Big Wednesday 2013
Yesterday, I finally had a spare moment to set up for today’s cases. And I threw in my predictions just to go on the record. No, I don’t know why the Court is taking three days to do what I… Continue Reading
Constitutional Law
In Which I Mostly Agree With Clarence Thomas
Today’s big case was Fisher v. University of Texas. It’s the affirmative action case. The case was decided 7-1 with Anthony Kennedy delivering the opinion of the Court’s majority in a blander fashion than I’m used to. The case is remarkable… Continue Reading
Big Monday 2013
Today is the last scheduled day for decisions and opinions scheduled by the Supreme Court. In the comments to this post, I’ll be glossing the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage cases.* And, of course, setting up a… Continue Reading
For The Cold Case Files
Does the Fourth Amendment allow law enforcement to gather an arrestee’s genetic sequence and compare it with a large FBI database of genetic material gathered from old, unsolved crimes? A reader asked me to do an analysis of Maryland v. King, a… Continue Reading
Serious Literary Content
Oh my not-God. I love this recent judicial opinion so much it’s difficult to even describe. An excerpt, describing the subject of the case, a fine piece of modern literature entitled The Silver Crown (content below the jump debatably NSFW but mainly… Continue Reading
How Metadata Could Have Squelched The Civil Rights Movement
Perhaps it would be of interest to the ongoing discussion about NSA accumulation of phone use metadata to see how some math gets mixed with metadata in a relatively simple universe. Professor Kieran Healy does just that (found via memeorandum) using… Continue Reading
Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.4
Will H. solicits my opinion on William Howard Taft, both as President and Chief Justice. Briefly: he had a solid procedural and administrative approach to both jobs, but he made a number of decisions which I find substantively unpalatable. He… Continue Reading
Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.2
John Howard Griffin asks: “What problems occur because we have a Capitalistic form of legal representation?” Which is a big question. A BIG question. And, although I don’t think Mr. Griffin intended it this way, a trick question. To say… Continue Reading
The Text Is All We Have
Today’s story about the Justice Department obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records from the Associated Press, apparently without a warrant and without any sort of prior notice to the people or entity thus searched, gives me a good platform… Continue Reading
1,776 Feet
Construction workers bolted a communications spire atop the New World Trade Center in Manhattan today, bringing the still-under-construction skyscraper to its final height of 1,776 feet. Rightly: New York has rebuilt, and are taller and better than before. The new… Continue Reading