Yesterday I posted the amicus brief that I and a group of constitutional law scholars filed in the Court’s recess appointments case, Noel Canning. Taking a page from Eugene, I thought I’d put break our argument out into three blog posts this week, for those who are curious but don’t want to read through the […]
Archive | November, 2013
A Recount in Virginia?
CNN reports on a possible election recount in Virginia: The Republican in Virginia’s attorney general race will request a recount after the official results released Monday showed state Sen. Mark Obenshain behind Democratic state Sen. Mark Herring by a razor-thin margin of about .007%. Obenshain lost by 165 votes out of 2.2 million, marking the […]
“No Instrument Could Long Endure Such Experiments.”
One of my favorite historical documents about recess appointments is the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 1863 report on the meaning of the Clause. (The document is here; a discussion by Michael Stern is here.) As we note in our brief, in late 1862, Lincoln’s Attorney General, Bates, issued an opinion justifying an expansive interpretation of the […]
Hackback Backers’ Comeback?
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has issued its annual report. It reminds us that, while press and privacy campaigners have been hyperventilating over US intelligence programs, there are, you know, actual authoritarian governments at work in the United States — breaking into the networks of activists whom they dislike, newspapers whose sources they […]
The KlearGear Controversy
I haven’t had a chance to blog about the case, but I thought I’d note that Public Citizen has gotten involved. Here’s the press release: Public Citizen Asks Online Retailer KlearGear.com To Remedy Its Retaliation Against Customer for Critical Online Review Company Damaged Customer’s Credit After He Refused Company’s Demand for $3,500 Over Critical Web […]
Evolving Christian Attitudes Towards Personal and National Self-Defense
By David Kopel on November 26, 2013 6:05 pm in Civil Rights, Communism, Equal Protection, Guns, McDonald v. City of Chicago, Politics, Popular Culture, Religion, Self-Defense
Issue number 5 of this year’s Connecticut Law Review is an excellent symposium on firearms law, policy, and culture. The lead article is from Nicholas Johnson, of Fordham: Firearms Policy and the Black Community: An Assessment of the Modern Orthodoxy. Johnson (who is my co-author on the Second Amendment textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment) details the long […]
Philosophical Objections to Prison Privatization
My new post, Philosophical Objections to Prison Privatization: Israeli Supreme Court strikes down privatization statute on “liberty” and “dignity” grounds, is up on the Reason Foundation website. Here’s an excerpt: This month is the fourth anniversary of an important date in privatization history. On November 19, 2009, in Academic Center of Law and Business, Human […]
The New Pope Doesn’t Heart the Free Market
It appears that he is agin’ it (full document here). I’m not going to go into the wrongheaded economics here. Instead, what I think is curious about this document is a longstanding peeve of mine. Ever since the Galileo incident, the Catholic Church has generally tried to be careful to get its science right before it […]
Our Constitutional Law Scholars’ Amicus Brief on Recess Appointments
Yesterday, Michael McConnell and I filed an amicus brief in NLRB v. Noel Canning (the Supreme Court’s recess appointments case) on behalf of ourselves and a group of other constitutional law scholars, including co-conspirators Dale Carpenter, Eugene Kontorovich, and Nick Rosenkranz, as well as Nathan Chapman, Samuel Bray, John Eastman, Richard Epstein, Michael Greve, Joshua […]
Supreme Court to Hear Two Contraception Mandate Cases
This morning the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases in which for-profit corporations are challenging the so-called “contraception mandate” under which employer-provided group health insurance plans are required to fully cover all FDA approved forms of contraception and sterilization. The two cases accepted for review are Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., in which […]
The Nuclear Option and Political Responsibility for Obamacare
Seth Barrett Tillman writes: The Senate’s use of the nuclear option pins any defects in the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) on the Democrats. Until the nuclear option was used, Democrats said that they had to pass an arguably defective bill because they could not get around a minority Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. In other words, […]
Obama’s War on Journalism Continues
Or, well, maybe not. From the Washington Post: The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. . . . The Obama […]
FDA Overreach and 23andMe
According to the FDA, a soiled plastic cup is a medical device subject to its jurisdiction. In its seemingly infinite expanse, the FDA has issued a cease and desist letter to 23andMe stating: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is sending you this letter because you are marketing the 23andMe Saliva Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service […]
Lisa Duggan, NYU and Curtis Marez, UC San Diego: Deserve to be Boycotted?
Duggan is the president-elect of the American Studies Association and Marez is the president. According to this Inside Higher Ed piece, they both support a pending motion to have the ASA endorse a boycott of Israeli universities. If the IHE piece is correct, I think they should be treated by all academics (and others) of […]
Tort Law vs. Privacy
I’m pleased to say that my article on this subject is coming out next year in the Columbia Law Review. You can read the entire draft in PDF, but here’s the Introduction, with most footnotes omitted. (I’ll likely also blog some other parts of the article, but for now I thought the Introduction plus a […]