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Above the Law has posted this year’s finalists for the Law Revue video contest. A few of them are pretty good. Check ’em out.

The California Assembly has passed a bill allowing non-citizens on juries. A reader asks: Is this constitutionally permissible? Probably yes. Historically, English and American juries had to be composed of citizens, likely in part because they had to be composed of landowners and in the past non-citizens couldn’t own land. At the same time, in […]

Could a sitcom in which the main characters are obsessed with comic books actually be one of the most intelligent shows on television? At the very least it’s “the best TV science fiction comedy since the original Star Trek series in the 1960s,” according to Steve Hayward. Ken Masugi also reflects on the show’s serious […]

A mandatory 4 percent cut to the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration (to what it was in 2010) results in furloughing 10 percent of air traffic controllers and delays are projected for 40 percent of flights. The Administration says it has no choice, and such consequences are unavoidable, and yet the office in the […]

O.K., so many of you figured out that my claim, yesterday, that $1 = 1¢ is not actually true. And it was clear that you had to either (1) not square the dollar or cent symbol to begin with, in which case the “proof” wouldn’t be able to proceed, or (2) square them, but remember […]

There’s been considerable speculation about how the government handled Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s return from Russia. Before Tsarnaev’s return, both the FBI and the CIA had suggested that Tsarnaev belonged in the government’s classified terrorist database, and according to some reports an alert for Tsarnaev was entered into the DHS border system. Yet according to Secretary Napolitano […]

Note: this is only useful to you if you use it in the right direction. $1 = 100¢ = (10¢) ^ 2 = ($0.10) ^ 2 = $0.01 = 1¢. How can you use this proof? Propose to your student loan creditor that your $10,000 loan is actually just 10,000¢ = $100. Their strategy would […]

Congratulations to Co-Conspirator Ilya on his Senate testimony on drone warfare yesterday – I had a chance to read and offer some comments on his written submission and it is sensible and smart as Ilya always is.  There’s stuff Ilya, I, and other should take up here; although I’m broadly in the same camp as […]

The Senate held a hearing today at which Richard Cordray testified in his supposed capacity as “Director” of the CFPB.  Jeb Hensarling, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, on the other hand has refused to invite Cordray to testify in light of the DC Circuit’s Noel Canning decision invalidating the NLRB recess appointments: President Obama installed Cordray […]

The federal government has filed a formal criminal complaint against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev.  One of the charges is “Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction.”  This may seem odd at first.  Yes,  federal prosecutors did charge a jealous housewife with violating the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act for trying to poison her […]

Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright have argued that the San Francisco plastic grocery bag ban was associated with an increase in food poisoning: Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a […]

Larry Lessig and I have published a short commentary on CFAA reform in The Atlantic.

I wanted to add a quick point on Nick’s post below about predictions on the Affordable Care Act challenges. In my view, the problem with such public predictions is that the people making them often were trying to create reality as much as predict it. As many have noted, courts are widely thought to be […]

This may well be old hat to you, but I just learned it myself — if you want to link to a particular page in a PDF, you can do that by saying something like, http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/2am.pdf#page=5 In a triumph for computer programmers — but perhaps confusing to most others — the pages are numbered started […]

Mary Lee Malcolm: OMG–I can see the tobacco lobby newsletter now: SMOKING SAVES LIVES! “Watertown man Dave Henneberry steps outside for cigarette, finds bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in his boat” Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/watertown-man-finds-bomber-holed-boat-article-1.1322387#ixzz2QyAG8tiK On the other hand, maybe we should credit his wife for insisting that he smoke outside. Or maybe the dog.