A new Rasmussen poll finds that 54% of the country believes the Supreme Court will strike down the Affordable Care Act. And the Court's approval rate has bumped up 13 points since the Court held oral arguments in the ACA case. Interesting. You just never know how the public will view the Court and interpret [...]
I am a relatively recent convert to the theory of libertarianism. In fact, I didn't even know I was a libertarian until I started reading economics books, and I realized that the heavy hand of government is not always the best, and rarely the most efficient, way to help people. My first introduction to real [...]
Professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy draws an interesting comparison between the Supreme Court confronting the constitutionality of President Obama's healthcare law and President Bush's law removing habeas corpus from terror suspects. Professor Kerr writes: If the Court does end up striking down the mandate, this will be the second consecutive presidency in which [...]
If one had listened to the legal academy, outside of Professor Randy Barnett, one would think that the challenge to the Affordable Care Act was not only silly, but frivolous. That is what I repeatedly read over the two years leading up to the Supreme Court's oral arguments (and even after them). As someone who [...]
The Legal Writing Pro, Ross Guberman, sent me this great PDF (you can find it here), where he dissects the Solicitor General's merits brief in the Affordable Care Act case. For those of you who do not know Ross, he is a legal writing master who instructs law school students, lawyers, and judges on how to [...]
Last week, the Supreme Court relisted a case involving some transsexual prisoners' claims that the State of Wisconsin violated their right to adequate medical care by failing to provide them with hormonal therapy. The case is Smith v. Fields, No. 11-561. Both the Federal District Court and Seventh Circuit found in favor of the prisoners, concluding that the [...]
I wrote this past year about the obstacles that prisoners filing pro se face when challenging their convictions and sentences. The Seventh Circuit's opinion today in United States v. Wyatt kind of typifies the problems inherent in a system that requires uneducated prisoners to fend for themselves and learn the law within a year in order to meet [...]
Over the weekend, I attended the Federalist Society Student Symposium which was held at Stanford Law School. The symposium was entitled, Bureaucracy Unbound: Can Limited Government and the Admistrative State Co-Exist? It was my first time attending a Fed Soc event, and I must say, I was greatly impressed. Not only was the quality of [...]