IslamicLawBlog

"Sue the bastards" is a catchy phrase invented in 1970 by Victor Yannacone, a U.S. lawyer and environmentalist, a trailblazer in cutting-edge litigation. The phrase, despite its critics, captures a sentiment for law-based empowerment against the hefty and mighty. Without fright, alarm, or vacillation, American Muslims are quietly 'suing the bastards" and asserting their civil liberties in courts - a quintessential American thing to do. A review of cases decided in 2015 reveal how American Muslims are claiming, sometimes pro se and sometimes with the help of pro bono and fee-paid lawyers, their rights against discrimination, hostility, and harassment. A symptomatic discrimination case, reported in Khan v. Hilton Worldwide, occurs at the Waldorf Astoria New York, a plush hotel located half a mile away from showy Trump Tower. In 2005, Ehsan Khan (no relation to the author) starts working as a "Café Attendant" at the Starbucks inside Read More

A bankruptcy court tells a gloomy story of student loans. Upon graduating from a school of dentistry in Wisconsin, Soler accumulated student loans in the amount of $200,000. Since then, repaying loans has been the primary predicament of Soler’s life. Soler has searched for higher paying jobs, worked with chronic back pain exasperated by her work as a dentist, and lived without many comforts cinematographed in the American dream of good life. After paying loan payments for eight years, a whopping $100,000 in total, Soler still owes $285,000. “With the accruing, compounding interest, in an effort reminiscent of Sisyphus, instead of gaining any ground with her mountain of loan debt, Soler has been going backwards.” A defeated Soler files for bankruptcy. See In re Soler, 261 BR 444 – Bankr. Court, Minnesota 2001. Soler’s story is anything but unique or unusual. It’s writ large across America. It highlights the existential consequences of massive debt with which various professionals,

It should come as no surprise, but it does for many, that money merchants founded and continue to govern America. See Debt Serfdom in America. The dominant narrative that America was established by “puritans” and “pilgrims” escaping religious atrocities sweeping across Europe is incompletely correct, used mostly for myth-making and finding a respectable origin for a powerful nation, the United States of America . But the dominant narrative conveniently if not deliberately whitewashes the plight of wretched debt servants brought from Europe to make profits for entrepreneurs. Just as vulnerable migrant workers are now imported from across the Mexican border to slog in the fields, poverty-stricken Europeans were transported from across the Atlantic to toil in the “New World” for the benefit of venture capitalists. An indentured servant – Read More