Ted Rall

CONTACT: National Headquarters, 212-809-8585

Life Without Fair Courts Illustration Contest
Second Place: "Explaining the Supreme Court"

About the Artist

Setting himself apart from the herd with a unique drawing style and hard-hitting approach, Ted Rall launched his editorial cartooning career in the late 1980s with a handful of small alternative weekly newspapers whose editors saw his photocopied work hanging from lampposts in New York City.  In 1991 San Francisco Chronicle Features launched Rall's three-times-a-week editorial cartoon syndication with a dozen clients, including the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Daily News.

Now with Universal Press Syndicate, Rall — called "the most controversial cartoonist in America" by the editorial cartooning site Cartoon.com — appears in more than 140 newspapers throughout the United States, ranging from the mainstream New York Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer to alternative weeklies as the Village Voice and Los Angeles CityBeat.

Because he has continued to criticize President Bush's policies via his trademark "Generalissimo El Busho" caricature, Rall has become a lightening rod of criticism, being called "treasonous" by The Weekly Standard and "anti-American" by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Right Wing News website named him 2003's "Most Annoying Liberal" and he was number 15 in Bernard Goldberg's book "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America."  He has received death threats in reaction to his cartoons opposing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rall has won numerous awards, including the 1995 and 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Outstanding Coverage of the Problems of the Disadvantaged. In 1996 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

There are three collections of Rall's cartoons: "Waking Up In America," "All The Rules Have Changed" and "Search and Destroy," as well as three award-winning graphic novels, "My War With Brian," "Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I've Ever Done!" and "2024, a parody of Orwell's 1984." He also wrote the influential 1998  "generational manifesto" "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids," a work that reviewers said made him a de facto spokesperson for Generation X.

Rall is also an expert on Central Asia who covered the war in Afghanistan, where his harrowing experience — three of the 44 journalists with whom he traveled were killed — led to the critically acclaimed book "To Afghanistan and Back." His latest book is "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?"

Q & A with Ted Rall

What inspired you to want to create a comic about why fair and impartial courts matter to you?

Instances of judicial unfairness and bias have made such a negative impact on our society that they demand outrage and ridicule. The importance of the role of the judiciary has been highlighted by recent attempts to expand the power of the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch and media. Often the only thing that stands between madness and fairness is a judge and/or jury.

What do you think is the most important LGBT and/or HIV issue that the courts are dealing with today or in the near future?

The right of gays and lesbians to marry. It's a basic civil rights battle, and I'm still optimistic enough about the basic goodness of the American people to think that public opinion will push the courts to see that equal rights apply to all citizens.