Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

What the Associated Press Should Have Added to Press Releases About Scalia’s and Alito’s Current Warm-Weather Junkets

Here are the press releases dutifully passed along by the Associated Press: HONOLULU (AP) – U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia will be teaching a class at the University of Hawaii law school. The university says Scalia’s guest lecture Monday at the William S. Richardson School of Law will be followed by brief remarks […]

The Affliction of Judicial Affluenza [Updated]*

I normally don’t post here about high-profile news stories on which I have nothing, really, to add to what has been reported extensively in news stories or argued in opinion pieces in the mainstream media.  So my first inclination when I saw an email from Dan Crawford yesterday suggesting that I post on the affluenza […]

Fodder For a Great Blog Post

  I received the following email from Dan Crawford last evening: Fwd: Blog Post Idea: SCOTUS Must Protect Free Speech in Ohio and Beyond Is this interesting? ———- Forwarded message ———- From: Kristen Thomaselli <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 6:25 PM Subject: Blog Post Idea: SCOTUS Must Protect Free Speech in Ohio and Beyond To: [email protected] […]

About That “Poking Into Every Nook and Cranny of Daily Life” Thing, Chief Justice Roberts …

If there is no mystery about the nature of the chief justice’s views, I remain baffled by their origin. Clearly, he doesn’t trust Congress; in describing conservative judges, that’s like observing that the sun rises in the east. But oddly for someone who earned his early stripes in the Justice Department and White House Counsel’s […]

The DOMA Opinion

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it is time for the court to strike down a federal statute in order to advance a liberal policy goal rather than a conservative policy goal. Justice Scalia’s paean to the democratic process* in his dissent sounds a little hollow, coming in the wake of his votes to […]

The Fundamental Principle That States Are People, My Friend

OH. WOW.  I actually called this exactly right in my post yesterday—this being, well, this.  [Inadvertently-omitted link to court opinion inserted.  H/T Dan Crawford.]  Specifically: Roberts’ 5-4 opinion today in Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder, the Voting Rights Act case that I discussed, and predicted the outcome of, in that post yesterday. Regular AB readers […]

Justice Kennedy Reads Angry Bear! Yup. There’s No Other Plausible Explanation for His Affirmative Action Opinion Today.

A longer-than-planned post on today’s Supreme Court opinion on state-college-admissions affirmative action programs.  (I’m up in Michigan’s Thumb region, sans cable and regular web service, and using my phone as a Wi Fi hotspot via the PdaNet app. I can attest that PdaNet is awesome.)  Here it is: The headline on Politico reads, “SCOTUS passes […]

Sooo … Akhil Reed Amar and Neal Katyal confuse the IRS and TSA with the FBI. I mean … really, profs??

Update: Link at Scotus blog http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/wednesday-round-up-187/. As prosecutors, police agencies and civil libertarians consider the ruling’s implications, Justice Scalia’s stark dissent — and the fact that President Obama’s two appointees to the court so far agreed with it — makes it worthy of scrutiny, even if he was on the losing side. His argument is […]

SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein says a same-sex-marriage victory in DOMA almost precludes a same-sex-marriage victory in the Prop 8 case. I disagree.

Students of Windsor and Hollingsworth have always recognized a basic tension between the theories of gay-rights advocates in the cases.  The challenge to DOMA is undergirded by a sense that marriage is a matter for state rather than federal regulation.  The challenge to Proposition 8 is a direct challenge to just such a decision by […]