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
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
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
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
Reason No. 172 Not To Practice Family Law
For the uninitiate, the term “family law” is a vaguely Orwellian euphemism for “divorce,” — just as Oceania’s Ministry of “Peace” was all about making war, “family law” court is all about breaking up families, not putting them back together.… Continue Reading
Beat About The Head And Shoulders
That’s how I feel after a day like today. I need to remind myself that the number of people who go see doctors for problems, get prescribed medication, fill those prescriptions, and then take the medicine in the manner directed… Continue Reading
Bad Attorney Advertisements, Part 3
For the third installment in my occasional series of bad attorney advertisements, I have found a television commercial. Embedding of the video here is disabled, so you’ll have to follow this link to see a truly tacky TV ad for… Continue Reading
I Have A Soft Spot For Elephants
Let’s play a game, albeit a morbid one. I’ve found a crime from a real case, and I’ve created a hypothetical circumstance. Consider two crimes, both setting in motion chains of events which result in the death of a human… Continue Reading