Archive | July, 2007

University of San Diego law professor Michael Rappaport describes his “clerkship from hell” with Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Dolores Sloviter. The apparently hellish experience of clerking for Judge Sloviter is also the subject of a new thinly veiled novel by recent Columbia Law School grad Saira Rao, who also clerked for Sloviter. I […]

A cool photo album. Thanks to Hanah Metchis Volokh for the pointer.

The front page of yesterday’s Washington Post had a story by John Solomon suggesting that Alberto Gonzales may have lied to Congress about the Patriot Act in 2005. Although the story received a lot of play on the Hill and in the blogs yesterday, on closer inspection I think this story is seriously weak if […]

A good column from Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe).

Adam Liptak at the New York Times reports: A company that broadcasts cockfights on the Internet filed suit in federal court in Miami on Tuesday to challenge a largely untested federal law that makes it a crime to sell depictions of animal cruelty. The owners of a Web site that shows cockfights says that though […]

Jack Goldsmith and Neal Katyal have a very interesting op-ed today proposing a new system for detaining terrorist suspects. Seems pretty sensible to me. Your thoughts?

I was very interested in yesterday’s poll results on reader attitudes towards President Bush, and I wanted to add an important follow-up question: Readers, how do you identify yourself on the American political spectrum? How do you identify your political orientation? I’m very conservative. I’m moderately conservative. I’m in the center. I’m a libertarian. I’m […]

I recently posted a new draft of my forthcoming article, Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protection, on the meaning of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. I normally wouldn’t mention a draft revision, but this one is substantially reworked and simplified; if you’re interested in the Fourth Amendment in general and the reasonable expectation of […]

At Cato Unbound, Brink Lindsey (who earlier won fame for his interesting proposal for a liberal-libertarian political alliance), has a fascinating essay arguing that longterm historical trends favor libertarianism. Lindsey makes a compelling case that both economic and social freedom have made significant advances over the last 40 years, and that both popular and elite […]

As I mentioned last month, one occasionally sees a student law review article that is cited a great deal by courts — even a lot more than are most articles by tenured academics. Of the student articles I’ve seen that are published since 1990, the one most cited by courts is Janet Hoeffel’s The Dark […]

In light of my post below about President Bush’s approval rating, here’s a question: What do you think about President Bush’s performance as President? Here’s a completely, entirely, 100% unscientific poll for you to take: Free polls from Pollhost.com Do you approve of President Bush’s performance as President? Yes, I approve. No, I don’t approve. I’m undecided.    

Pollster.com looks at all the different presidential polls and comes up with a trend line indicating President Bush’s latest approval ratings. The trend line was recently updated, and it indicates that the President’s popularity continues to drop: according to the site, the President’s approval rating as of July 8 hit a new low, about 27.7%. […]

Ann Althouse makes a very good point: I hate seeing people publicly humiliated for the sexual things they do in private. But the government is criminally prosecuting a woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, for what it says was a prostitution ring. These are federal charges, and the senator, David Vitter, has some responsibility for the laws […]

Sasha Volokh is right to point out that not all left-wing criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic or otherwise biased, even in cases where the critics attack Israel while ignoring other government that are guilty of similar offenses to a much greater extent. As Sasha puts it: For instance, one might think that only Israelis are […]

A lot of interesting things have been said about the gender makeup of Federalist Society events. But there’s something much more complicated going on here, I think, than just the demographic makeup of Federalist Society regulars, or for that matter anything else that’s specific to the Federalist Society. It may also be much more interesting […]