In preparing for my recent instructional guide on sandwich making, I asked the MD crowd whether a hot dog qualified. Responses were mixed. Included in the conversation were whether burritos ought be classified as such. It turns out their is legal precedent for just such a question: “A sandwich is not commonly understood to include…
The rhetorical case for protecting the unborn has succeeded. The debate is over. It would be, that is, had the Supreme Court not issued – in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s own words – a “difficult to justify,” “heavy-handed judicial intervention” in Roe v. Wade 40 years ago. Today, nearly two-thirds of Americans support making abortion generally illegal after the first three months of pregnancy. A staggering four-fifths support bans in the last three months. So if the pro-choice movement is […]
Many times in the past when I’ve written of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve emphasized that it is not law. The Constitution is law, but not the Declaration, which is a political document. This causes a lot of anxiety in people looking to cite the Declaration as though it were some kind of a trump…
Despite having lived in New York City for several years by that point, I had never attended the Pride parade. The reasons why I hadn’t in any given year escape me now, along with all the other irrelevant details of my life. But that year I decided to go because the Supreme Court had just…
I thought this would only have been a one-day thing. But we’re here on the third day in a row of huge decisions from the Supreme Court. At last, we have rulings on the same-sex marriage cases. [Discussion at NaPP]
Today is the last scheduled day for decisions and opinions scheduled by the Supreme Court. In the comments to this post, I’ll be glossing the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage cases.* And, of course, setting up a forum for your comments on them too. [See you at NaPP!] UPDATE: Here’s my first…
Does the Fourth Amendment allow law enforcement to gather an arrestee’s genetic sequence and compare it with a large FBI database of genetic material gathered from old, unsolved crimes? [Continued at NaPP]
In the context of my other post on Sullivan I wanted to highlight something else he penned recently:
Like a lot of folks, I’ve been following the whole story on the role of the media concerning abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. There’s a lot to said about media ethics and double standards. Last night, I watched a Huff Post Live segment on the case, which I consider some of the best coverage I’ve seen…
Tim Carney wrote yesterday that when Obama was a state senator, he “repeatedly voted against legislation requiring hospitals to care for babies born during abortions” because “[s]uch laws might somehow be used in the future to infringe on abortion’s legality.” Carney argues that “Gosnell’s method for aborting babies wasn’t substantially different from a procedure Obama enthusiastically defends.” Today, the White House has no comment on Gosnell, noting that it concerns on an ongoing legal matter. A totally valid response—is what […]
Scalia: “I take no position on whether it’s harmful or not, but it’s certainly true there is no answer to that scientific question…” — Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) March 26, 2013 This is why the support of the American Academy of Pediatrics matters. When Justice Scalia spouts balderdash like that Tweeted above with regard to…
I agree with Ned Resnikoff that the issue of abortion hinges on the question of personhood, but I am not sure the question of personhood as related to nascent human life has to be answered definitively before one may have an ethical basis to avoid (or morally permit) lethal violence against it. We may not,…
Via Digby I see this 1987 interview between Bill Moyers and Harry Blackmun, former Supreme Court Justice and author of Roe v. Wade. One thing to understand about Blackmun is that despite whatever assumptions you might have about his politics, he was actually something much rarer than an activist lefty: a moderate-to-liberal Republican. Appointed by Nixon, no less!…
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. While I usually post my Great Cases at my sub-blog (example) rather than here on the front page,…
Living in a country that has already embraced single-payer, universal, socialized health care, the debate around the passage and implementation of, and the court battles in reaction to Obamacare make me wonder just how this debate was handled so many years ago in Canada. Surely, Tommy Douglas never had to discuss Death Panels. It also…
“She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had…
In my previous post (which few people responded to*) I described Hart’s theory of law, gave some criticisms and gave my own take on things, which all things considered is still a legal positivist account of law. From this post on, I will be discussing Natural Law theories. As somewhat of a legal positivist, I will…
Andrew Sullivan wants Obamaites to more aggressively tout the President’s foreign policy achievements: “I think the Obamaites need to be more aggressive in foreign policy arguments. Obama ended one war in Iraq, dispatched Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi without a single US casualty, re-set relations with Russia, brought unprecedentedly united international pressure against Iran’s nuclear bomb potential, wiped…
In my previous post in this series, I gave a rough outline of Austin’s views and a number of criticism levelled against it. Now, I’ll reveal my hand: All those criticisms were levelled by HLA Hart in his book: The concept of law. Hart’s theory of law is therefore founded on the very same criticisms…
Matthew 25:31-46 – “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the…
In which we return to a time that Bryan Caplan appears to love… blindly. Inexplicably. Sort of embarrassingly. I mean the nineteenth century. Back in 2010, Bryan wrote that the legal regime of coverture must have been pretty good for women. Sure, they forfeited all their legal rights, but look at how many of them…
This is mostly a “clearing the deck” post. I realized earlier today that I have not participated in most of the discussions regarding what happened in Sanford, and so here it is: I firmly believe this to be a racial issue. Attempts to deflect race because Zimmerman is Hispanic or the possibility that Martin…
Round one… ready… FIGHT.
