A new report from the Pew Center on the States finds widespread irregularities and inaccuracies in voter registration rolls, including nearly two million dead people who remain registered to vote. As the NYT reports, approximately one-in-eight active voter registrations is “invalid or inaccurate.” From the NYT: The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead […]
Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler
Responding to Online Outlines
Many law professors are distressed by the proliferation of online course outlines and case briefs. Commercial outlines have been available for years. Now those students inclined to rely on such study tools have access to lower-cost alternatives. That’s not the problem. Rather it’s the existence of outlines that purport to represent how specific professors teach […]
Campaign Finance Reform and the 1968 Campaign
Ed Crane and David Keating in the WSJ It is instructive to recall the 1968 presidential campaign of Minnesota’s late Democratic Sen. Gene McCarthy (who was also a plaintiff in Buckley). Popular support for the war in Vietnam was declining, yet no establishment candidate was available to challenge the war—certainly not Richard Nixon. On the […]
Further Confirmation of Kerr’s Law
New polling shows a majority of Americans, and even a majority of self-described liberal Democrats, support drone strikes against suspected terrorists and keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention facility open. The Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy comments: the polling data suggests that a significant number of people who identify as belonging to a political party […]
Debating the Individual Mandate
Last week, I was a participant in the 2012 Fordham Debate at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. The topic was the constitutionality of the minimum coverage requirement (aka the individual mandate) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and my interlocutor was David Orentlicher of Indiana University. For those interested, […]
And Then They Came for Sugar . . .
On CNN and in Nature, the case for regulating sugar like alcohol and tobacco. What’s next, caffeine? How would law professors get anything done? (Oh snap.)
Legal Ethics Forum Symposium on the Legal Education and the Legal Profession
By Jonathan H. Adler on February 6, 2012 11:25 am in Law School Tuition and Loans, Law Schools, Legal Profession
This week the premier legal ethics blog, Legal Ethics Forum, is hosting a symposium on “Legal Education’s Response to the Economic Realities Facing the Profession.” In this symposium, “scholars on the legal profession from the United States and around the world will post contributions about the implications of economic pressures on the way we teach […]
Super Bowl Open Thread
And don’t forget the commercials! UPDATE: And speaking of commercials, some have already sparked controversy. Ford is unhappy about GM’s 2012 Mayan Doomsday ad. Also, an ad GOP Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra is running during the Super Bowl on Michigan stations has also sparked controversy.
A Vote Fraud Conviction in Indiana
Indiana Secretary of State Charles White was convicted of voter fraud, among other charges, this week for lying about this address on voter registration forms and voting in the wrong precinct. White apparently continued to use his ex-wife’s address for his voter registration after they split, in part, because he didn’t want to lose a […]
Non-Citizen Voters in Florida
There’s much speculation and debate over whether non-citizens and others who are ineligible vote in U.S. elections, but relatively few documented instances. That makes this report by a local television station in Fort Myers, Florida all the more significant. The station’s investigation uncovered nearly one hundred non-citizens who were registered to vote, and several admitted to […]
The U.S. may not use “an unusual mechanism to obtain an extraordinary remedy to avoid an ordinary appeal.”
This is the conclusion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in an interesting case, United States v. Carroll, in which the United States sought to invoke its sovereign immunity in a suit in which it is the plaintiff. To make matters more interesting, the U.S. was suing the bankruptcy trustees of […]
Access Palin’s E-mail, Get Convicted under Sarbanes-Oxley
Actually, it’s not quite that simple, but close. David Kernell hacked then-Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account, and was subsequently convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, for deleting information on his computer in order to impede the investigation into his accessing of Gov. Palin’s account. Today, the […]
NYT Abandons Nomination Filibuster, Will Senate Follow?
The editorial board of the New York Times has finally decided to abandon its support of filibustering nominees it opposes. It is time to end the ability of a single senator, or group of senators, to block the confirmation process by threatening a filibuster, which can be overcome only by the vote of 60 senators. […]
Most Americans Want Mandate Struck Down
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest poll (toplines here) finds that two-thirds of Americans oppose the individual mandate and a clear majority — 54 percent — want the Supreme Court to invalidate the provision. Based on the poll of 1,206 adults, only 17 percent of Americans would like to see the individual mandate upheld. Another interesting […]
Upcoming Talks
For those interested, I’ll be giving a variety of talks in the coming weeks, including the following: I’ll be speaking to the University of Michigan Law School Federalist Society chapter on “The Individual Mandate Litigation and the Future of Federalism,” Jan. 25 at 12:00pm, 120 Hutchins Hall. I’ll be debating the constitutionality of the individual mandate […]