In our next installment of the First Monday series with Alliance for Justice, we are thrilled to announce that Erwin Chemerinsky — noted Constitutional and federal procedure scholar — will be here to discuss civil liberties issues. First Monday will be at a special time — 1:30 pm ET/10:30 am PT — on Monday, April 7th, as he’s working us in between courses at Duke’s law school.

Last Sunday, CBS aired its long-awaited feature on the prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. The CBS piece, for which I was repeatedly interviewed, came through on its promise to deliver several additional bombshells. The most significant of these was the disclosure that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel….

Our First Monday series, put together in conjunction with the Alliance For Justice, will have a very special guest next Monday: Scott Horton, the NY lawyer who writes for Harpers, will be here at 3 pm ET/noon PT to chat live. Scott’s superb work on the Siegelman case, the long-term effects of politicization of the Department of Justice and the continuing ripples from the USAtty firings and other issues

Civil rights law tends to be discussed in terms of racial equality and discrimination, because that is the context in which most people have studied the fight for lifting the less powerful to a more equal footing. We have come a long way from the days of Frederick Douglass through to the mountaintop of Dr. King and beyond, but in so many ways we still have a long, long way to go….

Next Monday, February 4th at 3 pm ET/noon PT, we’ll have our next installment of the First Monday series on law, politics and you. Our topic will be the assault on civil rights laws in the last few years, with the impact of the Roberts Court on years of civil rights precedents front and center. In case you’ve somehow missed it, the Roberts Court has been gutting civil rights laws in a systematic effort to overturn years of work on equality and the precedents designed to protect less powerful Americans from the whims of the powerful….

I’m Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice, a national association of more than 75 advocacy organizations. For more than two decades AfJ has fought to advance to advance the cause of justice for all Americans. I remember when I was a young lawyer arguing a civil rights case in a federal court in Michigan. Like all young lawyers, I assumed that if I prepared and rehearsed my arguments I had a fighting chance of winning, even in front of a Republican appointed judge. I knew that when I walked into that courtroom, the judge would give my case a fair hearing, regardless of the president who nominated him. Things have changed….