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Ilya’s post about the unconstitutionality of a military intervention in Syria and Jack Goldsmith’s post about the problem under international law prompted me to wonder: Should we feel the same way about Presidential violations of domestic and international law, or are the two kinds of law morally different? Obviously different people can have different intuitions […]

There’s been lots of excellent blogging on the subject of whether Senator Ted Cruz was a “natural born citizen” of the United States and therefore eligible to be President.  I won’t summarize it here, but recommend Mike Ramsey’s two posts on here and here on The Originalism Blog, Garrett Epps’s post here on Atlantic.com, Sandy Levinson’s post here on Balkinization, and Steven Lubet’s here on […]

I’ve recently learned that some of my scholarship is cited in a book urging President Obama’s impeachment. As my daughter would say, “How about no.”  It’s reasonable to criticize this Administration’s efforts to expand executive power and its abuses of administrative authority — and I have done so — but this impeachment stuff is inane.

A recent post at Reason‘s Hit & Run (a blog I generally much like), says the following: Playing StarCraft can boost problem solving and creative thinking, according to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University College London. Researchers found that those who engaged in the real-time military strategy game […]

What law review articles, treatises, etc., do readers recommend for someone who wants to understand the nuances of intermediate scrutiny? Not theoretical articles about whether I.S. is a good or bad idea; rather, examination of how it works in practice, include the sub-rules.

I blogged below about why I’m skeptical of claims that law school should be shortened to two years; I think there’s a lot for business lawyers to learn, and it’s hard to fit all that into two years, even entirely excluding any of the classes that people sometimes mock (whether rightly or wrongly) as irrelevant. […]

Some people have argued that law school should be reduced from three years to two; President Obama has really endorsed this view. Such a reduction, the theory goes, will substantially reduce costs (whether those costs are paid by students, parents, or taxpayers) — the student won’t have to pay for a year’s education, and will […]

A lot of folks have wondered how the U.S. government couldn’t know what documents Edward Snowden illegally copied, and this AP story suggests an answer: The U.S. government’s efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden’s sophisticated efforts to cover his digital […]

One of the best case names ever; the full citation would be United States v. One Crystal Covered Bad Tour Glove and Other Michael Jackson Memorabilia (C.D. Cal. Aug. 20, 2013), and it has the added benefit of involving the government of Equatorial Guinea.

There is a place name word — not just a common non-place-name word that can be part of a place name, such as “of” or “United” — that appears in the names of four different countries that had been colonized by European powers. Yet each of the countries was predominantly colonized by a different power. […]

This is a reply to Professor Sherry about her argument that courts should strike down more legislation. In her reply to my critique of that argument, she explains that that her mini empirical study was merely intended as confirmation that striking down more laws is good because public preference favors more rights over time. As […]

Cool keyboard shortcut in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer; repeating it reopens the one closed before that, and so on, apparently up to 10. On Macs, it’s said to be Command-Shift-T. I didn’t know that, and I suspect many of our readers didn’t, either, so I thought I’d mention it. Thanks to Ryan Vogt (Slate) […]

Novelist Alice Walker was invited, then disinvited, from speaking at the Univeristy of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women’s fifiteth anniversary celebration. Walker claims that the disinvitation came because of pressure from pro-Israel donors. The Center claims that they just decided that they erred in inviting such a divisive figure to the celebration–Walker is […]

No, really, see Fitch v. Republican Party (Cal. Super. Ct. filed Aug. 19, 2013), which alleges, among other things, “Professional Negligence” consisting of the breach of the “legal duty of care, to take care of their constituents with job market protection” and the breach of a “duty to make[] sure the Republican corporate members are […]

I mentioned in my post below that Peter Swire is like to be the civil libertarian on the 4-person Obama committee to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. Along those lines, I noticed that Swire co-signed this amicus brief filed a few weeks ago that argued that the NSA’s telephony metadata program is illegal under FISA’s […]