All Rise! Ye Ordinary Court Is In Session
Introducing a new project by some of the lawyers and scholars writing for Ordinary Times: The Ordinary Court.
Tagged: constitutional law
The Ethics and Incentives of Socialized Law
Noam Scheiber makes a radical suggestion. Eric Posner has lots of reasons why it’ll never work. Burt Likko says, “There’s a few things neither of you bright fellows have thought of.”
What You Need to Know About Klayman v. Obama
A Federal Court found yesterday that the NSA does, in fact, routinely violate your Constitutional rights. The reason why is very likely within your arm’s reach right now.
The Price Of Citizenship (Updated)
New Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled today in favor of a plaintiff who sued for violation of one of that state’s anti-discrimination laws based on a photographer refusing to take pictures at her same-sex commitment ceremony. Burt Likko presents a digest of the decision.
Prop 8 stands?
Consider this: 1. The Supreme Court today ruled in its opinion holding DOMA unconstitutional that the states are entitled to decide their own marriage laws. Assume this is not a meaningless statement – a “bald, unreasoned disclaimer,” as Justice Scalia called it. (This may be asking much of those who recall the majority opinion author’s prior work in Lawrence and Romer, rich with such disclaimers.) 2. President Obama also acknowledged today that Americans’ views on marriage are based on “deeply […]
The NSA and Privacy: Why Conservatives Should Not Be Sanguine
Defending the NSA’s program that collects information about the American public’s phone calls and emails, President Obama offered this bit of doublespeak: Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe, is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision […]
For The Cold Case Files
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]
The Text Is All We Have
Today’s story about the Justice Department obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records from the Associated Press, apparently without a warrant and without any sort of prior notice to the people or entity thus...
Thursday Night Bar Fight #5: Brother, Can You Spare an Amendment?
Bad news, everyone! It turns out that due to its massive war debt at the end of its revolutionary war, the United States was unable to pay to own outright all future amendments to...
Liberal Democracy Is Not Too Big to Fail
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Democracy. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. Three...
Hexalogue
A certain kind of religious activist takes it as a given, and as an imperative, that the Decalogue must be displayed prominently on and in public buildings. Gratefully, these folks are rare; sadly, they have influence...
The Constitutional Conservatism Newspeak
“Liberals are the true conservatives of this generation,” a growingly popular line of argument goes, “because liberals are the guardians of the new American tradition—the New Deal tradition—against the reactionary onslaught of the fake,...
Why Originalism?
In our discussion of constitutional originalism below, I’ve been asked a very good question — Why should we choose originalism rather than any other interpretive strategy? Even if we grant that we need a...
Question for Supporters of the Individual Mandate
Can I just get an admission that this makes the so-called individual mandate look pretty ridiculous? The individual mandate — that is, the affirmative requirement that all people must purchase health insurance from a...
Arizona: Enemy of Federalism
By Transplanted Lawyer So the Federal Department of Justice has sued the State of Arizona over Arizona’s immigration law. Once again, I am forced to think critically about something of which I superficially would...
The Weekly Standard pulls a Cully Stimson
Does the name Cully Stimson ring a bell? In 2007 Stimson, in his capacity as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, made a series of bizarre statements on NPR criticizing the law...
Taxes: Where Political and Constitutional Expediency Collide
I’ve been out of pocket from the political realm for a week and a half, but President Obama’s claim that a health insurance mandate is not a tax strikes me as marginally good politics...
general welfare
I got a bit of a kick reading Ian Millhiser’s Rally ‘Round the True Constitution. He does a spectacular job of fearmongering by suggesting that “Tenthers”, his derogatory term for conservative politicians who, in opposition to...
