With Rhode Island and Delaware recently becoming the tenth and eleventh states to permit same-sex marriage and Minnesota likely to soon become the twelfth, now is a good time to reconsider the impact of judicial decisions requiring state recognition of gay marriage. The trend towards gay marriage began in 2003, with a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial […]
Archive | May, 2013
Congratulations to Ilya, Ken, Nick, Eugene K, and Rick Pildes!
I’m pleased to say that three of the six items in The Post: Good Scholarship from the Internet, vol. 3 — a new journal from the Journal of Law people that reprints blog posts that its editorial board found especially worthy — come from the Conspiracy. Here is a list of all the posts; you […]
No, it’s Not the Grossly Exaggerated Monologue of a Bad Guy in an Ayn Rand Novel
But it sure sounds like it. Here is University of Maryland Maryland Institute College of Art philosophy professor Firmin DeBrabander, writing in the New York Times Opinionator blog: But why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly? …. To be human, according to […]
The Highest-Paid Government Employee in Your State is Probably a Football or Basketball Coach
At Deadspin, Reuben Fischer-Baum has an interesting piece cataloguing the highest-paid state employees in each of the fifty states. Forty of fifty are coaches, all but one of them in either football or basketball. As Fischer-Baum notes, this state of affairs is not quite as egregious as it may at first seem. Many of these […]
Recent developments in government contractor immunity
I have a post up on the Reason Foundation’s web site on government contractor immunity. Here’s the beginning: An important question in contracting out is always how the contractors’ legal regime differs from the government’s. There are accountability mechanisms in the private sector, but they generally differ from the ones available in the public sector; […]
Diversity at Harvard Law School
The Harvard Crimson is currently running “a three-part series on gender disparity issues at [Harvard] Law School.” Part I reports that there are 17 tenured or tenure-track women out of 92 total on the Harvard Law School faculty. It goes on to report: Since she took the helm of the school four years ago, [Dean] […]
Paul Clement’s Brief for Petitioner in Bond v. United States
As regular readers know, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Bond v. United States in January. The case raises the question of whether a treaty can increase the legislative power of Congress. In 1920, in Missouri v. Holland, the Supreme Court seemed to say yes. In 2005, in the Harvard Law Review, I said no. […]
Righthaven’s Collective Copyright Enforcement Project Loses in the Ninth Circuit
The decision is Righthaven, LLC v. Hoehn (9th Cir. May 9, 2013), and it holds that Righthaven didn’t properly secure the exclusive rights needed to sue various alleged copyright infringers. (In this particular case, Righthaven had sued two people who posted newspaper articles onto Web sites, though it had also sued others in the past.) […]
Escheating Scandal?
An Investor’s Business Daily column claims: Like other states, Delaware originally enacted its unclaimed property laws as a consumer protection mechanism to reunite Delaware residents with dormant bank account balances, uncashed paychecks, and other unclaimed property…. But Delaware is now interpreting those laws against businesses to create a colossal revenue source for the state government. […]
Bill to Be Introduced to Increase Armed Services Committees’ Oversight Over Special Operations
By Kenneth Anderson on May 9, 2013 9:48 am in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Drones (UAVs), Military, National Security, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), member of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, plans to introduce a bill that would increase Congressional oversight over kill-capture operations conducted outside of Afghanistan by the US military. University of Texas law professor Robert Chesney discusses the proposed legislation over at Lawfare, and gives a section by section commentary. Whether […]
Minnesota House to Vote on Marriage Today
At Noon (central time) today, the Minnesota House of Representatives will begin debating a bill that would extend marriage to same-sex couples. The bill, as I explain in today’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, is among the most protective of religious freedom in the country. You can watch the debate on the website of the Minnesota house […]
Full First Episode of Peter Sagal’s “Constitution USA”
It’s here, via How Appealing. The embedding function only has the 1st 20 minutes, which you can watch below (and which will then ask you to click through to the PBS page for the rest). Watch A More Perfect Union on PBS. See more from Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.
Can an Integer Whose Digits Add up to 9 Be Divisible by 11?
Base 10 only, and no funny stuff.
Rodney Smolla Steps Down as Furman President
Rodney Smolla, previously a prominent law professor and dean of Washington & Lee School of Law, has resigned from his position as president of Furman University for personal reasons. According to this story, he is recently divorced from his wife of fourteen years. Smolla will be a visiting professor at Duke and Georgia law schools […]
District Judges Divide on Long-Term Cell Phone Tracking Under the Fourth Amendment
By Orin Kerr on May 8, 2013 5:54 pm in Cell-Site Information, Fourth Amendment, Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment
I haven’t blogged recently on judicial decisions considering the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. As regular readers will recall, the “mosaic theory” is a term for the idea that long-term monitoring of a suspect can be a Fourth Amendment search even if short-term monitoring is not. Under this approach, which was suggested by the […]