Opinion: Latest Reports from The Washington Posts ‘In Theory’

Is the concept of meritocracy even relevant anymore?
Bill Bishop is the co-author, with Robert Cushing, of The Big Sort: How the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Julie Ardery is author of The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art.

Primed with ambition, John Kennedy and Barack Obama wrote books to introduce themselves to the nation. Both books sold well, and both men became president. But the two works, published 40 years apart, bespoke entirely different notions of merit — of what it took to be a leader.

The unsettling truth about the tech sector’s meritocracy myth
,Tracey Ross is an associate director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress and co-host of TalkPoverty Radio.

It is no secret that the tech sector has a diversity problem. According to Google’s most recent employment data, just 1 percent of the company’s tech staff is black, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 82 percent of its tech workers worldwide are male. Over the past few years, companies like Google have faced pressure to confront their lack of diversity, but the myth that the sector is a true meritocracy — where hard work and the best ideas are rewarded — seems to endure.

Is success in America really based on merit?
College admissions season has arrived, with all its attendant stresses. Harvard accepted only 5.2 percent of its applicants for the graduating class of 2020, and the New York teen who was accepted into all eight Ivy League schools is now on a bona-fide press tour. Our fascination with educational placement reflects both celebration of and increasing concerns around the meritocratic ideals we still profess.

Americans and their longing for monarchy
Three years ago, I was giving tours of the nation’s Capitol. It was a fantastic job that allowed me to become immersed in the nation’s history. But there was one part of the tour that always struck me as odd: the fresco painting on the ceiling of the Capitol dome. “The Apotheosis of Washington,” by […]
History is clear: Juries were supposed to be able to overturn laws
Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about jury nullification. Need a primer? Catch up here. Clay S. Conrad is a partner in the firm of Looney & Conrad, P.C., where he is in charge of appellate litigation. He […]
The uncomfortable link between jury empowerment and bigotry

David Neiwert is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of several books, including And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border.

Do ordinary people serving on juries have an inalienable, God-given right to throw out the law if they think its outcome is “unjust”? Or is this legal concept — known as “jury nullification” — really just an assault on the rule of law itself?

Prosecutors have too much power. Juries should rein them in.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

If there’s strong evidence that you’ve committed a crime, there’s still hope. Despite the evidence, those responsible for convicting you may choose to let you go, if they think that sending you to jail would result in an injustice.

That can happen through what’s called “prosecutorial discretion,” where a prosecutor decides not to bring or pursue charges against you because doing so would be unfair, even though the evidence is strong. Or it can happen through “jury nullification,” where a jury thinks that the evidence supports conviction but then decides to issue a “not guilty” verdict because it feels that a conviction would be unjust.

Jurors need to take the law into their own hands
Paul Butler is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a former trial attorney with the Justice Department. His book “Chokehold: Policing Black Men” will be published in February 2017.

I learned about jury nullification while serving as a prosecutor in the District in the 1990s. As a rookie, I was warned that in nonviolent drug cases, it would be tough to get a conviction, no matter how strong my evidence was. The experienced prosecutors explained that the African American jurors “didn’t want to send another black man to jail.”

As I tried cases, I gained enormous respect for the seriousness with which jurors approached their work. The jurors were often elderly African Americans who had moved to D.C. to escape the Jim Crow South, and they were honored to serve on a jury because they came from places where blacks didn’t have that privilege. These jurors had no problem convicting anyone of a violent offense, if the government proved its case.

Why the ‘one person, one vote’ case was so important
The Supreme Court issued a decision Monday on the widely anticipated “one person, one vote” case, unanimously ruling that states can draw their voting districts based on total population as opposed to just the number of people who can vote. The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, featured arguments on a pair of state Senate districts in the Dallas area. Because Texas draws its districts […]