Author Archive | David Post

let me offer special congratulations to Brian Frye, a young lawyer and 2005 graduate of NYU School of Law, whose article The Peculiar Story of United States v. Miller, 3 N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty 48 (2008) was cited by the majority. Citations to such articles by people who aren’t academics, and who aren’t solidly […]

Sorry our comments were down most of the day; if you’d like to comment about the political implications of the opinion — what it’s likely to mean for the election, for the gun rights and gun control movements, and the like — please comment here. If you’d like to comment about the opinion as such, […]

Sorry our comments were down most of the day; if you’d like to comment about the legal implications of the opinion — what future challenges are likely to arise, how the opinion’s reasoning may affect other areas of the law, and the like — please comment here. If you’d like to comment about the opinion […]

Sorry our comments were down most of the day; if you’d like to comment about the opinion, please comment here. If you’d like to comment about the legal implications and political implications of the opinion, please comment on those threads above.

is here, featuring Ted Cruz and Nelson Lund vs. Carl Bogus and Adam Winkler. Much worth reading.

Naturally, the most interesting observations are likely to come after people have had some time to digest the debate between the opinions. But for now, a few observations: 1. There’s no substitute for winning elections. The 5-4 conservative-liberal lineup (admittedly, with one of the four being a Bush, Sr. appointee) shows this. These issues aren’t […]

whose amicus brief for the Institute for Justice was cited by the majority; and an extra dollop of congratulations to Randy Barnett, who was cited not just by the majority but also once by the dissent (as to an article cowritten with the pioneering Second Amendment scholar Don Kates). UPDATE: Whoops — missed the cites […]

SCOTUSblog reports: “Heller affirmed.” Justice Scalia wrote the opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito. Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg; there’s also apparently another dissent. (Thanks again to SCOTUSblog for their invaluable live-blogging, from which I’m getting all this information.) This split should be useful […]

upheld Tuesday by the Connecticut Supreme Court, in Bhatia v. Debek. An interesting discussion of how the malicious prosecution tort formally operates when the defendant is accused of having lied to the police in a way that led to an actual criminal prosecution — usually the tort, despite its name, applies to unfounded civil claims. […]

When Cingular released its “Mach 1” and “Mach 2” wireless services, it sent out a press release that included the following language: “Nearly 60 years ago, the legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and achieved Mach 1. Today, Cingular is breaking another kind of barrier with our MACH 1 and MACH 2 […]

From today’s Confrontation Clause case (Giles v. California): It is not the role of courts to extrapolate from the words of the Sixth Amendment to the values behind it, and then to enforce its guarantees only to the extent they serve (in the courts’ views) those underlying values. The Sixth Amendment seeks fairness indeed — […]

The reason sports gambling is good for the soul is this: it reminds you that all of those great “hunches” that you have had – you just knew that it was Boston’s year, back in April ‘04, just like you just knew, way back in ’93, that AOL stock would quadrizilliontuple over the next 5 […]

You’ll be relieved to know that, according to an unofficial count compiled by the Sacramento Bee, opposite-sex marriages in California contain equal numbers of men and women: Based on a tally of the licenses Thursday – using first names as a guide – 60 percent of the same-sex newlyweds this week are lesbians and 40 […]

at 5 p.m. Pacific time (8 p.m. Eastern). You can watch live coverage from around the state at this TV station’s website. The first same-sex marriage legally performed in San Francisco, at 5:01 p.m. Pacific, will join Phyllis Lyon, 87, and Del Martin, 84. They have been together for 55 years. Congratulations to the newlyweds!

I don’t have a great deal more to add to what Eugene [and Larry Lessig] have already said about this; there’s nothing here that impugns Kozinski’s status as a judge (or should cause him to recuse himself from an obscenity trial), and I agree that we should let the private story and its private embarrassments […]