Author Archive | Jim Lindgren

I read Barack Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, in part to try to understand Obama better, but more particularly to see whether he understood evil in the world. I found myself highly impressed with Obama’s fluency and open-mindedness. Some Republicans seem to be trying to depict Obama as some sort of angry, America-hating, […]

Here is part of Tony Mauro’s account of yesterday’s session of the US Supreme Court: When Scalia was reading his own opinion Stevens occasionally shook his head in disbelief. And Stevens jousted back. With emphasis on the word “genuine,” Stevens said that “a genuine judicial conservative” would not have inserted the Court into the “political […]

In the New York Times, Adam Liptak (admirably) writes a straightforward article on the effect of Heller: Coming Next, Court Fights on Guns in Cities The individual right to bear arms identified by the Supreme Court on Thursday will have little practical impact in most of the country, legal experts said, though Washington’s comprehensive ban […]

Unlike Reuters, the Washington Post is able to cast doubt on the Heller decision in ways that one expects from the more sophisticated organs of the establishment: Justices Reject D.C. Ban On Handgun Ownership 5-4 Ruling Finds 1976 Law Incompatible With Second Amendment The Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun […]

James Taranto has some fun at Justice Stevens’s expense and then quotes and criticizes an amazing passage from Reuters: “Although an individual now has a constitutional right to own guns, that new right is not unlimited, wrote [Justice Antonin] Scalia, a hunter,” the news service reports today. Justice Stevens is 88, and he is generally […]

In the Wall Street Journal, Randy Barnett has some extravagant praise for Justice Scalia’s opinion: Justice Scalia’s opinion is exemplary for the way it was reasoned. It will be studied by law professors and students for years to come. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be […]

I have been reading the exchange at the Federalist Society website on the Heller case. I found the post by Carl Bogus at best uninformed and (unintentionally) misleading. Bogus wrote: A careful study that compared the nine year period before the ban was enacted with the nine years following enactment, and then compared what happened […]

I have been reading Justice Breyer’s dissent in Heller. I suspect that it may go down in history as one of the strongest arguments AGAINST balancing tests. If the restriction on liberty were trivial, then it might be easy to use a balancing test to uphold the DC statute’s ban on handguns. Or if handgun […]

My initial impressions of Heller are much like Orin Kerr’s, yet these three things struck me: 1. Both Justice Scalia’s majority and Justice Stevens’s dissent are quite scholarly, including citations to recent and forthcoming scholarship. Like Orin, I noted the citations to our colleagues Eugene Volokh and Randy Barnett, as well as to others who […]

In the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday in Kennedy v. Louisiana, holding that the death penalty is excessive for all rapes of children, I was surprised by the weakness of Justice Kennedy’s arguments about a “national consensus.” If the American public has a “national consensus” about child rape, it is that the death penalty is […]

MJ at In the Pines writes about Obama’s latest gaffe: Obama implies the government should control how much you eat…what?! . . . WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama set his sights on November’s general election Saturday as he campaigned in Oregon, where he hopes to declare victory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. […]

Tonight I was reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The first footnote just jumped off the page: A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, […]

Given the huge increase in food prices and farm incomes, I wonder why some of our politicians aren’t proposing a windfall profits tax on farmers. To the contrary, Congress is passing a big farm bill with more pork for farmers: A Porker Of A Farm Bill The latest score on farm legislation: Congress 1, President […]

There are three ways to get someone to do something: You persuade them, you offer them some benefit, or you threaten them with harm. Leaving aside the last method (threats), so far inducing Hillary Clinton to drop out has focused mostly on persuasion. Yet the possibility of Barack Obama’s paying Clinton’s $20 million campaign debt […]

The State of Missouri may adopt a state constitutional amendment requiring proof of citizenship for voting. As the New York Times reports, the stated purpose of this requirement is to prevent voting by illegal immigrants and other non-citizens. Voting experts say the Missouri amendment represents the next logical step for those who have supported stronger […]