Sept 5, 2014: Washington Post: The 7 things you didn’t read today (but should have)
Dahlia Lithwick tries to make some sense of the Bob McDonnell trial before she, like the jury, can "loofah off the filth and go home.' If I never hear the phrase “X threw Y under a bus” again, especially with regard to this trial, I will be immensely grateful. At some point in the proceedings, it seemed as if there were so many people thrown under so many buses—wife, children, executive chef, staff—it wasn’t clear the bus could move anymore.
Dahlia Lithwick tries to make some sense of the Bob McDonnell trial before she, like the jury, can "loofah off the filth and go home.' If I never hear the phrase “X threw Y under a bus” again, especially with regard to this trial, I will be immensely grateful. At some point in the proceedings, it seemed as if there were so many people thrown under so many buses—wife, children, executive chef, staff—it wasn’t clear the bus could move anymore.
"Investigative journalism is one thing. But the Court of Public Opinion is what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies. It allows everything into evidence and has no mechanism to separate facts about the case from the experiences and political leanings of the millions of us who are all acting as witnesses, judges, and jurors." -Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) (Woody Allen v. Dylan Farrow) 02.05.14
Dahlia Lithwick is a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate. She writes "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. Before joining Slate as a freelancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, ELLE, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Washington Post. She was a regular guest on The Al Franken Show, and has been a guest columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page. Lithwick, functioning in her role as Slate's legal correspondent, has provided summaries of and commentary on current United States Supreme Court cases as a guest on National Public Radio's newsmagazine Day to Day, which was co-produced by Slate.com. She received the Online News Association's award for online commentary in 2001.
In 2009, Lithwick wrote an article for Slate titled "I Need a Hero: Seeking a bomb-throwing, passionate, visionary, liberal Scalia for a seat on the Supreme Court." In the article, she called for President Obama to nominate a person who was "some cross between Rachel Maddow and Emma Goldman," such as Sonia Sotomayor. Lithwick was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and is a Canadian citizen. She moved to the U.S. to study at Yale University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1990. As a student at Yale she debated on the American Parliamentary Debate Association circuit. In 1990 she and her debate partner at the time Austan Goolsbee were runners up for National Debate Team of the Year.
She went on to study law at Stanford University, where she received her J.D. in 1996. She then clerked for Judge Procter Hug on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 2009, Lithwick wrote an article for Slate titled "I Need a Hero: Seeking a bomb-throwing, passionate, visionary, liberal Scalia for a seat on the Supreme Court." In the article, she called for President Obama to nominate a person who was "some cross between Rachel Maddow and Emma Goldman," such as Sonia Sotomayor. Lithwick was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and is a Canadian citizen. She moved to the U.S. to study at Yale University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1990. As a student at Yale she debated on the American Parliamentary Debate Association circuit. In 1990 she and her debate partner at the time Austan Goolsbee were runners up for National Debate Team of the Year.
She went on to study law at Stanford University, where she received her J.D. in 1996. She then clerked for Judge Procter Hug on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
