I am prepared to believe Jonathan’s report that John Roberts has done this before. No doubt. But that does not making his bending himself into a pretzel to uphold a law when the screws were put to him any less political. This opinion should be studied for years to come as lesson of how a […]
Archive | July, 2012
Reader Poll on the Honesty of Your Political Adversaries
If you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, rather than a centrist, please consider taking one of the two following reader polls. The first poll is for our conservative readers: Free polls from Pollhost.com If you consider yourself conservative, do you think liberals are honest? Liberals are generally more honest than conservatives. Liberals are no more or less honest than conservatives. Liberals are generally somewhat less honest than conservatives. Liberals are generally much less honest than conservatives. The second poll is […]
Making Sense of Chief Justice Roberts’ Opinion
I can’t speak to how the Chief Justice interacted with his colleagues on the Court during the deliberations in NFIB v. Sebelius, or to whether he truly flip-flopped on the mandate or (as Mark Tushnet suggests) he had been the “least persuaded” of the anti-mandate arguments at the initial conference and eventually concluded that it […]
The Supreme Court Leaks Continue
The Hill recently named me “the unofficial emcee of Washington’s new favorite parlor game: guess the leaker,” so I figured it was time for an update on the latest in leaking. The dueling Supreme Court leakers took a few days off for July 4th. But now they’re back, with Jan Crawford’s latest story, Discord at […]
It’s Deja Vu all Over Again
Remember how George W. Bush crafted an education “compromise” with Sen. Edward Kennedy and other leading Democrats? The federal government would significantly increase its spending on education, and in return the states would be held to strict, enforceable standards to improve public education, especially for the poor. Many of us predicted that the money would […]
Should Charles Fried Eat His Kangaroo Skin Hat?
Back in October 2010, Fried was interviewed by Greta van Susteren: VAN SUSTEREN: The issue that will confront the federal judge, and the Supreme Court if it goes on, is whether or not the Commerce Clause gives the federal government the power to do this….And does the constitution in your opinion, sir, enable them? FRIED: […]
Fifth Circuit Holds Federal Retroactive Sex Offender Registration Statute Sometimes Exceeds Article I Powers
The case is United States v. Kebodeaux (5th Cir. July 6, 2012) (en banc): While in the military, Kebodeaux had consensual sex with a fifteen-year-old when he was twenty-one and was sentenced in 1999 to three months in prison. He fully served that sentence, and the federal government severed all ties with him. He was […]
LA Times to BioWatch: Bend over and drop your shorts
The Los Angeles Times has an endless article trying to make a scandal out of a simple technical constraint: the tools we use to test for biological agents aren’t perfect. Sometimes the machines go off because of a natural event rather than a terrorist attack (“Test says tularemia; somebody put another rabbit through a woodchipper,” […]
Limits on Job Market for Scientists and STEM (and Why, in an Alternative Universe Not Consisting of Our Universities, You Should Also Study Humanities)
One common theme in the higher education-and-economy debates is that students would be better off skipping the “soft” subjects and going for STEM – “Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.” In comments to some of my posts on higher education, commenters sometimes seem to endorse something close the idea that, since all advances in the standard of […]
Goofiness is in the Eye of the Beholder
Tom Smith: “I cannot resist observing that Posner’s lament that conservatives have gone all goofy comes from the guy who proposed setting up a free market in babies. My point is not so much that a free market in babies would be a bad idea, though I do think it would present many practical and […]
Who Lost the ACA Litigation? Kennedy and Scalia in 2005
I was going to write a post suggesting that Roberts’s vote may have come out the other way if Gonzales v. Raich had come out the other way (it didn’t because Scalia and Kennedy voted with the majority). University of San Diego’s Michael Ramsey beat me to it (reprinted with permission): In my previous post […]
Puerto Rico Second Amendment Case
The opinion is Asoc de Duenos de Armerias de PR Inc. v. Policia de Puerto Rico (P.R. Ct. App. June 28, 2012); I don’t know Spanish, but if any readers who do can post a quick summary of the court’s conclusion and its reasoning, that would be great. For earlier Puerto Rico Second Amendment opinions, […]
The Dismal Failure of Union, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Articles of Confederation
In my course this summer in Rome (“The Roman Republic and the US Constitution”), we spent the first two weeks surveying the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the last two weeks reading The Federalist from start to finish, and looking for connections between the two (of which there are a fair number). […]
“Another Switch in Time?” Yes!
While I am reprinting old posts, I thought I would repost this from May, a month before the decision (bold added): Another Switch in Time? Randy Barnett • May 23, 2012 4:54 pm Jennifer Rubin and Kathleen Parker’s columns today have made me think of another Justice Roberts: Justice Owen Roberts, who is famous for having […]
My Cato Podcast on the Obamacare Decision
Here is the podcast I made at Cato immediately after the program I link to in my previous post: