Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup

  • New Yorker legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin as unreliable narrator, part 483 [Damon Root, Pejman Yousefzadeh re: attack on Justice Clarence Thomas]
  • Background of Halliburton case: Lerach used Milwaukee Archdiocese to pursue Dick Cheney grudge [Paul Barrett, Business Week] More/related: Alison Frankel, Stephen Bainbridge (rolling out professorial “big guns”), Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (paper, “What’s Wrong With Securities Class Action Lawsuits?”)] & update: new Chamber paper on extent of consumer losses;
  • Roger Pilon on NLRB v. Canning recess-appointments case [Cato]
  • States’ efforts to tax citizens of other states stretch Commerce Clause to breaking point [Steve Malanga]
  • Richard Epstein on his new book The Classical Liberal Constitution [Hoover, more; yet more on why Epstein considers himself a classical liberal rather than hard-core libertarian]
  • Corporate law and the Hobby Lobby case [Bainbridge]
  • Some state supreme courts including California’s interpret “impairment of contracts” language as constitutional bar to curbing even future accruals in public employee pension reform. A sound approach? [Sasha Volokh first, second, third, fourth, fifth posts, related Fed Soc white paper]

One Comment

  • […] Andrew Grossman reports on yesterday’s oral argument in Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, which “may be the biggest business case of the term. …Basic [Basic v. Levinson, 1988, in which the Court dispensed with the reliance requirement in favor of the "fraud on the market" theory] came at the tail-end of the Court’s decades-long experiment in policymaking by creating and defining the contours of civil actions. … The chief barrier to overturning Basic may not be its logic, its wisdom, or even its correctness as a matter of law, but instead stare decisis.” Earlier here, here, here, and here. […]