This was a big week for same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit struck down California's Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds. Then on Wednesday, the state of Washington voted to approve gay marriage. A lot has been written in the last few days and here is some of the best coverage by people on both [...]
The 2012 Greenbag Almanac and Reader was recently published. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Greenbag is "a quarterly journal of short, readable, useful, and sometimes entertaining legal scholarship." The Greenbag has a distinguished Board of Advisors that includes Linda Greenhouse, Howard Bashman, Adam Liptak, Judges Alex Kozinki, Diane Wood, and J. Harvie [...]
Thanks to Judge Alex Kozinski you won't have to worry about being forced to shack up with the slobby guy, the party girl, the all-night video game nerd, or the quiet but hateful passive aggressive. Neo-conservatives won't be coerced into sharing their early mornings crammed in a bathroom brushing their teeth with a polite progressive. And Catholics [...]
The word tolerance gets thrown around a lot in the media and in every day conversation. But I've noticed that few people, and especially those with set political beliefs, actually understand what the word means in practice. Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic has a great piece, entitled A Real Commitment to Minority Rights Needs a [...]
I've been reading lots of write-ups for Law Professor Michelle Alexander's book on the American criminal justice system, entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. From what I've read, and heard from others in the legal community, it sounds like an amazing work. You can find the website for the [...]
SCOTUSblog is currently taking application from current law school students for its internship program. You DO NOT have to move to Washington D.C., from what the listing says the internship can be performed remotely. The details are here. Submit your application to Kali Borkoski at kborkoski@scotusblog.com.
Last week I was explaining to a friend the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Jones, the case where the Government installed a GPS device to monitor an alleged drug dealer's vehicle over the course of 28 days. After exhaustively covering the three opinions, my friend had this remark, "why didn't they just get [...]
This week Adam Gopnik published a piece at The New Yorker on this country's mass incarceration problem. Not only does it provide a number of sources and statistics to back up its claims, it also does so in a wonderful yet chilling way. The piece is long but well worth the read. You can find [...]
Between my first year of law school and two young children, I have really cut down on the amount of media I read in a given day. I tend to follow a pattern of checking the headlines at the New York Times, and then looking to see if any members of the Supreme Court [...]