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
News
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
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
Charity, Religion, Immigration, and Federalism
The state of Alabama has enacted a new law which would restrict the flow of various benefits to people not legally present in the country. You can read the entire text of the new law here. Alabama’s new law has… Continue Reading
On Wisconsin
It’s actually quite simple. Wisconsin, like nearly every other state in the union, is broke. It needs to tighten its belt. Its newly-elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, ran on a platform of restricting some public employees’ collective bargaining rights, and… Continue Reading
A Farewell To Kings
So it seems that the fires of revolution which were sparked in Tunisia, and came to full flame in Egypt, have spread to Bahrain and Libya as well. You can tell that these are serious protests because people who have… Continue Reading
Less Than Meets The Eye
The headline “House rejects extensions of Patriot Act provisions” is a little deceptive. It would tend to lead one to think that members of Congress suddenly re-discovered the Constitution, that a principled opposition arose to a law intrusive upon the… Continue Reading
Democracy In North Africa
We’re not anywhere close to seeing democracy emerge in the north African nations (other than Algeria). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t notable things going on. Over the past three weeks, Tunisia has been a nation whose remarkable events have… Continue Reading