Reported by Jan Crawford on CBS Face the Nation: Transcript: O’DONNELL: We’ll start first Jan because you’ve done some reporting. The big question was why did Chief Justice John Roberts do what he did? You’ve learned new details. CRAWFORD: That’s right, what was striking about this was that it was the conservative chief decisive vote, […]
Author Archive | Randy Barnett
Quote of the Week
Much ink has been spilled on the meaning and significance of the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius — much of it by me in the Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Daily Beast, and SCOTUSBlog. But, for me, the “Quote of the Week” is from from Part IIIC, pp. 41-42, of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion for the […]
Win or Lose, My Thanks
On the eve of the historic Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate, I don’t know what the outcome will be any more than anyone else. I have never made a prediction and won’t start now. From the beginning, I always insisted that the challenge was serious, but also an uphill […]
Chuck Lane: Why “Living Constitutionalists” Underestimated the ACA Challenge
Chuck Lane has this very insightful piece in today’s Washington Post responding to Akhil Amar’s cri de coeur that his academic life would be a fraud if the Court invalidates the individual mandate. In a piece worth reading in its entirety, Lane suggests that legal academics today “resemble the conservative leaders of the bar at the […]
Scrutiny Land
If you are bored to tears by the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause, and are curious about how the Supreme Court has gutted the Fifth and Fourteen Amendment’s protection of “liberty,” you might be interested in my Michigan Law Review article, Scrutiny Land. There I explain how the Court purports to be protecting […]
My Politico Interview on the ACA Challenge
The Politico has a new series of videos on the Affordable Care Act Challenge. Here is the interview they did with me: The rest of the interviews are here.
Anatomy of a Murder Trailer
My favorite lawyer’s movie is Anatomy of a Murder. Here is the very interesting trailer for the film (which I posted here about 2 years ago). I have seen this film more times than I can count and highly recommend it to future lawyers. The screenplay is based on a novel by a Michigan state […]
Jeff Rosen Responds to Critics
On TNR.com, Jeff Rosen has a thoughtful response to the criticism engendered by his New Republic magazine essay on Chief Justice Roberts. I just wish to offer five points in response: Rosen inaccurately claims that, in the Raich case, I asked the Court to reverse Wickard v. Filburn. To the contrary, throughout that litigation, in our […]
Remembering Mike Landes & the Hoover-Schrum Grade School Band of Calumet City, Illinois
Today our thoughts are with our veterans, but I am also remembering [WWII veteran] Mike Landes, the director of the Hoover-Schrum Grade School Band in Calumet City, Illinois. Mike started me on clarinet in the second grade and it was a major character forming part of my life until I graduated in eighth grade. We […]
George Will: “Liberals put the squeeze to Justice Roberts”
In today’s Washington Post: In one of his characteristic conniptions about people who frustrated him, Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism’s first president, said of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.” TR was as mistaken about Holmes’s spine as are various progressives today about Chief Justice John […]
Another Switch in Time?
Jennifer Rubin and Kathleen Parker’s columns today have made me think of another Justice Roberts: Justice Owen Roberts, who is famous for having switched his vote to uphold the New Deal programs in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, the 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation, which overturned […]
Jennifer Rubin: What the Left is Asking Chief Justice Roberts to Do
President Obama’s two statements urging the Supreme Court to uphold the Affordable Care Act came the week after the vote was presumably taken by the justices in conference. Since then we have been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of pundits, professors, and politicians urging the Court for “nonlegal” reasons (see Ilya’s post here) to […]
Kathleen Parker: “The Public Trial of Justice Roberts”
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker has a powerful column this morning in the Post. She begins: Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal […]
South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna Dewitt Whacks Nikki Haley Pinata
This is pretty shocking: From ABC News: Dewitt told ABC News she has no regrets about the incident and said there was “no ill intent” in what she was doing. Dewitt said her colleagues brought the pinata and were using it as a “memoir” of Haley’s words and actions towards unions in her time […]
Carrie Severino Responds to Jeff Rosen
On Bench Memos Carrie Severino offers her take on Jeff Rosen’s challenge to Chief Justice Roberts: In Rosen’s world, avoiding 5–4 decisions at all costs is apparently a higher virtue than following the law. But, for the sake of argument, let’s set aside the question whether the law obligated the chief justice to vote a […]