On Monday, the Supreme Court will announce some opinions, one of which could be Shelby County v. Holder, the case questioning whether the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. This is not a case that I paid great attention to, until I enrolled in a Supreme Court decisionmaking class at my law school. In class I sat [...]
Even though the Supreme Court invalidated this country’s sodomy laws ten years ago in Lawrence v. Texas, the State of Virginia has continued to press forward with prosecuting a few people for consensual sex acts. That is until yesterday, when a panel of the Fourth Circuit held the Virginia statue is unconstitutional [...]
The Washington Law Review recently published an interactive article written by Professor Yale Kamisar entitled, The Rise, Decline, and Fall (?) of Miranda. The article provides hyperlinks to source documents, including key cases, memoranda, and recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments. You can find the article here. For those of you unfamiliar with Kamisar's work, he is widely [...]
Adam Liptak at the New York Times has this great piece about a petition for certiorari asking the Court to grant a case involving some Seattle police officers, who tasered a pregnant woman because she refused to sign a speeding ticket. The police officers won on qualified immunity grounds in a divided en banc decision from the [...]
In an article for The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen writes that the recent decision in the Hettinga case has “unmasked” the continuing machinations of Rosen’s “Constitution in Exile” conspiracy. I say his conspiracy because in Rosen’s eyes, the widening circle of lawyers, judges, and law professors who are drawing attention to the many [...]
Illinois has one of the strictest laws in the country when it comes to people audio recording police officers in public. But then again, Illinois is also known for a long history of police corruption, and maybe the State thought it could prevent a few civil rights settlements by banning people from recording their interactions with police. Whatever the motivation behind the law, it doesn't [...]
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States v. Alvarez. At issue in this case is whether the Stolen Valor Act, 18 U.S.C. § 704(b)--which makes it a crime to falsely represent that you have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States--is [...]
I completely dropped the ball on this one. Back in October, University of Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar came to UW to talk about Miranda. If you have gone to law school in the past two or three decades, you have probably heard of the professor. His Modern Criminal Procedure book is the standard bearer [...]
The discussion over my article, In Defense of Substantive Due Process, is continuing at Cato Unbound. Prof. Gary Lawson has posted his response here, and now the general discussion is beginning. I responded to David Bernstein’s questions this morning, and I’ll have some further thoughts soon. Please join the discussion! Update: Is my position true [...]
The February issue of Cato Unbound focuses on substantive due process. The opening essay, by me, is adapted from my article, In Defense of Substantive Due Process. Responses will be coming soon from Professors Gary Lawson, Lawrence Rosenthal, and Ryan Williams.