From the Philadelphia Inquirer: [Sgt. Robert] Ralston, 46, said he had been shot in West Philadelphia by a black man who pointed a revolver at his head, then grazed him in the shoulder when Ralston knocked the gun away. He said he had returned fire and hit the man in the chest, but no gunshot […]
Archive | 2010
AZ Boycott and the Constitution:
Given that we’re deep into law school exam periods, here’s today’s question (“snatched,” as they say, “from today’s headlines”): The State of Arizona, you may assume, has passed controversial legislation regarding the legal status of immigrants in the State. The City Council of Los Angeles, protesting the impact of the Arizona law, declares that it […]
New lawsuit on Obamacare
Just filed in the Northern District of Ohio. (HT Jacob Sullum, of Reason.) Lead attorney is Jonathan Emord, formerly a Vice-President at Cato, and head of a firm with extensive experience in litigation against the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies on medical issues. The complaint is here. In the complaint, the material […]
Unless the Justices Start Skinny-Dipping in the Cert Pool
I don’t care whether they’re straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, two-spirit, men-who-have-sex-with-men, womyn-loving-womyn, autosexual, or beyond categorization. I know it matters to some gay-rights activists who think every gay nominee is practically gay-bashing unless she starts her testimony with, “I am a gay American judicial nominee…” I know it matters to some anti-gay-rights activists […]
I Should Note for the Record
that I am bissextile, from birth.
Bisexual Erasure
I don’t think we should choose our Supreme Court Justices based on their sexual orientation. I admire Elena Kagan’s scholarship [UPDATE: link added], expect to disagree with many of her votes on legal issues, and hope that some of her votes will be ones that I will like, all without regard to her sexual orientation. […]
Michael Bellesiles and the Bogus NRA Conspiracy
Eugene [Volokh] quotes from an editor at the New Press who is peddling the ridiculous notion that [Michael] Bellesiles was a victim of an NRA conspiracy instead of someone who destroyed his own career by writing a book (Arming America) that did not hold up when some of us checked his evidence, including work based […]
Elena Kagan, the Line-Item Veto Case, and Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong
David Kravitz (Blue Mass Group) reports on Elena Kagan’s negative views of the majority opinion in Clinton v. New York, the line-item veto case in which Justices Scalia, O’Connor, and Breyer dissented, and (to a lesser extent) of the majority opinion in Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, a 1976 case involving discrimination in favor of […]
More on “Weight Classes” for Prison Inmates
In a recent post, I endorsed economist Bryan Caplan’s “weight class” plan for reducing prison rape by separating prisoners by size and weight. It turns out that Columbia law student Philip Ellenbogen developed the same idea in a 2009 article for the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems (see esp. pp. 363-68). As he […]
Guns and Mental Illness
Title 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) criminalizes gun possession by (among others) anyone “who has been committed to a mental institution.” This includes relatively brief commitments, and from 1992 until 2007 this covered anyone who had ever been so committed, with no opportunity for relief. Title 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) did authorize the Secretary of Treasury […]
More Musing on Liquidity and Solvency Distinctions in Sovereign Debt Crises
I want to return again briefly to how the traditional distinction of liquidity and insolvency in a crisis applies to sovereign states such as Greece. Liquidity is usually thought of as a gap in information that causes investors, creditors, depositors or others to suddenly question an institution’s financial position. In the classic bank run, the […]
Kagan and Diversity Hiring
I admire the fact that Elena Kagan made it a point to hire prominent libertarians and conservatives while she was dean at Harvard. It’s difficult to get many American law schools, dominated by a broadly and comfortably liberal consensus across almost every field, to recognize the importance of ideological diversity among faculty. That’s true for hiring both […]
Another European Prosecution for Insulting Religion
[Polish pop star Dorota Rabczewska, also known as] Doda is accused by the prosecutor’s office of the capital [Warsaw] of insulting the religious feelings of others, including by calling the authors of the Bible “drunks and drug addicts.” For this, the popular singer is facing up to 2 years in prison. On April 30, the […]
Seeking Constitution Trivia Buffs
The Green Bag 2d is publishing a set of trivia-ish questions I put together related to the text of the Constitution; and it would be great if a few people who like such things could try to answer the questions, and let me know whether they think the instructions are flawed or imprecise in certain […]
How President Obama is bringing real education reform to Colorado
Today is the final day of the 2010 Colorado legislature, and cautious optimists are looking forward to final passage of Senate Bill 191, a dramatic reform of Colorado’s tenure system for public school teachers. To be precise, after three years, Colorado teachers get a set of “due process” rights, not tenure, but the effect is […]