At Slate, Matthew Yglesias has an interesting article reviewing all of the Star Trek and many of the movies from the original 1960s series to the present. He especially focuses on the series’ ideology and politics, and its “utopian” vision of the future. Despite coming at the issue from a very different perspective, I actually […]
Author Archive | Ilya Somin
Illinois Senate Passes Bill Authorizing the Use of Eminent Domain to Take Property for Casinos
The Institute for Justice, a leading libertarian public interest law firm that has litigated numerous property rights cases, reports that the Illinois state senate has passed a bill authorizing the use of eminent domain for the benefit of casinos: The bill passed 32-20 in the state Senate on May 1 and is now being considered […]
Upcoming XM Sirius Radio Appearance on the Current Supreme Court Term
This Thursday between 8 AM 9 AM eastern time, I will be appearing on Stand Up! With Pete Dominick, on XM Sirius satellite radio to discuss the major cases of the current Supreme Court term. I will be joined by Professor Eric Segall of Georgia State University. I am not sure exactly which cases we […]
Reassessing the Impact of Pro-Gay Marriage Judicial Decisions
With Rhode Island and Delaware recently becoming the tenth and eleventh states to permit same-sex marriage and Minnesota likely to soon become the twelfth, now is a good time to reconsider the impact of judicial decisions requiring state recognition of gay marriage. The trend towards gay marriage began in 2003, with a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial […]
The Highest-Paid Government Employee in Your State is Probably a Football or Basketball Coach
At Deadspin, Reuben Fischer-Baum has an interesting piece cataloguing the highest-paid state employees in each of the fifty states. Forty of fifty are coaches, all but one of them in either football or basketball. As Fischer-Baum notes, this state of affairs is not quite as egregious as it may at first seem. Many of these […]
The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and its Implications – Now Available for Pre-ordering
By Ilya Somin on May 2, 2013 11:30 am in Federalism, Health Care, Individual Mandate, Necessary and Proper
The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and its Implications – A new book on last year’s controversial Supreme Court decision on Obamacare is now available for pre-order at Amazon. The book is edited by Columbia law professors Nathaniel Persily, Gillian Metzger, and Trevor Morrison, and published by Oxford University Press. It contains essays […]
Public Ignorance About Obamacare
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll (Kaiser is one of the leading pollsters focusing on health care issues) finds that 42% of Americans are unaware that the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land. Kaiser reports that that figures includes “12 percent who believe the law has been repealed by Congress, 7 […]
Victims of Communism Day
Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated turning this date into Victims of Communism Day (though I should note that I didn’t invent the idea). In my very first post on the subject, I outlined the rationale for this step: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not […]
My Written Testimony on Drones and Targeted Killing Before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
My written testimony on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War on Terror submitted for yesterday’s hearing the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights is now available here. You can view the video of the oral testimony (both mine and the other witnesses) here. I will post […]
Oral Testimony on Drones and Targeted Killing Before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
A video of my and other witnesses’ oral testimony on the use of drones for targeted killing in the War Terror, before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights is now available here (just click on “webcast”). It was interesting for me to see that there was a broad consensus […]
My Upcoming Testimony on Drones and The War on Terror Before the Senate Judiciary Subcomittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
For those who may be interested, on Tuesday at 4 PM, I will be testifying at a hearing on “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights. My testimony will focus primarily on the issues addressed in this post. […]
Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Important Property Rights Case
As Damon Root notes, The Supreme Court recently refused to consider Ilagan v. Ungacta, an important Public Use Clause property rights case. I wrote an amicus brief on behalf of numerous public interest organizations and law professors urging the Court to take Ilagan and use it as an opportunity to clear up major ambiguities left […]
The Federalist Society’s New Executive Branch Review Blog
The Federalist Society recently unveiled its new Executive Branch Review Blog, which focuses on legal and constitutional issues involving – you guessed it – the executive branch. One of the regular bloggers there will be my wife Alison Somin, who serves as a special assistant/counsel with the US Commission on Civil Rights. Yesterday, she put […]
The Boston Attacks
I lived in the Boston area for most of the period between 1980 and 2001, and was therefore especially saddened by today’s terrible bombing there. Fortunately, none of my many relatives and friends in the area were hurt, though obviously many others were not so lucky. The nature of the attack clearly suggests that it […]
New Scholarship on Originalism and Discrimination
By Ilya Somin on April 12, 2013 6:30 pm in Affirmative Action, Constitutional Theory, Originalism, Racial Discrimination, Sex Discrimination
For a long time, the conventional wisdom among legal scholars has been that an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would require courts to uphold laws that discriminate against women and laws banning interracial marriage. While these arguments were once advanced by defenders of sexism and Jim Crow laws, today they are usually used as […]