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“9th Circuit Court Overturns New Iraq Constitution.”

My colleague Bill Klein, who knows a lot about corporate law, writes: Maybe the moral of the story is not that you should refuse to talk to investigators without a lawyer’s advice, but to be careful about your choice of lawyer. Alan Dershowitz, in the morning’s WSJ, notes that [Martha Stewart] did consult with her […]

Or do they just not care? The latest attempt to punish students for wearing blackface to a theme party — this time at Georgia State University — from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: During the weekend of Jan. 24, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity hosted an off-campus party with the theme “Straight Outta Compton,” with guests encouraged […]

On his new blog, Tutissima Cassis (How do people think of these names?), Nathan Oman takes on Jack Balkin’s accusation that conservatives are closet activists. Balkin sums up his argument by claiming, “The fact is, we are all living constitutionalists now; but only some of us are honest about it.” This, unfortunately, is not exactly […]

Someone asked me why I’m so troubled by the University of Southern Mississippi controversy. After all, the university is trying to fire the professors not for their scholarship or their teaching, but for their involvement in an investigation of an administrator’s alleged fraud (or, according to the University, for their unspecified misconduct in this investigation). […]

Interest rates are at historic lows, and I’ve see countless articles suggesting that they are inevitably going to rise. Everyone knows that long-term bond funds are a terrible place for investments if interest rates rise, and the articles duly note this. But the articles never state what investments, if any, are attractive ones when rates […]

“Online gambling sites are betting on tighter security after a recent wave of computer attacks from cyberextortionists plunged several into darkness. Shadowy hackers demand $20,000 to $50,000 for protection from distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood a Web site with data so that it is overloaded. BetWWTS.com in Antigua was forced to pay $30,000 when hackers […]

[UPDATE: For more recent thoughts on this, which are more critical of the proposal’s first sentence (though still supportive of the second sentence), see here.]      Sen. Orrin Hatch proposes an alternative Federal Marriage Amendment, which even I would support in principle (for reasons mentioned over the last couple of weeks): Civil marriage shall be defined […]

Clayton Cramer endorses Orrin Hatch’s proposed alternative Federal Marriage Amendment, on which I post more above. Cramer’s theory, and I kid you not: “If the point is reached where a majority of a state wants gay marriage, they’ll probably legalize polygamy, bestiality, and then combine them into polygamous bestiality.” O-kay.

Interesting that Larry Tribe says, below, “It’s almost embarrassing for anyone who is a serious thinker about the Constitution to bandy [the phrase ‘judicial activism’] about.” Let’s go back to the time of the summer 2001 Should Ideology Matter? hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was in the room, because Eugene and my then-boss […]

I had intended to respond to Richard Epstein’ reply to my comment on his speech (got that?) in Reason when I had the time. I still hope to do so in the future, but I appreciate and wholly endorse Sasha’s defense of my so-called “utopianism”–a charge I found bizarre given what I said about the […]

Susan Moller Okin has died. Stanford has now released its obituary. UPDATE: I’ll write more here as I’m able. For now I’ll note that the tributes to Okin are likely to (rightly) emphasize her best-known and most influential work, Justice, Gender, and the Family. But Okin’s subsequent fame as a normative liberal feminist shouldn’t obscure […]

Sunday’s Boston Globe contained a story–Judging the Judges–in which I and other scholars were quoted on the meaning of “judicial activism”: [T]he charge of judicial activism has become a “ubiquitous epithet” and unhelpful “scare phrase,” Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman recently noted in The Washington Post. Constitutional law scholars across the political spectrum tend to […]

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, The president of the University of Southern Mississippi on Friday suspended with pay two tenured professors and began procedures to terminate their employment. Francis D. Glamser, a professor of sociology, and Gary A. Stringer, a professor of English, learned of the decision Friday morning at separate meetings with […]

Apropos my post last week, I looked a little more into what “eligible” meant in 1804, when the Twelfth Amendment was enacted. I realize that this is far from perfect evidence — it’s 40 years later than the usage — but the earliest law dictionary the library could find for me, Bouvier’s (1843), defines “eligibility” […]