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I have a new post up on the Reason Foundation website about Contract Clause challenges to state public pension reform statutes. Here’s an excerpt: Faced with public pension crises, many states have recently enacted pension-reform laws—increasing the rates at which their employees must contribute to their pension funds, reducing or eliminating cost-of-living adjustments, increasing the […]

I’ve just started reading a very interesting draft book by David Friedman, called Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. It includes chapters on “Gypsy Law,” “Amish Law,” “Jewish Law,” “Islamic Law,” “Somali Law,” “Athenian Law,” “Irish Law,” “Chinese Law,” and “Plains Indian Law,” as well as a number of analytical chapters connecting these legal systems. […]

As Jonathan notes below, Harvard Law professor David Barron, former Acting AAG of the Office of Legal Counsel, has been nominated to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It’s interesting that the Obama Administration seems to have nominated recently an unusual number of feeder-type candidates to the circuit […]

Looks like a cool site — ConstituteProject.org — though of course the constitutional text often doesn’t tell us that much about how the legal and political system actually operates. For more about the project, see here. Thanks to Jamie Fletcher for the pointer.

In the last year, I’ve become a fairly regular reader of Lawfare, the blog focused on national security law started a few years ago by Benjamin Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Chesney. It’s a really terrific blog that offers in-depth coverage of national security law issues in nearly real-time with a host of informed and […]

Adam Liptak reports: Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study, 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work. This can sometimes be amusing. A link in a 2011 Supreme Court opinion about violent video games by Justice Samuel A. Alito […]

Last year I mentioned a legal challenge to a new right to work law in Indiana.  The opinion has now come down and Asheesh Agarwal has a commentary here.

I’m doing an essay for the George Mason Journal of Law, Economics, and Politics and one of the issues I will touch on is Robert Bork’s time teaching at GMU.  First, I’m trying to establish when he taught at GMU.  I have it that his last year was 1991-92 but I’m not sure how long […]

From The Atlantic–better customer service and lower prices (for many) than banks: As part of my research as an urban policy professor at The New School, I recently spent four months working weekly, eight-hour shifts as a teller at RiteCheck, a check cashing business in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. I wanted to […]

I’ve just started reading John Lott’s new book Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench and this review caught my eye because it discusses one of my law school professors, Lillian BeVier, who was nominated for the 4th Circuit back when I was in law school at UVA.

Joshua Silverstein says yes, George Leef says no. Law students overwhelmingly agree with Silverstein.  (That’s just a joke).

In my Amazon bleg yesterday, I asked for readers’ help in contacting Amazon to persuade them to fix the mistake of charging an unrealistically high price for the Kindle version of my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. I am happy to be able to say that, today, Amazon lowered the […]

The New York Times “room for debate” feature is on the surprisingly technical question of the retroactivity of Miller v. Alabama — i.e. should those currently sentenced to life without parole for crimes committed while they were juveniles be allowed to reopen their final convictions? (Here’s a ton of background from Doug Berman for the […]

An acquaintance remarked how odd it was that Biden is appearing at the conference, for two reasons: (1) Biden is presumed to be running for president in 2016, and playing kissy-face with JStreet is likely to antagonize a significant part of his potential donor base; and (2) unlike the more mainstream AIPAC, which enthusiastically lobbied […]