At Crooks and Liars, Parker Higgins focuses on comments made by Chief Justice John Roberts during the oral argument in the cellphone privacy cases, in which the Chief Justice expressed skepticism that many law-abiding people carry more than one cellphone.  Higgins suggests that if the Justices “fail to recognize where their assumptions about society and technology […]

I haven’t read Scalia’s dissents–either one of them–in EPA v. EMA Homer City Generation, and don’t plan to. Nor did I plan to post more than I already have about it. But Kenneth Jost has read it, and at his blog Jost on Justice points out another line in the first of the two: In dissent, Scalia saw the EPA as making up the […]

Updated below. —- If the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet […]

– I have my own personal phone and also a business phone. I am also a straight up guy, former Marine Sergeant, Scout Leader, VP on a Planning Commission for the Township, etc. etc. etc. I travel a lot and I do get out and walk the streets of the cities I visit for exercise […]

(Important update below.) —- Well, I’m sure y’all have heard by now about Scalia’s hilarious confusion of the EPA with the American Trucking Association, even if you didn’t read this post of mine about.  The two cases at issue are Whitman v. American Trucking Associations., from 2001, and EPA v. EMA Homer City Generation, the case […]

Okay, first things first.  And the first thing is that when you (okay, when I) put the word “after” instead of “before” in a key sentence, and the error (which in this instance occurred because of a cut-and-paste sentence-edit typo in a complex sentence) makes the sentence nonsensical, you’re gonna be stepping on your own punch […]

In a close and insightful  reading of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in McCutcheon, reproduced here with his permission from the election law listserv, Marty Lederman has called attention to this first paragraph: “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders. Citizens can exercise that […]

Clarification appended below. —- During oral arguments in a freedom-of-speech case out of Alabama, several justices challenged the notion that public employees who testify truthfully about an issue of significant public concern aren’t shielded from retaliation by the First Amendment. “What kind of message are we giving when we’re telling employees, you’re subpoenaed in a […]

Re-posted from Naked Capitalism (with permission from the author) comes a well written piece on an important court case concerning damages to health and property from fracking operations in Texas (hat tip Run75441): Texas Family Awarded $3 Million in America’s First Fracking Trial by Lambert Strether of Corrente $3 Million? More like this, please. Here’s some […]

[Annotation added below.] I’ve written here on AB, extensively now, about the invidious co-opting of the word “freedom” by the political far-right.  I’ve addressed this mainly in the context of the conservative Supreme Court justices’ neat trick of disconnecting the word from any relation to actual physical freedom as long as it is a state court […]