This Monday at 4:30 PM (eastern time), I will be participating in a Huffington Post Live video discussion on democracy, constitutionalism, and their role in recent events in Egypt. I don’t yet know the exact parameters of the discussion or who the other participants will be (the organizers indicated that this article helped inspire them […]
Archive | July, 2013
What Comes Next In This Sequence?
Nom. Suet. Sweden. Hurts. ___?
Is the Right to Bear Arms Plural?
By Eugene Kontorovich on July 8, 2013 10:04 am in Constitutional Amendments, Constitutional Law, Guns, Militia, Originalism, Right to carry, Seventh Circuit, Uncategorized
Tomorrow, Illinois’ concealed carry laws will become ineffective, having been held unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit several months ago. The Court kept the unconstitutional law on life support for a few months to give the legislature time to craft a replacement measure. Springfield responded, but now that bill has been vetoed by Governor Quinn. If […]
Amicus Project at Southwestern Law School
A few months ago, I mentioned our new UCLA First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic; I’m happy to see that Southwestern Law School is also setting up an amicus brief project, though operating in a different way and covering a broader range of topics: The Amicus Project at Southwestern Law School is a professional outreach program […]
A Proposal To Reform FISA Court Decisionmaking
Yesterday’s New York Times story on the secret legal opinions of the FISA court prompts a natural question: How should the FISA court reach its decisions, and how do we know it is doing so correctly? That breaks down into two questions. First, what procedures should the FISA court use to reach legal conclusions? And […]
Hints and Questions About the Secret Fourth Amendment Rulings of the FISA Court
In the New York Times, Eric Lichtblau has a major scoop describing some of the secret rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISC (and sometimes just called “the FISA court”). According to Lichtblau’s sources, described as “current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions,” the FISA court has issued over […]
Upcoming Talk on the War on Drugs before the Northern Virginia Chapter of NORML
On Thursday, July 11, I will be giving a speech on the politics of the War on Drugs before the Northern Virginia chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). The event is open to the public. The NORML meeting will begin with refreshements at 7:30 PM, and my talk and […]
Ross Guberman, Guest-Blogging
I recently read Ross Guberman’s Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates and found it very helpful; indeed, I’ll be assigning it to my First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic students as required reading. To quote the book’s Amazon blurb, With Point Made, legal writing expert Ross Guberman throws a life preserver to […]
Did the Taxman Make Howard a Rocket?
All-Star Center Dwight Howard accepted less money to sign with the Houston Rockets than he could have earned had he remained on the Los Angeles Lakers, yet it appears he actually increased his after-tax income. According to analyses rounded up by Paul Caron at TaxProfBlog, Howard stands to make more money with the smaller contract. […]
Valley Fever
When one of my nephews fell ill with a strange pneumonia-like illness as a boy in the 1980s, his mother was told he had something called “Valley Fever.” My sister and her family lived in Bakersfield, California, and it was something I had heard of – my parents had lived there for a couple of […]
France’s NSA-Like Electronic Surveillance Program
Yesterday, the major French newspaper Le Monde published an article revealing that the French government runs a massive electronic surveillance program similar to the US NSA program that has caused massive international controversy. Here is a summary of the revelations in English, published by the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian. For French-speaking readers, the original […]
Public Testimony About Classified Activities: A Thought On the Clapper Dilemma
As Jonathan notes below, DNI James Clapper has apologized for his “clearly erroneous” testimony before Congress about NSA surveillance. The underlying question is a tricky one, though: How can you have public testimony about classified activities? Senator Wyden had been briefed about the NSA program, and he knew the answer to the question. So he […]
NSA-Style Surveillance, The French Version
An interesting story for those interested in comparative law: [T]he newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France. Le Monde reported that the General […]
A Rare Non-Delegation Decision
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held in Association of American Railroads v. U.S. Department of Transportation that Section 207 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 constitutes an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to a private entity. Here is how Judge Janice Rogers Brown summarizes the […]
DNI Clapper Apologizes for Giving False Testimony to Congress
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has written an apology to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein for giving false testimony about the National Security Agency’s collection of information about U.S. citizens. In the letter, Clapper apologizes for the “mistake” of giving an “erroneous” response to a question from Senator Wyden. GWU law professor Jonathan […]