Two updates for those following the XKeyScore debate: Joshua Foust has written an excellent post that clarifies a few things I didn’t cover in my earlier post. He notes that XKeyScore allows analysts to recover only material that NSA has collected and stored; that’s important because just being able to enter the President’s email address is not […]
Archive | August, 2013
Does NSA Work Harder to Protect Privacy than to Protect National Security?
Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare asks a good question: How is the NSA Director Alexander’s claim that “we can audit the actions of our people 100%” (thus providing an important check against abuse) consistent with (a) stories long after Snowden’s initial revelations that the White House does not “know with certainty” what information Snowden pilfered, (b) reported NSA uncertainty weeks after […]
Interesting Division in Sixth Circuit Qualified Immunity Case
On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decided Kovacic v. Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services. The panel consisted of Judges Boggs, Moore and Sutton. The panel split on the question of qualified immunity for social workers who removed children from their mother’s home. (You know where this is going, […]
Sixth Circuit Rejects Class Settlement in Pampers Case
Yesterday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit threw out a proposed settlement in a class-action suit against Proctor & Gamble. Judge Kethledge wrote the opinion for the court, joined by Judge Thapar (sitting by designation). Here is how he summarizes the opinion: Class-action settlements are different from other settlements. […]
How Not to Convince Republicans to Address Climate Change
It’s fair to say that only one political party today considers climate change to be a problem worth addressing. As readers know, I wish it were otherwise and believe there is a conservative case for addressing climate change. I welcome others to this cause. This NYT op-ed, “A Republican Case for Climate Action,” is not the sort […]
The Missing Part of The Washingtonian Signing Bonus Story
I’ve seen several links to the Washingtonian piece on Supreme Court signing bonuses. The interesting claim in the piece is that hiring Supreme Court clerks is a “gamble,” because it’s possible they’ll leave after a very short period of time but keep all the money. (“So how can a law firm ensure it’s betting on […]
ABA Task Force Releases Draft of Recommendations to Reform Legal Education
The working paper is here, and it was released for comment yesterday. I’m generally skeptical of ABA reports, but there are a lot of promising ideas in this one. I don’t agree with everything in there, certainly, but there are some significant ideas in there worth taking seriously.
Michelle Friedland Nominated to Ninth Circuit
Michelle Friedland, a former clerk for Justice O’Connor and lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson, was just nominated to the Ninth Circuit. I know Michelle and think very highly of her — she’s an excellent lawyer, and I think she’d make an excellent judge. As with Paul Watford — whose resume reads a lot like […]
Tim Edgar on Transparency for NSA Surveillance Practices
My law school classmate Tim Edgar has a very interesting opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing for greater transparency of the NSA’s surveillance activities. That message isn’t new, of course, but Tim’s unusual career gives him a special insight into the issue: He’s a former ACLU lawyer who then went to work for […]
Steve Sanders on The Obligation to Recognize Out-of-State Marriages
IU Law Professor Steve Sanders has a post on the ACS Blog discussing Obergefell v. Kasich, the S.D. Ohio decision I blogged about earlier that required Ohio to recognize a marriage from Maryland — a marriage performed on a jet that had touched down in Maryland for the ceremony. Sanders is quite critical of the […]
I Should Not Have Opined About Facebook’s TOS and its Relationship to the CFAA
Some commenters on Stewart Baker’s, Orin Kerr’s, and my own recent posts on the Obama 2012 campaign’s possible violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act argue that, even if the CFAA does criminalize use of websites in violation of their terms of service, the Obama campaign did not in fact violate Facebook’s TOS, as […]
No, the Obama Campaign Didn’t Violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
I think my co-blogger Stewart Baker is missing the point of Michael Vatis’s post on the Obama campaign and the CFAA. Vatis argues that the Obama campaign violated the CFAA if you accept DOJ’s ridiculous view that violating Terms of Service of a website is itself CFAA violation. But Vatis does not argue that DOJ […]
Obama Probably Did Not Win the 2012 Election by Violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
In a recent post, co-blogger Stewart Baker writes that there is “a very real possibility” that the Obama campaign won the 2012 election by increasing turnout among its supporters, using tactics that violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It is difficult to definitively disprove such claims. But the available evidence cuts the other way […]
The D.C. Circuit on private delegation
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Adler noted the recent D.C. Circuit decision in Ass’n of Am. Railroads v. DOT. I now have a post up on the Reason Foundation website about it. Here’s an excerpt: On July 2, 2013, in Ass’n of American Railroads v. DOT, the D.C. Circuit struck down a delegation of authority […]
7 Years in Prison + 600 Lashes in Saudi Arabia for “Insulting Islam”
CNN reports: A Saudi court has sentenced a activist to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for violating the nation’s anti-cybercrime law, Human Rights Watch reported Wednesday. A Jeddah Criminal Court found Raif Badawi, who has been in prison since June 2012, guilty this week of insulting Islam through his website and in television […]