One of the standard arguments put forward by critics of the Supreme Court’s decision protecting corporate political speech in Citizens United is that people aren’t entitled to constitutional rights when they use corporate resources because corporations are “state-created entities.” If the state can create an entity, it supposedly also has the power to define its […]
Archive | 2010
New Electronic Clerkship Applications Deluged Federal Judges
The ABA Journal has this short article on the rising number of federal judicial clerkship applications. It contains the interesting factoid that there was a 66% increase in the number of on-line applications for federal clerkships last hiring season. Apparently the number of applications was so great that some judges simply stopped reading them.
Supreme Court Justices as Inferior Judges
This concludes our posts (here here here and here) summarizing our draft article, Judicial Duty and the Supreme Court’s Cult of Celebrity. Tonight or tomorrow, we’ll post responses to a few of the comments. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress included service on lower federal courts among the original duties of Supreme Court Justices. […]
Administration’s Guantanamo Panel Backs Indefinite Detention
The Justice Department’s task force on what to do about Guantanamo and detention has said that nearly fifty of the 196 detainees at Guantanamo should be held indefinitely without trial, under the laws of war, on the grounds that they are too dangerous to release but unprosecutable. Stories are in the Washington Post and the […]
A Downside to the Brown Victory
Like others who oppose much of President Obama’s legislative agenda, I’m pleased that Scott Brown won, and even more pleased that he won relying on generally libertarian themes. There is a downside, however. From what I can tell, the swing vote for Brown, and more generally against Obama these days, is senior citizens who want […]
Egyptian Court Overturns No-Face-Veil Rule in Exams
I blogged about the litigation a few weeks ago, when a court ruled that the government could ban face veils in exams. (“The government said it brought in the ban in part because students, male and female, were sitting exams disguised as other candidates by wearing a face veil.”) But now that court decision has […]
Pat Buchanan on the “White Vote”
Commenters identified as “conservative” often get unfairly, and generally absurdly, labeled by their opponents as “fascists,” but Buchanan is a rare one who deserves it. Why is he still a “respectable” media presence? UPDATE: Let me clarify: this post is just one of many examples of Buchanan’s general fascistic mentality, not “proof” by itself of […]
President Obama’s Banking Proposal
(Update: I did not want to add my own reaction until I had a chance to read through the President’s speech. In quick terms, I think it is conceptually the right approach, for the reasons laid out by Manzi, McArdle, today’s WSJ editorial, but above all by Paul Volker. It is important to understand that […]
Foxman vs. Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh made comments on his radio show (scroll down–if you find this post of great interest, you should probably read the whole three-paragraph monologue, which makes the relevant context abundantly clear) suggesting that Pres. Obama may be subtly appealing to anti-Semitism through his attack on “bankers” and “Wall Street,” and that Jewish voters, in […]
Bainbridge, et al. on Citizens United and Corporate Personhood
For those interested in the corporate personhood issue, Professor Bainbridge has several posts on the matter: Citizens United v FEC: The First Amendment Rights of Corporate “Persons” Citizens United, Corporate Personhood, and Nexus of Contracts Theory Citizens United v. FEC: Stevens’ Pernicious Version of the Concession Theory See also this post by Larry Ribstein at […]
Disenclerking the Supreme Court
Today, we extend our earlier posts (here here and here) summarizing our draft article, Judicial Duty and the Supreme Court’s Cult of Celebrity. In 1957 a young Arizona lawyer wrote an article in U.S. News and World Report entitled, “Who Writes Decisions of the Supreme Court?” Noting that Supreme Court clerks are “an intellectually high-spirited […]
Why Restrictions on Corporate Speech Reduce Political Equality
To my mind, the strongest argument for restrictions on corporate speech is that they promote political equality. Unlike the far weaker argument that corporations aren’t entitled to free speech because they aren’t people, the equality argument correctly assumes that corporations are actually just tools used by people. It then holds that restricting the use of […]
Ending Judicial Nomination Fights
“Tit-for-tat” has produced a downward spiral of increased politicization and obstruction of judicial nominations. Now that Senate Democrats have lost their super-majority in the Senate — and have learned that even a super-majority does not guarantee quick confirmation — perhaps there is an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to reach an accommodation over judicial nominations. […]
Plain View for Computer Searches Generates Two Circuit Splits in Two Days: United States v. Williams and United States v. Mann
Should courts adopt a new set of Fourth Amendment rules to regulate how the police can search computers for evidence? In particular, does the fact that so much electronic evidence outside the scope of a warrant can come into “plain view” during a computer search require a different approach to whether that evidence outside the […]
“If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe”
Today’s New York Times has this interesting story on the use of easily-guessed passwords.