He first notes a contrast: On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also…
This is the first in a series of posts about general jurisprudence. In this post, I will cover Austin’s view. I will give a simple overview on what his views are, what is good about them and what is bad. Inevitably, this would involve an exploration of some of Hart’s work in the concept of…
Questions of jurisprudence can become quite complicated. When we want to ask whether a particular judge went outside the law in making a decision, (or whether he was right to do so) we need to know what the law is. But in order to know what the law is, we need to know what Law is.…
This past weekend I went to the gun show. This is the big annual show at the Kentucky Fairgrounds that brings in hundreds of dealers. In that one building there was probably over a quarter million firearms of various types and sizes. Gone are the days of the late 90s where certain types of guns…
by James Hanley Guest author: James Hanley. Tom Van Dyke has written a very thoughtful post about the role of traditional morality in law. There are various points at which we could quibble with his argument, but here I offer a direct rebuttal of his support for traditional morality as a basis of law, arguing…
~by Sam Wilkinson For reasons that I cannot understand, the threat posed by various conservative candidates to women’s reproductive rights rarely seem to warrant mention or concern amongst those who profess themselves to be most concerned with liberty. Perhaps I travel in the wrong circles – with a two kids and a mortgage and a car payment and a…
I watched maybe half of the first GOP 2012 primary debate the other night on Fox. I actually thought the questions were decent, and while many pundits have written off the debate as the ‘second-tier plus Pawlenty’ I find this line of thinking to be a little silly frankly. Nobody knows how the primary will…
Since it’s apparently “Torture Awareness Week” here at the League, yet another — I’m on the road, so forgive me if I continue to ignore the comments section until early next week. (But that also means my typos will be there for the world to see for at least the weekend!) Working on my last…
“It’s a mistake to say this was about inflicting pain. These measures were about instilling a sense of hopelessness, and that led them to compliance.” — Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (2002-5) His statement, for the way he said it, is all the more striking. It was not about inflicting pain…
I was going to keep my damn mouth shut today, because, well, my attitude toward the news is May his name be blotted out! and it’s kind of hard to shake a grogger at your computer every few minutes. Then: There is this: “Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of…
by Christopher Carr I considered titling this post a more academic “Rejoinders to a Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion” but thought better when I realized how many lines that would take up. First, I’d like to say thank you again to Erik for agreeing to guest-post my recent offerings on abortion to this excellent blog and…
by Christopher Carr Jeremy Stangroom is a British author, philosopher, co-founder of The Philosopher’s Magazine Online – one of the premiere philosophy publications on the Internet – and the director of Philosophy Experiments – where users can participate in a variety of interactive thought experiments. One of the more popular experiments is called Whose Body Is It Anyway; it is about the taboo…
Ta-Nehisi has pushed once again into the abortion and slavery debate, this time following the invocation of that analogy by Rick Santorum and Joe Klein’s subsequent defense of Santorum’s rhetoric. Now, I’ve admitted in the past two things about the fetus-as-slave analogy: first, that it is not a very good analogy – and indeed I…
