QUEENS BROKEN BONES ATTORNEY

I have been saddened to hear so many stories about Asians and Asian-Americans being treated badly during this current health crisis. This is riding on the heels of nasty rhetoric from the Trump administration regarding immigrants and refugees. It’s important to know that Federal, New York State and New York City law prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accomodations. New York City laws are the strongest of all, prohibiting discriminatory lending practices, retaliation, discriminatory harassment and bias-based profiling by law enforcement. Who Is Protected From Discrimination? The purpose of discrimination laws is to protect people that are vulnerable to being treated poorly in our culture. Treating somebody badly for personal reasons or grudges is not legally actionable as discrimination. For example, you can be denied employment because the owner of a business hates your [...]

We might just be seeing Stacey Abrams on the ticket for the 2020 Presidential election. The former Democratic Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, and 2018 Democratic Party contender for Governor of Georgia, is being courted by several of the Democratic Presidential candidates as a running mate. This savvy Yale graduate was the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party and has launched “Fair Fight,” a voting rights organization taking the initiative on funding the training of voter protection teams in twenty battleground states. If she’s not on the ticket this year, she’s young enough to make a go at it later. In fact, she told “The Hill,” in January that she “plans to be President by 2040.” I hope her dream comes true because she’s the kind of [...]

I’m eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to study Constitutional Law with Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the Summer of 1996. She remains a great inspiration to me, inspiring me to share some of her contributions with you today. She’s a groundbreaking lawyer, women’s rights activist and Supreme Court Justice that’s changed the World. Early Life and Career Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn in 1933, daughter of a furrier and a garment worker. She was an exceptional student, graduating first in her class from Cornell, and from there she became one of the few women in her class at Harvard Law School. Later she became the first female member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. She married Martin Ginsburg, also an attorney, who shared responsibility for caring for the couple’s children and household. [...]

Martin Luther King Day was signed into law as a federal holiday in 1983, but was not established in all 50 states until 2000. The holiday celebrates the contributions of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., known for his contribution to ending segregation in the United States, and the tactics of civil disobedience that were used to achieve this goal. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of his first successes. On the evening of December 1, 1955, 42 year old Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama after a long day at work. She took a seat in the “colored” section of the bus, as was required under Montgomery’s segregation laws. The bus took on more passengers, and eventually there were no seats left at all. The white section [...]

High crimes and misdemeanors is the Constitutional standard the Congress must use to decide whether or not to impeach and remove a sitting President. It’s always been difficult to understand Constitutional law because it’s written in old-fashioned language and is often intentionally vague. That’s why my teaching assistant review sessions, for the late great civil rights lawyer Haywood Burns, attracted hundreds of students and packed the auditorium at CUNY Law School. It was hard enough to understand these concepts back in the 1990’s, but now we live in the age of “fake news” and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know who to believe. The discussions we see on TV and read in the paper are usually so partisan that they are unreliable. We all have a bias, and since you know I’m a civil rights [...]