Legal minds on legal matters and whatever else strikes our fancy.
The New York Times has been criminal justice heavy in the last week. The articles are so good that I wanted to share them here all in one place. First, there was a great piece on how tough sentences have given prosecutors unbridled discretion. In this federal system this is especially true [...]
This fall the brunt of my blog posts will change from covering the Supreme Court to covering law school. And many of my posts will be anecdotal, about my experiences in the first year of law school. I also plan to have some of my fellow classmates write posts for the blogs. [...]
We filed two merits briefs this week: Brief for Respondent in Perry v. New Hampshire, No. 10-8974, filed on September 16, 2011 Brief for the Petitioner in Coleman v. Maryland Court of Appeals, No. 10-1016, filed on September 20, 2011
I just finished up two weeks of law school orientation, during which I met quite a few of my classmates, many of whom asked me questions relating to law school. So I thought I’d provide a different kind of orientation—a “best of” listing of articles that helped me to understand law school [...]
The other big healthcare case this term is actually three cases. In Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, Douglas v. California Pharmacists Association, and Douglas v. Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the State of California has asked the Court to review 9th Circuit rulings that struck down the state’s effort to [...]
GW law professor Orin Kerr argues in a new post on the Volokh Conspiracy that the Individual Mandate is in a sense more “libertarian” than a single-payer, socialized medicine scheme—and suggests that there’s something disingenuous in calling the Individual Mandate “unprecedented” when the reason it’s a newfangled idea is because it’s something of a step [...]
Supreme Court practice has a language unto itself. One of the terms you will occasionally hear at the certiorari stage is that a petition has “vehicle problems.” Well, what does that mean? And what the heck is a vehicle? The Court doesn’t like to waste time. So when they consider granting a [...]
Professor Douglas Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has a great post about the GOP Presidential debate. Professor Berman would like to ask three highly relevant questions to candidates who support limited government and free markets. Those questions are: Do you support the bill introduced by Ron Paul and Barney Frank to get the federal government [...]