Author Archive | David Kopel

Dana Milbank made quite a whopper on NPR’s Dianne Rehm show earlier today. In a discussion of the politics of judicial nominations and abortion, Milbank made the point that Congress is likely to address many abortion-related issues in coming months beyond whether judges would support or overturn Roe v. Wade. Fair enough. But among the […]

That’s the title of my newly-published future history of the United States. Looking back on the United States from a French perspective in the year 2150, the story explains how Mrs. Clinton won, and how she governed so successfully. The keys to her first election, it turned out, were President Bush’s victory in the War […]

Most (though by no means all) speculation about potential Supreme Court nominees focuses on currently sitting judges — and federal judges at that. Given the current composition of the Court, this is be unsurprising. Seven of the nine justices were federal judges before they were nominated to the Court, and an eighth was a state […]

After the election, one of my colleagues placed a bumper sticker on his office door reading “Lobotomies for Republicans.” I always suspected that if wealth resdistribution didn’t work, the Left would seek other ways to level the playing field. [I’d put that on my office door, but I don’t have tenure yet.]

Thomas Friedman woke up after the election wondering what country he was living in: what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. […]

Assuming that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, who will she pick as her running-mate? Some people would say Illinois Senator Barack Obama–an excellent speaker who could help bring out the black vote. But I’m putting my money on Colorado’s new Democratic Senator Ken Salazar. Salazar is a very dull public speaker, […]

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in U.S. v. Small. The case involves interpretation of 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1), which prohibits firearms possession by any person “who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” The question for the Court is whether the statute applies […]

An interesting report from the Washington Blade‘s Blade Blog: Perhaps the most surprising news for gay observers of the presidential election is that exit polls show President Bush received the exact same percentage of gay votes — 23 percent — as he did four years ago. This despite the president’s vocal support for a federal […]

I’ve just published a Second Amendment guide looking at all U.S. Senate races, all Governor races, and important U.S. of House of Representatives races. You can use the guide to see how the Second Amendment is faring when election returns come in tonight.

Justice Stevens denied the applications to vacate the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s decision staying enforcement of two federal District Court orders barring partisan poll watchers from polling places in Ohio. Jusitce Stevens did not, however, tip his hand on the merits of the competing claims. Although the hour is late and […]

University of Colorado law professor Robert Nagel has a provocative op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy.” Nagel ponders the persistence of “myths” about the 2000 election, such as the claim that President Bush is an “illegitimate” President, and the “lawyering up” of the electoral process. The essay is […]

In today’s Wall Street Journal ACLU President Nadine Strossen defends her organization’s position on the USA PATRIOT Act, portions of which she believes are unconstitutional. She writes: “One of the act’s broad surveillance provisions was struck down by a federal judge in New York just a few weeks ago in a case that the ACLU […]

The Canadian web journal PoliticsWatch.com has a new article noting some of the many similarities between the claims in Osama bin Laden’s latest movie and the claims in Michael Moore’s latest movie. The reporter asked me for an observation, and I said, “It’s a poor reflection on both of them. Michael Moore presents numerous anti-American […]

Last Thursday, I spoke on the Second Amendment, at Western New England College School of Law, in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the invitation of the school’s Federalist Society. The night before, the Red Sox won the World Series, and it was fun to be in the hotel bar, with plenty of Red Sox fans, as the […]

Here’s the abstract to an intersting statistical study by Riccardo Puglisi of the London School of Ecnomics analyzing New York Times issue coverage from 1946-1994. I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1994. Controlling for the incumbent President’s activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign […]