The Legal Edition®

Guest: Dr. Caroline Light – Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her book, Stand Your Ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense is a critical genealogy of our nations ideals of armed citizenship.

Discussion on the history of armed citizenship – from the days of the founding of the US to present day. Who was really supposed to be armed? What qualifications needed to be met to be a gun owner? Did race, status and gender play a role?

Learn how ‘stand your ground’ laws evolved over the centuries – how our nation’s forefathers expected and envisioned who would exercise that right.

Fascinating account of our nation’s past – and a look to the future on stand your ground laws across America. 

Guest: Dr. Caroline Light – Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her book, Stand Your Ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense is a critical genealogy of our nations ideals of armed citizenship.

Discussion on the history of armed citizenship – from the days of the founding of the US to present day. Who was really supposed to be armed? What qualifications needed to be met to be a gun owner? Did race, status and gender play a role?

Learn how ‘stand your ground’ laws evolved over the centuries – how our nation’s forefathers expected and envisioned who would exercise that right.

Fascinating account of our nation’s past – and a look to the future on stand your ground laws across America. 

Guest: Dr. Michael Jensen. He is a Senior Researcher at the National Consortium for Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland. He leads the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) project – a first of its kind database on the radicalization of U.S. homegrown extremists used by the US Justice Department, including the FBI.

Discussion on how extremists get radicalized, who they are, and why they do it. An in-depth discussion on the psychological motivations of those who become home-grown violent extremists, how they identify their cause, and even merge their actions with other violent extremists groups, as seen on the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

A stunning review of psychological profiles of those who truly believe in their cause – willing to Act at their own peril and that of others, believing they are “Patriots” – and must subvert government, and “take” it back.

Guest is Denice Labertew. She is a women’s rights advocate, professor, and former US envoy to foreign states – providing policy guidance to protect the rights of women and girls. Her work includes negotiating regulations in the Violence Against Women Act, and advocating for human rights at the recent UN Universal Periodic Review – on the US Treatment of migrant women and girls detained at the US/Mexican border.

Discussion focuses on the Trump administration and its treatment of migrant women and girls up to and including before President Biden took office. According to official reports, under the Trump administration the International Standards for keeping families intact – were repeatedly violated by the US.

Other reports of children forcibly taken from their parents and put in Foster Care are equally disturbing. Other reports of unnecessary medical procedures and withholding of hygiene materials appear inhumane. Discussion on the mental trauma and revictimization of these migrants, after fleeing their homeland in search of safety.

Is the US traumatizing another subset of future Americans by forced family separation? Are forced sterilizations of migrant women taking place? Is the US violating International Treaties and Human Rights Standards? This discussion explores all these issues with a look from someone who had an inside view from the US Department of State.

Guest is Attorney Mitchell Garabedian – the attorney who litigated many of the first child sexual-abuse cases in the nation – representing survivors of the clergy abuse taking place in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and later around that nation.

Guest: Attorney Stephanie Krent, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The mission of the Institute and its attorneys, is to defend freedom of speech and the press in the digital age – through strategic litigation, research, & public education.

In this discussion, Attorney Krent outlines how the Office of Legal Counsel and its infamous legal opinions often referred to as OLC opinions, are of critical importance to those who need to know the law, comply with it, or challenge it. All too often, those outside of government need to know what is established precedent for government agencies, but these “secret opinions’ have been routinely withheld from the public – and ultimately lawyers.

Guest: Judith Herman, MD, formerly a full-time Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School; and co-founder former Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry, at Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including the groundbreaking book, Trauma and Recovery, The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

Discussion on the insidiousness and pervasiveness of domestic abuse – and the mistreatment of victims by the very people and institutions that should be protecting them. How these institutions have functioned for generations with impunity, including the Catholic Church, Hollywood, government and even the private sector. She explores what it is like for victims who suffer repeated abuse as well as institutional bias – where victims are treated with contempt by society, by the judicial system and even their own families.

Guest: Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at the MIT.

Discussion on her compilation & analysis of scientific data showing how 'statins' work in the body, the metrics on how successful they are in managing high-cholesterol and LDL. Also discussed is the fact that many of these meds have been over-prescribed by doctors in the US. Questions include, What are the side-effects to statin use? Are doctors informed about the unintended consequences of high-dose statin use? What are the long-term unintended consequences of regular statin use? Discussion includes data analysis by medical scientists and Dr. Seneff's synthesis of the data on how it should be analyzed.

Guest: Bruce Schneier, is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books — including Data & Goliath, & Click Here to Kill Everybody — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Discussion on how voting machines are inherently vulnerable and what can and should be done to make them safer – to the ‘Gold Standard’ of paper ballots used across American in this election. Further discussion on hacking, audits and International bad actors trying to infiltrate state election databases as well as old voting machines that are vulnerable to attack and manipulation. An open and frank discussion with a ‘security guru’ with decades of experience on how we can keep America’s democratic process of voting safe and secure.

 -Guest: Attorney, Jamil Dakwar, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program (HRP)

Discussion is on the International Bill of Rights – (3 parts) including: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948 after WWII, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights. Specifically, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICESCR), is a “multilateral treaty” adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1966, and put in force in March 1976. Yet, the Trump State Department is weakening the rapport with both the international community, while exacerbating the international norms.