Archive | August, 2009

Over time, the Voting Rights Act morphed in an unanticipated direction — a change that had both benefits and costs. The act’s original vision was one that all decent Americans shared: racial equality in the American polity. Blacks would be free to form political coalitions and choose candidates in the same manner as other citizens. […]

Yesterday’s fishing on the lower Yellowstone River was for the birds. Despite favorable weather conditions, we caught very little. I did, however, snag this picture of a bald eagle perched in a tree along the river. The fishing on the upper Yellowstone was much better today. Casting hoppers all day, I caught browns, rainbows, and […]

Independence Institute Senior Fellow (and University of Montana constitutional law professor) Rob Natelson suggests not, in this blog post. (Which is cross-posted on the blog of Ind. Inst. President Jon Caldara.) Natelson puts aside the question of whether it is constitutional under Originalism (for which the answer is “obviously not”), and instead points to four […]

The Obama Justice Department today filed a reply brief supporting its motion to dismiss in Smelt v. United States, a constitutional challenge to DOMA filed a few months ago in a California district court. Readers may remember that back in June the DOJ supported its motion to dismiss with some merits arguments that justifiably angered […]

I sometimes come across arguments by lawyers or bloggers that the Supreme Court should not rely on the doctrine of stare decisis. (For nonlawyers, a rough definition of stare decisis is the practice of following prior court decisions unless there are very unusual circumstances.) The argument against stare decisis is a simple one: It’s the […]

The CrimProf Blog is back, this time hosted by the excellent criminal law faculty at the University of San Diego. Thanks to Doug Berman for the link.

Today the Supreme Court took a step I don’t think I have ever seen before: When faced with an actual innocence claim in a capital case that was filed as a result or an original habeas corpus case, the court transferred the case to the relevant district court and ordered the trial court to figure […]

Spinelli v. City of New York was decided on August 7, by Judges Calabresi and Walker. Judge Sotomayor had been on the panel, but did not participate in the decision, due to her elevation to the Supreme Court. Angela Spinelli had been doing business a licensed firearms dealer in the Bronx for decades. Pursuant to […]

A district court in New Jersey recently decided a case involving law enforcement access to an online financial account. I couldn’t find the case online, but the citation is Patel v. Hayman, Civ. No. 08-3586 (D.N.J. June 18, 2009), available at 2009 WL 1748964.   The facts, as alleged in the pro se complaint: Plaintiff alleges […]

A long time ago, I wrote about President Obama’s nomination of Cass Sunstein to head OIRA and noted that some academics and commentators opposed it because of Sunstein’s support for cost-benefit analysis. Sunstein is not yet confirmed many months later, not because of the opposition of critics on the left, but because some senators took […]

The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv has published an article about Joe Stork, deputy director for the Middle East of Human Rights Watch. As Noah Pollack summarizes, Stork has “written in explicit support of terrorism against Israel, who lauded the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 as providing ‘an important boost in morale among Palestinians,’ […]

First and foremost, much gratitude to Eugene Volokh for creating space for me on his splendid, indispensable blog. Voting Rights — and Wrongs is my second effort to understand a statute that has become, in the words of Richard Pildes, “one of the most ambitious legislative efforts in the world to define the appropriate balance […]

I’m delighted to report that Abigail Thernstrom will be guest-blogging this week about her new book, Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. Dr. Thernstrom is the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She and her husband, Stephan Thernstrom, […]

Althouse criticizes what she calls the Orwellian use of “conversation” in current national debates: Man, “conversation” has become one of those Orwellian words. There it is in Obama’s NYT interview, where he’s saying something that invites the relabeling that Sarah Palin so effectively slapped on it — “death panels” … “I think that there is […]

As I noted in a 2002 post on this blog: About 10 years ago, when WESTLAW came out with its “Natural Language” search facility, I decided to enter the question, in the Supreme Court decisions database: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? The answer my friend, was […]