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According to ABC News, the panel of “outside experts” picked by the Obama Administration to review the NSA surveillance programs consists of the following: Michael Morrell Richard Clarke Cass Sunstein Peter Swire Assuming that’s the whole group, it’s not exactly a list of “outside” experts. Morrell retired just two weeks ago from the CIA, where […]

The declassified and redacted opinion is here. I’m reading it now, and I hope to post some comments when I have finished. Meanwhile press coverage confirms my earlier suggestion that the problem was an overcollection problem. As the Post summarizes: Under the program, the NSA for three years diverted large volumes of international data passing […]

A comment on the Explorer/DISQUS thread led me to check Google Analytics for statistics on which browsers people use to access our site. Here’s what I get for the last month, listing all the browsers with a >1% share: [table id=5 /]

The commenting software we’re using (Disqus) seems to be having problem on our site, for users using Internet Explorer. We’ve asked the Disqus people about this, and we’re hoping it will be fixed soon. But for now, if you’re finding comments aren’t working for you, please try with Firefox, Chrome, or some other browser; annoying, […]

Former judges Paul Cassell and Nancy Gertner have an op-ed in today’s WSJ decrying the effects of budget constraints and sequestration on federal public defenders.  Here’s a taste: due to the combination of general budget austerity and sequestration, the federal public defender system—a model of effective indigent defense for the past 40 years—is being decimated. As […]

Professor Suzanna Sherry recently posted an essay, Why We Need More Judicial Activism, arguing that we should encourage courts to strike down legislation because courts more often err by upholding legislation than by striking down legislation. The Green Bag put out a request for responses to Sherry’s article. I wrote up a response, but then […]

Prof. Walter Effross (American University) has an interesting list of suggested law blog topics (plus an item on Disclosures, Disclaimers, and Designs of Ethical and Effective Law Blogs and Law Firm Web Sites). Naturally, you shouldn’t start a blog on a topic unless you’re really interested in the topic, but looking through a list like […]

My co-blogger Randy Barnett raises some classic questions about originalism in his post below, Can Lawyers Ascertain the Original Meaning of the Constitution? Having spent some time trying to grapple with the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment specifically, especially in the course of writing this recent article, I thought I would offer some thoughts […]

In the comments on my blog post praising the originalist analysis of the Fourth Amendment by Professor Donald Dripps, some commentators raised the predicable canard that one must be a trained historian to identify the original meaning of the Constitution.  This is actually an interesting question as it goes to the heart of both the […]

University of San Diego law professor Donald A. Dripps has an important new article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: “Dearest Property”: Digital Evidence and the History of Private “Papers” as Special Objects of Search and Seizure (103 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 49 (2013)).  (H/T Mike Ramsey at The Originalism Blog).  In […]

Do you have an obligation, whether of professional ethics or just of human ethics, to stress in various contexts (demand letters, advertisements, campaign literature, op-eds, and the like) that you’re not actually a judge, whether current or retired? What if someone is citing your law review article; does he have an obligation (of whatever sort) […]

It’s not every day that you read a published appellate opinion that says “evidence at trial in this case was not sufficient to satisfy the jurisdictional element of the offense of conviction,” and then goes on to affirm the conviction. But that’s what happened in the Second Circuit’s decision Wednesday in United States v. Corey […]

These days it has become more and more common for those who are interested in becoming law professors to pursue an academic “fellowship” first, spending 1-2 years in the academy reading and writing before going on the tenure-track job market. (As many as 78% of last-year’s tenure-track hires had a fellowship, according to Prawfsblawg.) To […]

Bart Gellman has a big story at the Washington Post about another Snowden-leaked document, this time an internal NSA audit of some of its surveillance practices. Also of great interest is this internal document offering a description of the FISC opinion that found some of the NSA practices unconstitutional — apparently a problem with the […]

Click here for close-ups. Laugh out loud (well, chortle out loud) funny. Thanks to Bored Panda and GeekPress for the pointer.