Author Archive | Orin Kerr

Thanks to everyone who participated in my blogosphere challenge by sending me links to posts on the three questions I raised about the war in Iraq. I received in the neighborhood of 90-100 responses, and hope to post links to all of the responses sometime over the weekend. I also expect to respond myself to […]

It seems that the ACLU’s temporary success mispresenting the nature of Wednesday’s court decision has led to some heat being directed back at the ACLU. Corrections have been run at several papers, and the ACLU’s misleading description has become a bit of a story itself. How does the ACLU respond? With another press release:   ACLU […]

In light of yesterday’s posts (see here and here) on how the press misreported Wednesday’s court decision allegedly striking down part of the Patriot Act, it is worth pointing to the first item on the Corrections Page of today’s New York Times: An article yesterday about a judge’s ruling to invalidate some federal surveillance powers […]

Following this post, several readers have asked me where the press got the idea that the recent court decision in New York invalidated a major part of the Patriot Act. I assume the main source is this ACLU press release, which begins: In ACLU Case, Federal Court Strikes Down Patriot Act Surveillance Power As Unconstitutional […]

No, not really. But is it too much to ask that when the mainstream media reports on court decisions that they properly identify the law that is struck down and the Administration that is rebuked? Apparently it is, at least if the Thursday morning papers are any guide.   As I noted in my post below, […]

District Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York issued a 122 page opinion in Doe v. Ashcroft yesterday invalidating 18 U.S.C. 2709, the “national security letter” provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, on Fourth and First Amendment grounds. This is big news: it might require heavily increased reliance on the controversial […]

Blogs seem to be getting the attention of the mainstream media. To get some idea of how long this has been happening, I ran month-by-month searches for use of the word “blog” appearing in the Westlaw ALLNEWS database covering the last two years. (The ALLNEWS database is a database of newspapers, more or less). You […]

The 2004 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. Information here. As Brian Leiter has noted, these awards are often but misleadingly described as “genius grants.” It would seem more accurate to say that the awards are given to interesting people doing interesting work that the fellowship committee finds commendable and wants to recognize with an award. […]

A draft of a new forthcoming essay of mine, Digital Evidence and the New Criminal Procedure, is now available on SSRN. The essay studies the differences between traditional criminal investigations and investigations into computer-related crimes, and argues that computer-related crimes will trigger new rules of criminal procedure in response to those differences. It’s a fun […]

SCOTUSBlog has the scoop.   The most interesting case is Kelo v. New London, No. 04-108, which considers whether the Takings Clause allows governments to take real property under its power of eminent domain for economic development purposes. The case was brought to the Court by the Institute for Justice, and our own former co-blogger Sasha […]

I’ve received lots of great responses to my three questions about Iraq. In case you haven’t seen the initial post, here are the three questions I posed to the pro-war blogosphere: First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the […]

A group of about 90 former Supreme Court clerks (along with some prominent practitioners) have signed a statement about the recent Vanity Fair article on Bush v. Gore. An excerpt from the statement:   [T]hese breaches of each clerk’s duty of confidentiality to his or her appointing justice — and to the Court as an institution […]

Last week, I posted about some of the AALS statistics on law teaching jobs. I noted that those statistics suggest that women have a slightly higher rate of success than men in getting law teaching jobs; although women make up only about 35-40% of the faculty candidates, they tend to land about 45% of the […]

to my blogosphere challenge from earlier today. So far I have about a dozen responses, and they’re great. But I want more, many more. So keep sending me your links to orinkerr at yahoo.com. I’ll probably post links to the first set of responses later today, but it depends in part on how many I […]

A year and a half have now passed since the invasion of Iraq. If you read the papers these days, the news coming from Iraq seems awfully depressing. The country is suffering about 70 hostile attacks a day, and 900 U.S. soldiers have died since the declared end of the hostilities — a rate of […]