bundy Smith was a lawyer and judge in New York State. While he was a law student at Yale University, he participated in the Freedom Ride from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama.
Adam Liptak is an American journalist, lawyer and instructor in law and journalism. He is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times.
President Bill Clinton made two appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, both during his first term.
Bernard S. Cohen was a civil liberties attorney and Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates. On April 10, 1967, appearing with co-counsel Philip Hirschkop on behalf of the ACLU, Cohen presented oral argument for the petitioners in Loving v. Virginia before the U. S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cohen's clients, declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional, thus invalidating the anti-miscegenation laws of 15 states.
Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders. The ruling applied even to those persons who had committed murder as a juvenile, extending beyond Graham v. Florida (2010), which had ruled juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional for crimes excluding murder.
Philip Jay Hirschkop is an American civil rights lawyer. With fellow American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteer cooperating attorney Bernard S. Cohen, the two represented Mildred and Richard Loving in several court cases to overturn the Lovings' conviction for interracial marriage in the state of Virginia. The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, and on April 10, 1967, Hirschkop and Cohen were permitted to share the oral argument for the Lovings. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings in Loving v. Virginia, overturning their conviction and ending the enforcement of state bans on interracial marriage.
Lane v. Franks, 573 U.S. 228 (2014), is a U.S. Supreme Court case involving public employee's freedom of speech rights. Edward Lane sued Steve Franks for unfairly firing him, out of retaliation for sworn testimony Lane gave during a federal fraud case. The Eleventh Circuit originally ruled in favor of Franks, “denying [Lane] first amendment protection to subpoenaed testimony”. The case was argued before the Supreme Court on April 28, 2014. The case was decided on June 19, 2014.
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The fifth woman to serve on the court, she was nominated by President Donald Trump and has served since October 27, 2020. Barrett was a U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.
Walter Pollak (1887–1940) was a 20th-century American civil liberties lawyer, who established important precedents while working with other leading radical lawyers in the 1920s and 1930s. His best known cases involved the defense before the Supreme Court of Communist Benjamin Gitlow and the Scottsboro Boys.
Deborah N. Archer is an American civil rights lawyer and law professor. She is the Jacob K. Javits Professor at New York University and professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law. She also directs the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law and the Civil Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law. In January 2021, she was elected president of the American Civil Liberties Union, becoming the first African American to hold the position in the organization’s history.
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