Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

In an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday John McCain stated that “I don’t believe in gay adoption.” That morning I blogged here about this statement, calling for a clarification from the McCain campaign about whether he really opposes all adoptions by gay individuals and couples. It seemed to me unlikely that […]

John McCain was interviewed Friday by the New York Times, which published a summary in this morning’s edition. The Times recounted a question-and-answer with McCain on the subject of gay adoption as follows: Mr. McCain, who with his wife, Cindy, has an adopted daughter, said flatly that he opposed allowing gay couples to adopt. “I […]

In an interesting op-ed in today’s New York Times, Professor Paul Robinson reports on what he sees as the coming collision between the Second Amendment right recognized in Heller and state-law limitations on the use of deadly force for self-defense: A narrowly divided Supreme Court ruled last week that the Second Amendment gives Americans the […]

Today we learned that Barack Obama opposes the proposed amendment to the California constitution defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In a letter to a gay civil rights group in San Francisco, Obama said he rejects “the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution” and similar efforts in […]

My point yesterday that we’re all originalists after Heller is more limited than Orin understandably takes it to be. Orin is right that none of the justices is completely faithful to originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation. Justice Thomas comes the closest, but even he strays. As I noted in my post yesterday, and as Orin […]

Along with many others, I noted yesterday that the Supreme Court expressly left open the question whether the individual right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment should be incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment to apply against the states. Here is the relevant passage reserving the issue: With respect to [the nineteenth-century case […]

Here are some initial impressions of the Heller opinion, which I think was both the right result and rightly minimalist: 1. We’re all originalists now. One of the most extraordinary things about this case is that it presented, for the first time in modern memory, a chance for the Supreme Court to decide the meaning […]

I’m happy to announce the publication of the 12th Edition of the criminal procedure casebook that Yale Kamisar first assembled in 1965: Modern Criminal Procedure, now with LaFave, Israel, King, & (gulp) Kerr. The Table of Contents is available here.   My contribution to the 12th Edition was a complete rewrite of Chapters 7 and 8. […]

I’m trying to understand this morning’s important Sixth Amendment decision in Rothgery v. Gillespie County, and in particular the key practical question raised by the case: When exactly does the Sixth Amendment attach, and what does that mean? The opinion is clear that it only addresses the first question: It goes out of its way […]

In the latest Green Bag, John Q. Barrett has this fun little article (with some classic pictures) on some amusing lyrics about the Supreme Court written by William Rehnquist when he was a law clerk for Justice Jackson.

Because judges can write 85 pages of very serious analysis on the constitutionality of moving a zipper on a jacket. See today’s en banc Fourth Amendment decision by the DC Circuit in United States v. Askew. The en banc court ended up taking a different view than the original divided panel: My coverage of the […]

when you are writing a law review article and you instinctively end your paragraph and begin a new one by typing: < br > < br > & nbsp ; & nbsp ;

So says the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in an opinion letter interpreting the effect of the Defense of Marriage Act on the benefits eligibility of the child of a non-biological “second parent” in a civil union: Although DOMA limits the definition of “marriage” and “spouse” for purposes of federal law, the Social Security […]

to the Wiretap Act, which was born on June 19th, 1968, together with the rest of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

In this very interesting radio program on the LA Times’ story about Judge Kozinski’s fileserver, there’s an interesting moment in which the LA Times reporter who broke the story, Scott Glover, defends his description of the video of a man running away from a donkey as a “video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a […]