Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been a mob. The founders began, "We the People." And yet "the People" had very little to do with writing the thing. The framers, working behind closed doors and shut windows, were highly literate white males -- landowners, military heroes, merchants, accomplished lawyers. Hardly a word was heard from the common folk. Only 133 years later, with the 19th Amendment, did women acquire the right to vote...
...overturn Roe v. Wade. Given the uncertainty of the viability standard, they claim, potential life should be recognized from conception. They point to medical technologies such as sonography and fetal-heart monitoring that have literally raised the visibility of the unborn well before viability. "It's now common for young couples to see their ((unborn)) little baby moving around, sucking his thumb," says John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee...
...would be crude and misleading to say that Jefferson's ideas about building illustrate the ideas of the American Constitution. But they certainly grew from the same origin -- the secular humanism that, despite the gaudy bleatings of today's religious right, was their common moral root. Thus the calm, measured, lucid interior of Jefferson's Rotunda, the focus of his "academical village" (the University of Virginia), declares the value of reason and persuades us that humane analysis, not blind faith, is the true measure of a decent society. We sentimentalize Jefferson and his colleagues if we suppose they were...
...million in damages -- but also to many other Americans. As a matter of law, however, they are wrong. The 1982 verdict against the Post was overturned, first by the trial judge and again on appeal. Libel law is often what scholars call counterintuitive: its tenets sometimes appear to contradict common sense and even common courtesy. The clash between legal principle and public perception may explain why libel verdicts so persistently get reversed and why legal scholars and a growing number of libel plaintiffs are concluding that going to court usually amounts to a frustrating waste of time...
Arbitration aside, how can the current law be improved? One common response from media executives is to compel the loser to pay the winner's legal bills, a standard British practice. Because most plaintiffs ultimately lose, that would greatly reduce the media's expenses but could also have the practical effect of cutting off litigation, except to the best-financed plaintiffs...