Adam Cohen

Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right - and the national government should protect it.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

The first thing to understand about surveillance video in public places is that there is already a lot of it going on - though it is impossible to know how much.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.

The blogosphere makes it possible to have a sprawling national conversation about the hard times - often among people who would never find each other offline.

A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.

It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern - such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.

There is no room on the federal bench for a judge who does not treat all people as equal before the law.

Supporters of tough voter ID laws are not afraid of vote fraud - they are afraid of democracy.

The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around 'max black' after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining 'bleached' districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.

Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.

There is no way to undo what happened in the Zimmerman-Martin encounter, but some good can still come of it: it could lead states to repeal their misguided 'Stand your ground' laws.

Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic - including blacks, hispanics and students.

With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial - and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.

Defending Congressional authority should not be a partisan issue.

Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form.

When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.

It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.

After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up 'locational privacy.'

For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of 'Mad Men' are good company.

Escapism makes a lot of intuitive sense - whisk people away from their cares with stories of a better life.

Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, 'Mad Men' is stunning to look at - a Camelot-era parade of smartly dressed professionals lounging around on midcentury modern furniture.

To be rejected on account of old age may or may not feel the same as being rejected on the basis of race or sex. But it is clearly unjust and dehumanizing, and the law should take it more seriously than it does.

Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

If you're going to call a book 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,' readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.

State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.

When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.

We should craft our laws to allow images of criminal suspects to be captured in public - but also to make sure that the government does not unduly infringe on the privacy rights of innocent citizens.

People's genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's.

There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.

Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides - offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night - is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.

The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.

The remarkable thing about 'Avatar' is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na'Vi natives in 3-D because 'Avatar' is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.

In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

In a perfect world, we would have put users in control of their information when the Internet was first created.

Patents have a place in medical science - for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.

As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.

Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.

Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.