Uncategorized

Recent posturing by politicians hoping to censor their political opponents with obviously unconstitutional laws against speech remind me that there is nothing new under the sun. I wrote this piece for the New York Times back when online pornography, not vaccine misinformation, was the fear. NYT Op-Ed, June 15, 1996, by Richard Dooling Just how much Government time and expense went into drafting, debating and passing the Communications Decency Act, which was declared unconstitutional by a Federal district court last week? Imagine a second-year law student presented with this question on a constitutional law exam: Q. May the Government make it a crime punishable by two years in prison and a $250,000 fine to transmit to minors on the Internet “indecent” material — without defining “indecent”? Trained to be suspicious of the obvious, our student panics. The statute couldn’t be “void for vagueness,” could it? This couldn’t be the “overbreadth doctrine” learned on the first day of class, could it? Too easy! Must be a trick question. It belongs on a high school civics test. Yet politicians from two branches of government (President Clinton, a Yale law graduate, signed the bill) spent the last year posturing for the camera, providing […]

I have a short story, Sycamore Acres, in the July/August 2021 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

The Wall Street Journal invited Richard Dooling to write its Millennial Essay on Swearing, One Thousand Years of Searing: From Swearing By To Swearing At. Writing in the New York Times, Richard Bernstein called Blue Streak “a charmingly impudent essay on language and sexual politics . . . less an argument than it is a kind of illustration, an often extremely clever and creative sort of literary acting out. His chapters on swearing as a healthy, normal, entertaining, creative, cathartic and even ultimately peacemaking gesture, more practiced by men than women, are deep and funny at the same time. ”Swearing,” he writes, ”is the close cousin of magic, ritual, laughter, dreams, neurosis and reflex — all indispensable expressions of instincts and impulses.”