It has been a very busy Term at the Supreme Court for summary reversals: There have been 10 already—far more than the Court usually has in an average Term, and the Term ain’t over yet. The odds are good that we’re about to get one more, in a capital case out of the Eleventh Circuit, […]
Archive | May, 2010
Elana Kagan: This Video Has Nothing to Do With
But it is amazing.
Splitting Up MMS to Prevent Oil Spills
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar plans to break up the Minerals Management Service in the wake of the offshore well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The rationale is that the MMS has an internal conflict-of-interest because it is responsible for both generating revenue through offshore leases as well as protecting worker safety and the environment. […]
A New York Court?
If Elena Kagan is confirmed, the Supreme Court will have four justices from New York City, the New York Times reports. The four are a portrait of the city, each carrying distinct New York traits to Washington. “Kagan is so Manhattan, Scalia is so Queens, Ginsburg is so Brooklyn and Sotomayor is so Bronx,” said […]
A reliable book about 1877
Eugene Volokh notes the forthcoming book from the audaciously fraudulent and inaccurate writer Michael Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. Because 1877, unlike gun ownership, is not currently a controversial topic in the United States, it is possible that nobody will track down Bellesiles’ footnotes to see if they support his claims. However, readers […]
Ilya May Be Right About the Context of the Pew Poll
I appreciate Ilya’s clarification about the Pew Poll; as he notes, the question about reactions to words was preceded by questions about politics. Ilya may be right that this implicitly clued in poll respondents that they were really being asked not for the reactions to the words (as the poll asked) but for their reactions […]
The Pew Survey Respondents Were Not Reacting to “Words Without Context”
In his response to my last post, Orin argues that some of the seemingly anomalous reactions of respondents to the Pew survey I analyzed might have been the result of the fact that the researchers asked them to react to “words without context” rather than “ideologies” or political ideas. I highly doubt this accounts for […]
Reactions to Words Without Context
Ilya posts below about a poll on public attitudes towards terms like “socialism” and “capitalism.” I suspect the polling methodology explains much of the oddity of the results. Notably, the respondents were asked to offer positive or negative reactions to listed words without any context, not to the underlying ideas signified by the words in […]
Political Ignorance and Perceptions of “Capitalism” and “Socialism”
This recent Pew survey has some interesting data on public opinion regarding various political and economic ideas, including “capitalism” and “socialism.” To me, the result that stood out the most was this one: Perhaps surprisingly, opinions about the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” are not correlated with each other. Most of those who have a positive […]
Kagan and the Cult of Personality
Mary Dudziak is right regarding Elena Kagan: “let’s focus on her ideas and accomplishments, and not on the unsurprising idea of a single Supreme Court nominee.” The problem, though, is the cult of personality that has developed around Supreme Court Justices over the past few decades, aided to a substantial degree by how presidential administrations […]
A New Book Coming Soon from Michael Bellesiles
History News Network reports about it (the title is 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently) and the rather pugnacious promotional campaign for it, which argues that Bellesiles’ Arming America was wrongly criticized. Arming America was indeed quite rightly condemned, including by our own Jim Lindgren, and Bellesiles rightly lost his Bancroft Prize, and his tenured […]
Wake Me From This Nightmare
A lawsuit has now been filed in a Minnesota state court challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples under the state constitution. It makes the usual claims about due process and equal protection, but adds especially adventurous claims based on “freedom of conscience” and “association.” The plaintiffs are sympathetic, including a couple of 36 years who don’t […]
Licensed carry now allowed at Colorado community colleges
New policy, just announced. More fruits of the great work of Mountain States Legal Foundation Jim Manley, with their win in Students for Concealed Carry on Campus v. Regents of the University of Colorado. Colorado is joining Utah in allowing licensed carry at all state higher education campuses. As I detailed in Connecticut Law Review […]
Colorado Supreme Court Rejects Good Faith Exception for Changing Law
A while back I blogged a bunch about whether the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule should apply when a search that is constitutional under existing law at the time of the search is ruled unconstitutional on direct appeal. Yesterday the existing split deepened, with a divided Colorado Supreme Court joining the Ninth Circuit […]
My own Kagan experience
By Sasha Volokh on May 11, 2010 4:43 pm in Executive Branch, Federalist Society, Guns, Judicial Nominations, Kagan Nomination, Law Schools, Supreme Court
Elie Mystal, who graduated from law school at the same time as I did, has bad memories of Elena Kagan from when he had her for Civ Pro as a 1L. [UPDATE: Read The Whole Thing, the commenters remind me to say.] For what it’s worth, here are my own impressions of Elena Kagan: I […]