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In challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in our Heritage Foundation paper, we adopted the Congressional Research Service’s conclusion that such a purchase mandate was literally “unprecedented.”  This claim assumed some significance for three reasons.  If accurate, it might make a constitutional challenge a case of first impression not governed directly by previous […]

The Hill reports “Attorney General Eric Holder faces a crucial decision on whether to press federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman,” after Zimmerman’s acquittal in the trayvon Martin murder trial. Some activists are pushing hard for the Justice Department to take action. The Rev. Al Sharpton, for instance, made the case for federal prosecution […]

Reuters reports on an interview that Glenn Greenwald recently gave about about Edward Snowden to La Nación, a newspaper based in Argentina: “Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian […]

I’m delighted to report that Will Baude, who will be joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty in January, will be joining the Conspiracy. Will is the author of Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power, 122 Yale Law Journal 1738 (2013), Beyond DOMA: Choice of State Law in Federal Statutes, 64 Stanford Law Review […]

Today’s NYT reports on how the President’s remarks calling for military service members accused of sexual assault to face stiff consequences is creating problems for the prosecution of sexual assault cases in the military.  As I noted last month, the President made a speech saying those accused of sexual assault in the military should be “prosecuted, […]

I have — really! — been doing productive work this summer; more on that later.  But I have also spent prodigious amounts of time learning alternate-bass fingerpicking on the guitar, something I’ve longed to be able to do for 30 years or so. [If you don’t know what “alternate-bass fingerpicking” sounds like, listen to the […]

No surprise there, given the outlandish reasoning of the panel decision in United States v. Blewett.

My op-ed in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on the unconstitutionality of the blanket seizures of private data by the NSA and the CFPB is now online here.  Although I believe this type of mass data seizures may be unprecedented, I don’t make that claim in this column.  But if it is, it makes a […]

A reminder about our comment policy, which I would hope more or less reflects how most of you would govern yourselves in your offline lives. 1. We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil — and, especially, free of name-calling. We […]

Later this week, I will be speaking at FreedomFest at the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas.  I am looking forward to attending for the first time and seeing friends.  If you are attending here are the programs I will be on: Friday at 5pm:  I will be the judge in a moot trial: “The […]

An interesting new article by Raizel Liebler & June Liebert in the Yale J. of Law and Technology on “link rot” in Supreme Court opinions finds that almost 30% of the Internet URLs cited in Supreme Court opinions since the first such citation in 1996 (!) no longer work.  It’s not the end of the world, […]

The Fourth Amendment protects people in their “houses, papers, and effects” – all plural, and understood to extend to an indefinite number of such belongings. That is, the right is coextensive with however many things a person happens to have. However, there is an interesting difference in the language of the warrant clause: a warrant […]

I’ve posted this before, but I thought some of our newer readers might appreciate a re-post of my short article on how to read legal opinions: How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students. It’s intended for new law students, but I understand that at least some non-lawyers have found it […]

From the Inspector General’s report on the Economic Development Administration’s reaction to the infections (June 26, 2013) (emphasis added): Given EDA’s history of common malware infections (the NSA identified common malware on EDA’s IT systems in its 2009 review), there was a high probability that external incident responders would find some malware infections when investigating […]