Author Archive | Orin Kerr

In Huntsville, Alabama, a lawyer and his girlfriend were arrested and convicted of indecent exposure for having intimate relations in a pickup truck parked outside someone’s private home. The story in the Huntsville Times mentions the text of the Alabama indecent exposure state in passing, and a closer look on Westlaw confirms an interesting quirk. […]

Under the American Library Association’s definitions, presumably it would be. I wouldn’t say that — I don’t think removing a book from a school library is properly called “banning,” and I don’t think it should be seen as violating the First Amendment (notwithstanding the opinion of four Justices in Board of Ed. v. Pico (1982)). […]

from Longfellow by way of Wittgenstein and then Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit: In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere.

is here. The amici on whose behalf the brief is filed include Jack Balkin, Michael Froomkin, Joshua Micah Marshall, Markos Moulitsas (the Daily Kos), Glenn Harlan Reynolds (InstaPundit), and me. Many thanks to Lauren Gelman, who wrote the brief. How Appealing posts about this, and links to an easy-to-read list of the amici.

In the Soviet Union, I recall, the date was widely known, but in my experience Americans generally don’t know it. (Show hint.) The event happened 44 years ago today. (Hide hint.) (Show answer.) On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. (Hide answer.)

NYU law professor Burt Neuborne — who has been, among other things, National Legal Director of the ACLU and Special Counsel to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund — warns his fellow liberals in an article in The Nation not to rely too much on victories in court. He writes: In recent years, many […]

competing head to head, courtesy of the aptly named The Surrealist. Just enter the names of your favorite blogs and see the results.

A guide from EFF. Thanks to Politech for the link.

I’ve been pondering the merits of proposals to impose 18-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices, and have decided that I am tentatively in favor of the basic idea.   It seems to me that 18-year Supreme Court term limits would have some significant advantages over the current system: 1) it would tend to make the […]

The opinion is here; the bottom line is that the judges conclude that Judge Calabresi violated the Canons of Judicial Ethics by suggesting that Bush ought not be reelected, but that his apology and the admonition that he had gotten from the Chief Judge (with which the Judicial Council concurs) are all the discipline that […]

on the Joyce Foundation-funded symposium on the Second Amendment. He writes: I fear David Hardy has not checked his facts. (Not that surprising given the quality of much of what he writes on the gun issue.) Here are the facts. Nicholas Johnson was invited to participate and he withdrew at the last moment. Calvin Massey […]

This practice is scandalous. Or at least it should be.

Bill Horne, the managing editor of the Chronicle writes, apropos Jim Lindgren’s post below: The Chronicle of Higher Education has collected all of its coverage of the controversy over Michael Bellesiles’ “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” — including an open Colloquy on the controversy and letters to editor — and posted […]

Slate reports that the Internet Archive’s “main server farm” holds “half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages.” A thousand gigabytes — or 1,024 gigabytes, to be precise — is of course a terabyte, which is roughly 1.1 trillion bytes. How much is 1,024 terabytes, or 1,048,576 gigabytes? I had to look this up, and I’m […]

Our former guest-blogger Cass Sunstein and our own Randy Barnett have published a revised version of their on-blog exchange about Cass’s “Second Bill of Rights” in 53 Drake Law Review 205.