A month ago, on the day that The Guardian released the FISC order requiring Verizon to turn over all of its telephone metadata, I wrote: If the order is what it appears to be, then the order points to a problem in Section 1861 that has not been appreciated. Section 1861 says that the “things” […]
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What Comes Next In This Sequence?
Nom. Suet. Sweden. Hurts. ___?
Is the Right to Bear Arms Plural?
By Eugene Kontorovich on July 8, 2013 10:04 am in Constitutional Amendments, Constitutional Law, Guns, Militia, Originalism, Right to carry, Seventh Circuit, Uncategorized
Tomorrow, Illinois’ concealed carry laws will become ineffective, having been held unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit several months ago. The Court kept the unconstitutional law on life support for a few months to give the legislature time to craft a replacement measure. Springfield responded, but now that bill has been vetoed by Governor Quinn. If […]
Amicus Project at Southwestern Law School
A few months ago, I mentioned our new UCLA First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic; I’m happy to see that Southwestern Law School is also setting up an amicus brief project, though operating in a different way and covering a broader range of topics: The Amicus Project at Southwestern Law School is a professional outreach program […]
A Proposal To Reform FISA Court Decisionmaking
Yesterday’s New York Times story on the secret legal opinions of the FISA court prompts a natural question: How should the FISA court reach its decisions, and how do we know it is doing so correctly? That breaks down into two questions. First, what procedures should the FISA court use to reach legal conclusions? And […]
Ross Guberman, Guest-Blogging
I recently read Ross Guberman’s Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates and found it very helpful; indeed, I’ll be assigning it to my First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic students as required reading. To quote the book’s Amazon blurb, With Point Made, legal writing expert Ross Guberman throws a life preserver to […]
Valley Fever
When one of my nephews fell ill with a strange pneumonia-like illness as a boy in the 1980s, his mother was told he had something called “Valley Fever.” My sister and her family lived in Bakersfield, California, and it was something I had heard of – my parents had lived there for a couple of […]
Public Testimony About Classified Activities: A Thought On the Clapper Dilemma
As Jonathan notes below, DNI James Clapper has apologized for his “clearly erroneous” testimony before Congress about NSA surveillance. The underlying question is a tricky one, though: How can you have public testimony about classified activities? Senator Wyden had been briefed about the NSA program, and he knew the answer to the question. So he […]
NSA-Style Surveillance, The French Version
An interesting story for those interested in comparative law: [T]he newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France. Le Monde reported that the General […]
DNI Clapper Apologizes for Giving False Testimony to Congress
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has written an apology to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein for giving false testimony about the National Security Agency’s collection of information about U.S. citizens. In the letter, Clapper apologizes for the “mistake” of giving an “erroneous” response to a question from Senator Wyden. GWU law professor Jonathan […]
Two Perspectives on Egypt
Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman bemoans the coup as a defeat for democracy. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has a more ambivalent reaction but ultimately seems to think the coup was a good thing, because “the Muslim Brotherhood is a totalitarian cult, not a democratic party,” and totalitarian cults are hardly likely to respect democratic outcomes […]
Justice Ginsburg Vows to Resist Pressure to Retire
Joan Biskupic has the scoop: In a Reuters interview late on Tuesday, [Justice Ginsburg] vowed to resist any pressure to retire that might come from liberals who want to ensure that Democratic President Barack Obama can pick her successor before the November 2016 presidential election. In her interview, Ginsburg referred to past liberal commentary [urging […]
O Say Can You See
Happy 4th of July, everyone. This is a holiday in which I think about the Declaration of Independence, but sometimes find myself, like today, drifting to think about America’s national anthem. Views on the Star-Spangled Banner usually start – very sensibly – from the concession that as a piece of music, it’s mostly un-singable and […]
Lose-Lose Situations
Who are the good guys in the following conflicts in the Arab world? (1) The various Libyan factions fighting each other (2) The Palestinian Authority vs. Hamas (3) The Syrian government and Hezbollah vs. Sunni Islamists (4) Hezbollah versus Sunni Lebanese and Palestinian militas in Lebanon (5) The Egyptian army vs. the Muslim Brotherhood government […]
More Policy-Based Evidence-Making at CFPB
The Community Financial Services Association has submitted a petition for withdrawal of the latest bit of policy-based evidence-making at the CFPB, its White Paper on Payday Lending and Deposit Advance Products. Ballard Spahr’s CFPB Monitor blog summarizes the petition. The critiques are clearly correct to me, most notably the lack of any support whatsoever for […]