Legal minds on legal matters and whatever else strikes our fancy.
Update: Orin Kerr has this post about oral arguments this morning. Judge Motz told the attorneys challenging the ACA that they could argue for as long as they wanted but with the caveat that the government would be able to argue for the same amount of time. I just read over the ACA Litigation Blog [...]
I was in a Barnes and Nobles about six months ago, and the store had a rack of five-dollar books. I am like a junkie when it comes to discounted books. So I read a few jacket covers before stumbling upon a book called The Tender Bar—a memoir written by J.R. Moehringer, [...]
“If the will of the Queen in Parliament is already being constrained by a group of European lawyers sitting in Strasbourg, . . . then Parliamentary sovereignty is a waning idea.” – Tom Ginsburg I felt I might begin my tenure as a regular contributor to the Cocklebur blog with an exposition [...]
For the next month I will be focusing on prisoners’ issues, because I know that many prisoners’ families come to the CockleBur to keep up-to-date on legal developments affecting prisoners. So here is a roundup of the latest prisoner stories in the news. Last week, the New York Times published an editorial entitled, [...]
As you no doubt know, unless you've lived under a rock, there was big news in the last couple of days. By this, of course, I am referring to that tremendous spectacle that rendered an entire city paralyzed and represents a marvel of planning and preparation. And apparently there was a wedding somewhere, too. Wednesday, [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I raised the issue of implicit racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in Connick v. Thompson. Recently, I was paging through the April issue of the DC Bar's Washington Lawyer. There, on page 9, was a full-page ad for the upcoming (June) 36th Annual Judicial Conference of the [...]
Last term, Justice Kennedy said in Salazar v. Buono, that a “cross by the side of a public highway,” marking “where a state trooper perished,” was not a statement of “governmental support for sectarian beliefs,” and therefore, would not violate the Establishment Clause. As Lee Corso would say: Not so fast Justice [...]
Law professor Lawrence Lessig has famously challenged recent extensions of intellectual property law and defended the importance of a public-domain "cultural commons" through his books such as Free Culture. Some libertarian theorists and economists have gone even further and proposed that we should abolish intellectual property, particularly copyrights and patents, entirely. I've summarized some of [...]
Last week, I claimed that, in terms of cases with broad importance that will be decided this term, American Electric would be “unmatched.” I am not alone. Yesterday, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal started his argument off with what is at stake: “In the 222 years that this court has been sitting, [...]
I’ve written at great length about the constitutional issues involved in the Civil War, mostly in response to the increasingly popular argument that secession actually was constitutional and that the Lincoln Administration had no legal authority to use force against the Confederacy—but also in response to various other criticisms of Lincoln and the Union cause. [...]