So the big Voting Rights Act news of the day is that the Department of Justice will be asking a court to “bail in” the state of Texas for preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. (This involves a separate provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section 3, codified at 42 U.S.C. 1973a(c).) Rick Hasen has […]
Author Archive | Will Baude
Cutting the Federal Defender Budget: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
I’m glad Orin posted about the startling impact of the sequestration on the federal public defenders. For those interested in the numbers underlying some of the claims in the Huffington Post story, I thought I would direct readers toward this fact sheet prepared by the Federal Defenders, and entered into the record at yesterday’s Senate […]
Federal Court Orders Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage
As readers of the VC all surely know, the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Windsor struck down Section 3 of DOMA, which restricts the recognition of marriage for purposes of federal statutes. One of the big unanswered questions after Windsor was what would happen to Section 2 of DOMA, and more generally the question […]
Contracts 101 and “Ethicist” Chuck Klosterman
The New York Times’s Ethicist column is infamously awful, but I had generally found that the new columns by Chuck Klosterman were not as bad as they’d been before. Nonetheless, today’s paper featured a howler. Here’s the question: I’m on the art-museum board, so that is my preferred artistic donee. An acquaintance repeatedly called me […]
Did Election Fraud Help Win The Civil War?
A very interesting post by Rick Pildes.
Thinking Through the Constitutionality of Section 2
Several commenters asked me to expand a bit on the constitutional questions raised by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. While I doubt that I can do so with a thoroughness that would satisfy the Volokh commentariat (can anything satisfy the Volokh commentariat?), I thought I’d lay out a few more thoughts. I don’t […]
Justice Stevens’s Thoughts on Shelby county
Justice Stevens has not been shy in his retirement about telling us what he thinks about current controversies at the Supreme Court. In an essay at the New York Review of Books (reviewing Gary May, Bending Toward Justice), he discusses the Court’s decision in Shelby County. I found this passage the most interesting: The statistics […]
What Will Happen to Section Two of the Voting Rights Act?
In a speech today, Attorney General Holder announced that he has “directed the Department’s Civil Rights Division to shift resources to the enforcement of Voting Rights Act provisions that were not affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling – including Section 2.” Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the one that nationwide forbids voting […]
The Uncertain Future of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act
I do not think it is likely that the federal government will end up charging George Zimmerman with a crime. But if it does, the prosecution may raise several interesting and potentially certworthy constitutional issues. Jonathan has already noted the possibility of revisiting the dual sovereignty exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause. But another important […]
Why George Zimmerman Didn’t Have a Public Defender
Matthew Yglesias speculates about what would have happened if George Zimmerman had been represented by a public defender. As somebody who knows quite a few public defenders (and — full disclosure — is married to one), I was surprised to see Yglesias describe most public defenders as having “little emotional … investment in winning the […]
A Child’s Instinct for Positivism
A recurring question in the philosophy of law is the relationship between law and morals. The Hart/Fuller debate famously illustrated this: Hart thought that law and morals were conceptually separate, and that a “bad” law was just as much of a law as a good one. Fuller disagreed, and thought truly bad law could not […]