In honor of Lysander Spoooner’s birthday, I am pleased to make available on SSRN my new paper, Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment, which I have been researching and writing for over a year. In it, I discuss 13 abolitionists who made important constitutional arguments on various aspects of slavery […]
Archive | 2010
Happy Birthday Lysander Spooner!
Today is Lysander Spooner’s birthday. Born in 1808, Spooner was a lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur, prolific writer and eventually an individualist anarchist. Political science professor and Spooner scholar Helen Knowles offers her birthday tribute on her new blog, Irresistible Clearness, which is named after a passage from United States v. Fisher by Chief Justice John Marshall […]
The Supreme Court’s Cult of Celebrity
We would first like to thank Eugene for inviting us to summarize and discuss the arguments in our draft article, Judicial Duty and the Supreme Court’s Cult of Celebrity. We’re looking forward to comments and constructive criticism from VC’s thoughtful and active community. The 1987 confirmation fight over Robert Bork gave political salience to the […]
Did the FBI Violate ECPA By Improperly Obtaining Call Records in Terrorism Investigations?
The Washington Post has a new story, “FBI Broke Law For Years in Phone Record Searches”, reporting that the FBI violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by unlawfully obtaining non-content records about telephone calls in terrorism investigations. According to the story, FBI anti-terrorism investigators had a backlog of requests for National Security Letters that they […]
Craig Lerner and Nelson Lund Guest-Blogging
I’m delighted to report that Profs. Craig Lerner and Nelson Lund, both leading constitutional law scholars at the George Mason University School of Law, will be guest-blogging this week about their new article, Judicial Duty and the Cult of Celebrity. Here’s the abstract, which should give you a flavor of Lerner’s and Lund’s thoughtprovoking — […]
Don’t Bank on Legal Challenge to Bank Tax
By Jonathan H. Adler on January 19, 2010 12:56 am in Economic LIberties, Proposed Legislation, Taxes
Monday’s NYT reported the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is investigating potential constitutional challenges to the President’s proposed $90-billion bank tax. It’s apparently not enough to argue that the President’s various economic and regulatory initiatives are bad policy — as this proposal is — it must also be unconstitutional. Based on the article, SIFMA […]
Is Libertarianism on the Rise? (And Should We Thank the President?)
An interesting tidbit from Sunday’s Washington Post about a new Washington Post-ABC News poll: The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country’s problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller […]
Coakley vs. Curt Schilling
Former Boston Red Sox star Curt Schilling has been campaigning for Republican Massachusetts Senate candidate Scott Brown. In response, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley called Schilling “another Yankee fan.” Schilling responds here: I’ve been called a lot of things…. But never, and I mean never, could anyone ever make the mistake of calling me a Yankee […]
The Weekly Standard’s Parody of Ann Coulter
I’m not opening this for comments because this was intended as – and taken in the spirit of – parody. That’s all. I thought it was funny, that’s all, and I’ve been wondering all these years if I’d ever get a chance to link it. (A senior Weekly Standard editor at the time told me […]
Coakley in free fall
Reports a new poll for Politico, conducted entirely on Sunday night. Dorothy Rabinowitz and Ann Coulter have both explained why Coakley’s role in the Amirault case–involving the persecution and long-term imprisonment of plainly innocent people, reveal her to be utterly unfit to serve in any public office. That Coakley is now plainly lying about Scott […]
Let Haitians Vote with their Feet
Stanford economist Paul Romer suggests an overlooked strategy for helping Haitians – letting them move abroad to countries with better political and economic institutions: Even if the motivation is humanitarian, letting a military intervention morph into a long-lasting occupation in some part of a country would risk the kind of violent opposition that colonialism generated […]
Balkin on the Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate
Jack Balkin has a very different take on the constitutionality of the individual mandate than does my co-blogger Randy. Jack’s take is here, and he concludes that it is pretty clearly constitutional. My guess is that this issue won’t get to the Supreme Court, but it will be interesting to watch the lower court challenges […]
United States v. Payton Update
Two weeks ago, I wrote a post seeking updates on United States v. Payton, a Ninth Circuit computer search and seizure decision that I think was wrongly decided. Howard Bashman notes that on Friday the Ninth Circuit handed own this seven-page order explaining what happened. It seems that there was interest in rehearing the case […]
For readers in Atlanta and everywhere else: Emory Law Journal’s 2010 Thrower Symposium
The Emory Law Journal is having its 2010 Randolph W. Thrower Symposium on Thursday, February 11, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in Tull Auditorium at Emory Law School in Atlanta. The folks at the ELJ say: The annual Randolph W. Thrower Symposium at Emory University School of Law gathers scholars from around the country […]
Martin Luther King and the private automobile
I thought I’d share with you an op-ed I published on this occasion 13 years ago: History Shows Freedom Drives a Car. (The title was the newspaper editors’, not mine.) UPDATE: Tim Sandefur has further comments here and here.