Supreme Court agrees to hear Hamdi case: FoxNews so reports. It’s the second war on terrorism case that the Court will have heard — the first involves the Guantanamo detentions — and is a tremendously important issue: Under what conditions may the government militarily detain U.S. citizens, and what role should civilian courts have in […]
Archive | December, 2004
Still more on the Brazil story:
Just added an update to the post below — it turns out that indeed Brazil does generally fingerprint and photograph its own citizens. Makes the Brazilian judge’s shrill reaction to the American requirement that visitors from various countries (including Brazil) be fingerprinted and photographed even odder. If Brazil can do it to Brazilians, and to […]
“Absent an armed insurrection type of thing”:
Reader Stephen Humphrey points to this this CNN story: Officials in the popular ski resort area of Killington want the town to secede from Vermont and join neighboring New Hampshire in a dispute over taxes. They say the town’s restaurants, inns and other businesses send $10 million a year to the state capital in sales, […]
Speech suppression in child custody disputes:
In November, I posted about a Colorado judge restricting one parent’s anti-gay speech as part of a child custody order: A Christian mother is appealing a judge’s decision that prohibits her from teaching her daughter that homosexuality is wrong. Cheryl Clark, who left a lesbian relationship in 2000 after converting to Christianity, was ordered by […]
Criminal libel:
The Rocky Mountain News reports: A Weld County man is suing Greeley police for seizing the computer on which he publishes an online newsletter called The Howling Pig, which takes satirical barbs at a vocal university professor. Thomas Mink, of Ault, a 24-year-old English major at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, said police […]
More on Brazil and fingerprinting:
As readers doubtless recall, a Brazilian judge has mandated that all visitors to Brazil from the U.S. be fingerprinted and photographed, in retaliation for the U.S. imposing a similar requirement on visitors from Brazil and other countries. The judge also condemned the U.S. requirement as “absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and […]
Being fingerprinted in Brazil:
As many VC readers may know, the Brazilian government has started fingerprinting American visitors, as a kind of retaliation for how we now treat Brazilian visitors. My friend and colleague David Levy just flew to Brazil, and he offers the following account of the process: “The Brazilian authorities are indeed engaged in “tit-for-tat” for US […]
Lawsuit over anti-Catholic sculpture:
Washburn University, a public university in Kansas, is displaying an anti-Catholic sculpture. The sculpture apparently “depicts a Catholic bishop with a grotesque facial expression wearing a phallus on his head that is shaped like a bishop’s miter” (a photo is visible in this news story, and apparently it’s not clear whether any phallic connection was […]
Public Service Announcement:
We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging for this important public service announcement, brought to you by BBC news: Men who use laptop computers could be unwittingly damaging their fertility, experts believe. Balancing it on the lap increases the temperature of the scrotum which is known to have a negative effect on sperm production, researchers found. Here […]
Happy Chanukah, Outkast Style:
If King Solomon’s Casino doesn’t do it for you, try this Weird Al meets Outkast way of celebrating the Jewish holiday. Warning: there is sound, although that’s the point. And it’s also kinda warped. My favorite line: “Sheh-vitz [of Manischewitz] and a kosherized pickle” in lieu of “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Runner-up: “Oy […]
Happy Chanukah:
From the King Solomon Casino. UPDATE: Oh, the instructions are in Hebrew; you have to click on the candles to make them sing.
Etymology:
The most interesting claims about word origin are often wrong. Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary seems to have the goods on one, in Slate: John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language […]
Bad Behavior by CBS? Good Sign for Bloggers?
RatherBiased.com reports that The owner of Nonviolence.org, Martin Kelley, said . . . ‘Yesterday I got a call from a publicist for CBS News’s 60 Minutes. They’re running a story tonight on ‘Deserters,’ U.S. military personnel who have fled to Canada rather than serve in Iraq. She was requesting that I talk up the program […]
Originalism and the Role of Precedent:
At the annual meeting of the Law Professor Division of the Federalist Society this past weekend in Atlanta, I moderated a panel on “Transitions to Originalism” which concerned how, if one accepts originalism as the proper method of constitutional interpretation, do you move from where we are to restore the original meaning? An important aspect […]
Another legal publishing story:
Carolyn Elefant writes: I read your post on Jared Gross and how he was able to get his student note published in a journal. I was never on law review in law school but I published an article a few months after graduation and have been published in journals twice more. I have found that […]