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 [...]
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 [...]
When it comes to free speech rights, the Supreme Court typically applies the rule of “strict scrutiny,” which holds that a government restriction on free speech is presumed unconstitutional, until the government proves otherwise. The reason is that, given the importance of freedom of speech, courts should “not presume acquiescence in the [...]
K.C. Johnson has an insightful blog post on the collapse of serious American history scholarship, due in large part to the influence of politically correct fads in the academy. Johnson notes that the recent Montana Supreme Court decision regarding campaign finance restrictions relied heavily on scholarship about Montana history, yet the court [...]
This week, in what Adam Liptak at the New York Times suggested was “most significant religious liberty decision in two decades, the Supreme Court ruled in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC that: The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important. But so too is the interest of religious groups [...]
A lot of conservatives, and some libertarians, have made a point of attacking or ridiculing the legal theory of substantive due process. I think a lot of these criticisms are misleading, unfair, or misinformed—and I think that substantive due process is a valid legal theory, and one that is central to our [...]
Cases at the U.S. Supreme Court often involve a collision of competing values, such as Fourth Amendment cases where the right to privacy runs headfirst into the ability of police to acquire relevant inculpatory evidence. Cases in which important values clash are some of the most difficult for the Court to decide [...]
Call me old-fashioned but I still believe the primary role of government is to protect our liberty. The Framers believed this was the government’s role and it was for quite some time. But if protecting liberty is the primary goal of government then with passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, government has become [...]
Several years ago, I wrote a review of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom by Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy and Institute for Justice co-founder William Mellor. As its subtitle suggests, the book criticizes twelve U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are especially offensive [...]
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Government can monitor people through GPS devices without warrants. The case has been covered extensively. Perhaps the most thorough treatment is that from SCOTUS Blog's Lyle Denniston, which can be found here. Orin Kerr over The Volokh Conspiracy also covers both questions: whether the use of a GPS [...]