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The story, “If Obamacare is overturned, a Case Western law professor gets the credit”, begins: If the law known as Obamacare gets struck down in the latest court challenge, the victors will thank a Hudson resident and Case Western Reserve University law professor who discovered what the law’s critics say is a major flaw. Jonathan […]

Thanks to Will’s excellent post below, I now think I was wrong before in my earlier approach to Maynard. My sense now is that the correct approach is to say that the Supreme Court didn’t reach the Maynard question of whether GPS tracking is a search under Katz. As a result, there is still a […]

Reading EFF’s amicus brief recently filed in United States v. Vargas reminds me of a question that has come up in Fourth Amendment circles after the Supreme Court’s 2012 GPS decision, United States v. Jones: Is the DC Circuit’s mosaic analysis in United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544 (D.C. Cir. 2012), aff’d sub nom. […]

Readers may recall that I blogged about the outlandish Sixth Circuit panel decision on the retroactivity of the Fair Sentencing Act here, and I pointed out that the circuit vacated the panel decision to go en banc here. The en banc court handed down its opinions today, with Judge Sutton writing the majority opinion disagreeing […]

Well that didn’t take very long. Five days after the FDA issued a cease and desist letter to 23andme, San Diego resident Lisa Casey has has filed a class action law suit, and she is seeking to represent the “ten or hundreds of thousands” of others across America who paid for the product and were […]

Most readers will be familiar with URL shortening services — redirection services that give users a short web address that points to a longer one. I’ve come across URL shortening in legal briefs more and more, and I have used such links in briefs myself. The shortening avoids an unsightly excessively-long URL when you are […]

The Supreme Court just agreed to decide two new religious exemption cases, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialty Store v. Sebelius. In both, the owners of closely held, family-owned corporations hold religious beliefs that it is wrong to use any devices or products that sufficiently risk killing a fertilized embryo, including […]

The Federalist Society’s journal Engage has an interesting Symposium on the National Security Agency’s Bulk Data Seizures and FISA Surveillance Programs.  The symposium includes my very brief essay with Cato’s Jim Harper, Why NSA’s Bulk Data Seizures Are Illegal and Unconstitutional.  In it we contend that: Rather than airy and untethered speculations about “reasonable expectations,” the courts […]

Last week, I joined with Michael Ramsey (San Diego) Michael Rappaport (San Diego), Chris Green (Mississippi), Gary Lawson (Boston University), John McGinnis (Northwestern) and Todd Zywicki (George Mason) on an amicus Brief of Originalist Scholars in NLRB v. Noel Canning.  Much of the evidence cited is taken from Michael Rappaport’s path-breaking 2005 article, “The Original Meaning of the Recess […]

Over on The Daily Caller, Josh Blackman offers a tongue-in-cheek parody Thanksgiving Address that could have been given by President Obama in November 2009 to honestly defend the yet-to-be-released Senate originated Affordable Care Act.  But his parody is fair and nuanced enough to provide a template for what an honest description and defense of Obamacare […]

Happy (American) Thanksgiving to all readers! And some Thanksgiving thoughts from Presidents Washington and (below the fold) Jefferson: President Washington: Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor … Now […]

In his concurring opinion today in Carter v. Welles-Bowen Realty, Judge Sutton addresses a very interesting legal question: If an administrative agency is charged with administering a statute with criminal sanctions, and the agency adopts a broad reading of the statute that ordinarily would be entitled to Chevron deference absent the criminal sanctions, does the […]

I was googling around yesterday and stumbled across a website that I think is a pretty cool idea: LonLFuller.org, a website created by the estate of the law professor and legal theorist Lon Fuller. Fuller died in 1978, but his estate set up the website to have a short biography of Fuller (with some personal […]

Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley of FIRE have come across a doozy of a free speech case–a Modesto Junior College student who was prevented from distributing copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. The student, a former Army veteran, recorded the incident.  Posted here. One of the illuminating things about this video is the combination […]