I’ve linked to this essay before, but with law school new student orientations only a month a way, I figured I would link to it again: How to Read A Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students. Here’s the abstract: This essay is designed to help new law students prepare for the first few […]
Archive | July, 2012
American Jewish Voting Behavior, 1972-2008
Here’s a very interesting report from “The Solomon Project.” The main conclusion is that based on election year exit polls, Jewish support for Democrats and liberalism has remained pretty constant since 1972. If one digs a bit deeper into the report, one learns that current trends suggest that the American Jewish electorate will grow less […]
Acquittal of Man Who Stripped Naked at Airport as Protest Against TSA Screening
So reports The Portland Mercury: The judge ruled this afternoon that protester John Brennan is not guilty of incident exposure charges for stripping down at the PDX security station. The issue basically came down to whether Brennan’s striptease was meant to be a protest or whether, as the state’s prosecuting attorney argued, he retroactively claimed […]
New Book on National Security Law
The ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security has just released a sequel to its first book on national security legal topics. The first book, Patriot Debates, focused heavily on the USA Patriot Act. The second book, Patriots Debate, is a wider-ranging look at law and national security. Both volumes are distinguished by several […]
Recommendations by Law Professors: Three Scenarios
Imagine you are a law professor at School X. In the course of one day, you are asked to provide an opinion in the following three different situations. (For the record, all three scenarios are just hypotheticals; happily, none are based on any actual events within the last several years.) 1. You are attending admitted […]
Scalia Denies Feud with Roberts
The AP summarizes part of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent interview with Piers Morgan on CNN. Justice Antonin Scalia said Wednesday he hasn’t had a “falling out” with Chief Justice John Roberts over the Supreme Court’s landmark 5-4 decision validating much of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. In an interview on CNN’s “Piers […]
Panel on Implementing the Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment
A few weeks ago, at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference in Washington, DC, a group of privacy activists put on a panel about how to implement the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment from the two concurring opinions in United States v. Jones. They selected six proposals from a dozen or so that were submitted, […]
Tom Smith on “You Didn’t Build That!”
Smith: But here’s the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit […]
Federal Judge Issues Temporary Restraining Order Authorizing Opening of Murfreesboro (Tenn.) Mosque
The mosque had aroused a great deal of public opposition; the county planning authorities nonetheless granted the necessary building permits; but a state court ruled that the county hadn’t given sufficient notice to the public about its meetings, given the heightened public interest in the mosque. The court therefore blocked the issuance of an occupancy […]
Free Law School Casebooks For Everyone? (And See Update)
John Mayer, the Executive Director of CALI, has a post suggesting a way to generate free law school casebooks for every law student. Under the current system, professors who want to write casebooks can write the books on their own and can then make a deal with publishers to bring the books to market in […]
The Gulag Museum and Russia’s Historical Memory of Communism
During my recent visit to Russia, I visited the Gulag Museum in Moscow, one of the few recent Russian efforts to accurately portray the horrible atrocities of communism. The mass murders and other crimes of communist regimes have often been neglected in both Russia and the West. In recent years, that neglect has deepened in […]
Copyright v. Conservatives
Conservatives have grown more skeptical of copyright maximalism since SOPA forced newly elected Republicans to choose sides in the copyright wars. And copyright owners aren’t doing much to win them back, judging by Bertelsmann’s latest ham-fisted foray into US politics. The large German publisher, which owns BMG Rights Management, recently forced YouTube to take down […]
Is the Availability of an Insanity Defense Constitutionally Required?
It’s an interesting question, and it’s the issue presented in a pending cert petition at the Supreme Court in the case of Delling v. Idaho, recently filed by Jeffrey Fisher of the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Stephen Morse of Penn and Richard Bonnie of UVA put together an amicus brief of 52 law professors […]
Fourth Amendment Facial Challenges and Access to Hotel Guest Lists
Los Angeles has a municipal code provision requiring hotel operators to keep a list of guest names and to make that list available to the LAPD on request. Specifically, the code says that the list “shall be made available to any officers of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection. Whenever possible, the inspection shall […]
Most Cited Professors in Criminal Law & Procedure, 2007-2011 (Draft Version)
Because the 2007-2011 scholarly impact study by Greg Sisk et. al. did not include rankings within individual scholarly fields, I decided to channel my inner Brian Leiter and update the citation ranking in my area of interest, Criminal Law & Procedure. To make matters simple, I took Brian’s 2010 Top 20 & Runners-Up list from […]