An interesting Newsday column. A couple of excerpts: Could there have been a white Trayvon Martin? Ask the parents of Christopher Cervini, also 17 when he was killed in Rochester, N.Y., in 2009. The shooter, Roderick Scott, said he saw three boys breaking into a car, went out with his (legal) handgun to stop them, […]
Archive | July, 2013
Sous Vide Cooking
All the recent praise of sous vide cooking (such as Megan McArdle’s) makes me inclined to buy one. Do any of you folks who have experimented with such machines have a sense of the relative merits of the various gadgets? I can’t decide between the Sous Vide Supreme ($400+), Sous Vide Demi ($300+), and the […]
UCI Supreme Court Review Video
A very interesting program, with, among others, Joan Biskupic (Reuters), Adam Liptak (New York Times), noted liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, and noted conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada. Moderator Rick Hasen (Election Law Blog) has more details.
The Jerusalem Passport Case – Separation of Powers and Standing
By Eugene Kontorovich on July 23, 2013 12:31 pm in Constitutional Law, Israel, Separation of Powers, Standing
The D.C. Circuit has held the Jerusalem passport law unconstitutional for impermissibly intruding into the Executive’s foreign relations powers. The law requiring the State Department to record “Israel” as the country of birth for those born in Jerusalem. The D.C. Circuit, through extensive and lucid analysis, concluded that recognition was an exclusively executive function, on […]
FDA Must Bar Imports of Sodium Thiopental
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court decision requiring the Food and Drug Administration to block the importation of sodium thiopental for use in lethal injection because it has not been approved by the FDA. Here is how Senior Judge Ginsburg summarized the court’s holding in the conclusion […]
D.C. Circuit Holds Jerusalem Passport Law Unconstitutional
On remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held today in Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State that the federal law requiring the U.S. State Department to list “Israel” as the country of birth in U.S. Passports for U.S. citizens born in Israel is unconstitutional because it “impermissibly […]
Will NYT’s James Risen go to Jail?
Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the fourth Circuit rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s claim of reporter’s privilege in United States v. Sterling. The underlying case is a federal prosecution of a former CIA official for allegedly disclosing classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. The federal government believes Sterling […]
My USA Today Op ed on the Troubling Implications of Cases where the Administration Loses 9-0 Decisions in the Supreme Court
USA Today has just posted my op ed on the troubling implications of cases where the executive branch loses unanimous Supreme Court decisions: Those of us who follow Supreme Court decisions spend most of our time debating the contentious issues that divide justices 5-4 along predictable ideological lines…. But we might do well to pay […]
Eminent Domain and the Decline of Detroit
Detroit’s sixty year decline, culminating in its recent bankruptcy, has many causes. But one that should not be ignored is the city’s extensive use of eminent domain to transfer property to politically influential private interests. For many years, Detroit aggressively used eminent domain to promote “economic development” and “urban renewal.” The most notorious example was […]
Federal Court Orders Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage
As readers of the VC all surely know, the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Windsor struck down Section 3 of DOMA, which restricts the recognition of marriage for purposes of federal statutes. One of the big unanswered questions after Windsor was what would happen to Section 2 of DOMA, and more generally the question […]
The Reverse Mussolini Fallacy and Conservative/Libertarian Reactions to PC Excesses
One of senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh’s cleverest inventions is the Reverse Mussolini Fallacy: The Mussolini Fallacy is believing that, because Mussolini made the trains run on time (if he did), that excuses his other acts. The Reverse Mussolini Fallacy is believing that, because Mussolini made the trains run on time, making the trains run on […]
A Property Law Bleg
This fall, I will be teaching the first year course on Property for the first time in a couple years. I would like to ask readers who are property professors, practitioners in the field, or otherwise expert on the subject if you have suggestions for recent cases and other materials that you think should be […]
The New Republic on Large Law Firms and the Current Legal Market
In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber has a long article on recent internal dynamics inside Mayer Brown, the very prominent law firm. I’ve never worked at a big firm beyond the fantasy experience of being a summer associate back in the 1990s, so I can’t speak directly about whether the story is representative of other […]
Former “Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter Resigns from Rand Paul’s Staff
Jack Hunter, the Rand Paul aide once known as the “Southern Avenger” has resigned from the senator’s staff in order to avoid being a “distraction.” Hunter has a history of pro-Confederate and borderline racist statements, though he has repudiated them in more recent years. In addition to creating a political problem for Rand Paul, the […]
A Crime to Conduct a Same-Sex or Polygamous Religious Wedding Ceremony in Indiana?
The Becket Fund had an interesting item about this on July 11 (sorry for the delay blogging, but I was out last week and with a poor Internet connection starting Wednesday): There was a recent blogstorm about what was by some billed as a new legislative attempt to criminalize religious — but not civil — […]