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An interesting question, which Carver v. State (Oct. 31, 2013) answers “yes,” following several other such decisions: After a jury trial, Rebecca Michelle Carver was convicted of pointing a firearm at another and reckless conduct…. Her sole [grounds for appeal] presents a question not previously considered in Georgia: whether the trial court erred in denying […]

Is Obamacare enforced by a tax or a penalty? In the Supreme Court, the Obama Administration claimed that the “penalty” enforcing the individual responsibility requirement was a tax.  Proposals by anxious Democrat Senators, many in vulnerable seats, to delay the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act presents a golden opportunity for the government to finally […]

I just finished reading a new Mercatus Center study by Benjamin M. Blau, “Central Bank Intervention and the Role of Political Connections.” The findings are summarized: Background The study uses data from a full-scale audit of the Fed conducted by the General Accounting Office to examine whether banks with political connections were more likely to […]

In his post below, Eugene K. responds to Geoffrey Stone’s latest reason why the conservative Justices are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Justices. According to Stone, the conservatives are intellectually weak political hacks, with the evidence being the party affiliation of the President who nominated the circuit court judges that their clerks worked before […]

Question for this fifth of November: What does the Fawkes say?

A fun oral argument at the Supreme Court today on that question, Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp.

I have not been blogging much of late; there’s too much on my plate.  I am, however, giving a few talks in the next few weeks that may be of interest to VC readers. Tomorrow, November 5, I’ll be speaking about the NLRB v. Noel Canning case before the Federalist Society student chapter at the Villanova University […]

Is there a good spell checker that’s optimized for legal documents? I have in mind features such as: ignoring brackets, as in “revers[ing]” or “[w]here”; allowing a word to be viewed as correctly spelled in italicized text (usually a case name) without treating it as correctly spelled in normal text; automatically recognizing common terms in […]

My friend and ardent civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate describes what he calls the “The Slow Death of Free Speech at Harvard” at Minding the Campus. Interesting historical analysis.

Today’s iteration of a longstanding Supreme Court tradition is Stanton v. Sims (per curiam), a qualified immunity decision summarily reversing Judge Reinhardt’s decision in Sims v. Stanton, 706 F.3d 954 (9th Cir. 2013) (Reinhardt, J., joined by Silverman and Wardlaw), a slightly earlier version of which you can find here. For those interested, here is […]

I just recently learned that, in the Roman Empire, our very own abbreviation “VC” stood for “vir clarissimus.”

The WSJ has an article today on how President Obama could have “parsed” his words better when it came to his claim that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it. But the WSJ article seems awfully credulous about the supposed “parsing” that the Administration’s spinmeisters are putting on it.  Apparently, what the […]

Back in March, I decided to try Twitter again. It seems to have stuck this time.  I’ve tweeted about 550 times, around twice a day. Some of my tweets are only links to blog posts, so it’s stuff you’re getting by reading the VC. But I’ve found that Twitter is also useful to link to […]

Dan Filler reports: LSAC has now released data about the number of people who sat for the October LSAT. The total number of takers was down 10.9% from October 2012. The number of first time takers was down roughly 13% from last October.