I wisecracked yesterday chez DeLong that, given the current political climate, I wouldn’t invest in a company without political connections using his money, let alone my own. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Supreme Court already had decided earlier yesterday that investing in mutual funds should be a hazardous activity: Janus […]

by Beverly Mann Ah! It’s not about regulating markets, after all! It’s about regulating the individual! ATLANTA — In perhaps the weightiest of the dozens of challenges to the Obama health care law, a panel of appellate judges grappled Wednesday with the essential quandary of the case: if the federal government can require Americans to […]

by Beverly Mann Last week, one of the law blogs I read regularly mentioned a post from May 11 on a law blog read regularly by a lot of law geeks (but not by me) about the oral argument in those cases a day earlier. The blog is The Volokh Conspiracy. Its bloggers are prominent […]

by Beverly Mann The Difference Between Defending DOMA and Defending Neo-Nazis and the ACA A post via Blog of Legal Times on Wednesday titled “King & Spalding Offers New Details on Marriage Mess,” which summarizes a report that day in one of its sister ALM (American Law Media) publications, the Atlanta-based Daily Report Online by […]

The Tax Policy Center The Supreme Court Says Tax Expenditures aren’t Goverbment Spending points us to a notable decision by the Supreme Court that has been lost in the federal budget fracas. Ever since Stanley Surrey popularized the concept of tax expenditures nearly half a century back, economists have argued that many tax breaks are […]

Part of an e-mail from Beverly Mann on additional expansion of corporate personhood concept at the Supreme Court: I agree that, as the article at Raw Story says, the decision is a striking contrast to the court’s ruling in Citizens United, which upended decades of campaign finance regulation, allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts on […]

Lifted from an e-mail in reaction to two links here and here I sent to Beverly Mann concerning Judge Clarence Thomas. (e-mail slightly revised for clarity) by Beverly Mann Clarence and Ginny Thomas, the Go-To Folks for Liberty Hi Dan, I’m obviously very supportive of the political goals of both of the organizations whose web […]

by Beverly Mannfrom The Annarborist A Scalia Tea Leaf on the Healthcare Law? Judicial decisions, like the Constitution itself, are nothing more than “parchment barriers,” 5 Writings of James Madison 269, 272 (G. Hunt ed. 1901). Both depend on a judicial culture that understands its constitutionally assigned role, has the courage to persist in that […]

by Beverly Mann Washington Post writer R. Jeffrey Smith posted a comment to my post yesterday, providing a link to an article by him published in the paper about a letter that a large ad hoc group of law professors sent to the House and Senate Judiciary committees yesterday recommending legislation that would extend to […]

I sent this Salon article on the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal by Ben Adler to Beverly Mann asking her what she thought of the article. The article discusses the possible conflict of interest regarding Judge Thomas’s ruling on Citizen’s United and his failure to disclose his wife’s earnings: Experts […]