This memorandum (in PDF format) is intended to outline the constitutional powers of the Maryland Governor, who is often said to be the most powerful Governor in the country in terms of constitutional authority. Click here to view the PDF File.
A lawsuit seeks to accord civil litigants a constitutional right to state-paid lawyers like that guaranteed criminal defendants by the famous case of Gideon v. Wainwright. The test case is Frase v. Barnhart, a child custody matter which the Court of Appeals is to hear this October. Not one Marylander in a hundred knows about […]
MR. GEORGE W. LIEBMANN: This is a symposium on the criminal justice system in Baltimore City that is jointly sponsored by three organizations: The Bar Association of Baltimore City, Maryland Business for Responsive Government, and the Calvert Institute for Policy Research. We are honored to have with us this evening four distinguished judges, Judge Charles […]
The late Spiro Agnew, no great statesman, once referred disgustedly to “the pop issues-acid, amnesty and abortion.” The first two are no longer with us as political issues, having now been replaced by ‘gun control’. Agnew’s point, however, remains valid: when candidates talk about abortion and gun control, it suggests that they have few serious […]
In a likely preview of Republican proposals should the party win the Maryland gubernatorial election next month, its 1998 candidate for the U.S. Senate [sic], Baltimore lawyer George Liebmann, writes on a Baltimore Sun opinion page that the state’s current Smart Growth practice ”has reached its limits” and that the time has come to privatize […]
The recent discussion of slot machines at race tracks makes it appropriate to focus on Maryland’s existing gambling enterprise: the lottery. Critics of gambling have done little to see to it that gambling revenues are distributed so as to compensate the jurisdictions in which they are raised, which are also the jurisdictions which suffer any […]
If exodus is a measure of livability, then only a handful of cities are as unlivable as Baltimore. And the people leaving are just the sort of folk Baltimore must keep. They are the ordinary, middle-class types without whom no city can function. But the municipal authority’s response to these individuals’ verdict on the city has been – nothing. Baltimore is home to public employees and welfare recipients a-plenty.
As Maryland moves toward the 21st century, an expanding population demands ever better services and ever more schools – without more taxes. How to pull it off? The answer is for local governments to pay less for services, leaving funds available for purchasing additional services in other areas. The easiest means of doing this is to subject service providers to the rigors of the market by making them compete with each other.
The National Taxpayers Union, a watchdog group in Washington, D.C., has just released its annual rating of the “taxpayer friendliness” of all members of Congress. Maryland’s U.S. Senators, Democrats Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, ranked absolute bottom on the NTU scale. Between them, Sarbanes and Mikulski scored a combined average of 8 percent, out of […]
I was looking for something in my basement the other day. As is so often the case, I did not find what I was looking for. But I did find something better – two photo albums filled with snaps I had taken during a trip to Albania in 1987. This prompted a frantic search for […]