The University of Puget Sound Philosophy Department has a major issues with diversity and inclusion. In my experience as a philosophy major at this University, I have been silenced in class by professors, belittled by my peers and erased in our curricula. Why do the white, straight, cisgender, propertied, tenured male professors in our philosophy department refuse to include the work of queers, the work of trans philosophers, the work of marginalized people in general? Why is it that there is only one tenured woman in our philosophy department? Why...

On Wednesday, April 24, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Metrish v. Lancaster, a murder case from Michigan with potentially massive ramifications in criminal law; more importantly, however, the case asks citizens to engage more meaningfully in how law is made, by whom it is made, and what we expect from our criminal justice system. Burt Lancaster, a former Detroit police officer, was found guilty of murdering his former girlfriend, Toni Kind, in 1994. At trial, Lancaster asserted a defense of “diminished capacity,” a legal defense offered in some...

Library fines, as many of us know, are some of the most annoying things on the planet. I haven’t met any librarians who have said they were all that important, yet libraries continue doling them out like it’s the new hottest thing to do. Library fines, ostensibly, have one or both of the following as their goal: to deter individuals from stealing books, or to punish those who do steal. In this article—half-seriously, half-satirically—I hope to demonstrate that neither of these goals is sufficient to justify the imposition of fines...

Less than a month from today, the Supreme Court will hear argument in  United States v. Windsor, currently scheduled for March 27. The votes of many of the justices are relatively easy to predict: Justice Scalia will likely vote against marriage equality, Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor are more likely than not to support it. Justice Kennedy, however, remains more of an enigma: Seen by many reporters as a moderate swing vote, he has voted in the past to expand gay rights (such as in the landmark cases of Romer v....

No, this isn’t a story pulled from The Onion: Birmingham, Ala. is raising a challenge to the Voting Rights Act in federal court. On Friday, Nov. 9, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in  Shelby County v. Holder, challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The controversy is over the “preclearance” requirements of Section 5: The 1965 law requires certain “covered jurisdictions” to request permission from the federal government before making changes to their local voting laws because of a history of racial discrimination...

We’ve all read countless op-eds about the negative effects of unlimited political ad spending heralded in Citizens United. But what I don’t think we’ve heard enough about is how these ads, as both political and aesthetic tools, affect us as citizens and voters. So here, I’d like to talk a little bit about the political ramifications of the aesthetics of negative advertising in political campaigns. These ads normally come in two flavors, pretty much split between local and national races: At the local level, you most commonly see the brand...

On Monday, Oct. 8, Socialist Alternative—a global political movement affiliated with the Committee for a Worker’s International, as well as with the socialist political parties of 41 countries—held a talk entitled “Capitalism in Crisis and the Socialist Alternative” in Wyatt 109. The talk hosted speakers from Austria and numerous Occupy movements, many of them from right here in Tacoma. It focused on the failings of global capitalism and argued that the current economic crisis is not something specific to any shortcomings of capitaism, but rather was a structural crisis endemic...