- Georgia: “Twiggs County Landgrabber Loses, Must Pay $100K in Fees” [Lowering the Bar]
- “Major California Rule Change For Depositions Takes Place In 2013″ [Cal Biz Lit] Discovery cost control explored at IAALS conference [Prawfs]
- Gift idea! “Lego version of the Eighth Circle of Hell (where false counselors and perjurers suffered)” [John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum; Flavorwire]
- “Don’t Worry About the Voting Rights Act: If the Supreme Court strikes down part of it, black and Hispanic voters will be just fine.” [Eric Posner and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Slate, via @andrewmgrossman]
- “Why did Congress hold hearings this week promoting crackpot [anti-vaccination] views? [Phil Plait, Slate]
- “Debunking a Progressive Constitutional Myth; or, How Corporations Became People, Too” [John Fabian Witt, Balkinization]
- “Federal ‘protection’ of American poker players turning into confiscation” [Point of Law]
Posts tagged as:
constitutional law
Author Russell Nieli came to Cato this week to discuss his new book and I gave a brief commentary. More: John Rosenberg, Discriminations.
Related: Voting on ideological lines, the Sixth Circuit declares void the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, suggesting a constitutionalized “right” to racial preferences. Calling SCOTUS! [Jonathan Adler]
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[video link here]
I had the honor of moderating a debate at Cato on Thursday between Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, author most recently of Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance, and the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon on the proper role of restraint and energy in judicial protection of constitutional liberty. It was a scintillating discussion and you can watch it above, or at this Cato link.
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Adam Freedman, author of books including The Naked Constitution, has a podcast series at Ricochet examining issues in constitutional law. In the latest installment, Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice and I discuss how to distinguish between the contrasting dangers of judicial activism on the one hand and, on the other, what Neily calls “judicial abdication.” You can listen here.
P.S. More on The Naked Constitution here.
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If you can’t attend in person in Washington, D.C., C-SPAN will be covering it live all day (C-SPAN1 in the morning, C-SPAN2 in the afternoon).
- “Targeting the red plastic gas can”: how product liability bankrupted Oklahoma manufacturer Blitz [editorial, earlier]
- Summers v. Tice, the famous “which hunter shot him?” California tort case, re-examined [Kyle Graham, Green Bag/SSRN]
- Paul Taylor of House Judiciary makes a case for the constitutionality of broad federal tort reform [Suffolk University Law Review via Point of Law]
- New Ken Feinberg book on compensation plans in lieu of litigation [Scheuerman, TortsProf]
- Hot propaganda: filmmaker Susan Saladoff faces off against Victor Schwartz on “Hot Coffee” [TortsProf]
- Studies of tort reform’s effects underestimate effects of durable reforms by mixing them in with the many that are struck down by hostile courts [Martin Grace and Tyler Leverty, SSRN via Robinette, TortsProf]
- Membership in AAJ, the trial lawyers’ lobby, said to be on the decline [Carter Wood, PoL]
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- Prediction: Homeland Security to emerge as major regulatory agency prescribing security rules to private sector [Stewart Baker] Regulators fret: air travel’s gotten so safe it’s hard for us to justify new authority [Taranto via Instapundit] “Romney’s regulatory plan” [Penn RegBlog]
- Claim: frequent expert witness in Dallas court proceedings is “imposter” [PoliceMisconduct.net]
- “‘Temporary’ Takings That Cause Permanent Damage Still Require Just Compensation” [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
- On the ObamaCare decision’s wild card, the ruling on “coercive” conditions on Medicaid grants under the Spending Clause [Mike McConnell, Ilya Somin] Ramesh Ponnuru argues that ruling is no victory for supporters of limited government [Bloomberg]
- D.C.’s historic Shaw neighborhood near Cato Institute narrowly escaped planners’ bulldozer [Greater Greater Washington, WaPo]
- Michelle Obama on the right track with an idea on occupational licensure but should take it farther [Mark Perry]
- Everyone’s a judicial critic: Auto-Correct proposes replacing “Posner” with “Poisoner.”
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“Rasmussen has a poll out today that shows that only 7 percent of Americans support Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 Supreme Court case upholding the use of the Commerce Clause to regulate a farmer’s wheat growing for personal consumption.” [Ammon Simon, NRO "Bench Memos"] David M. Wagner: “Too bad nine of ‘em are on the Supreme Court.”
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- “We won everything but the case.” Ilya Shapiro at SCOTUSBlog on what it’s like to have your arguments succeed while your client goes down. Recommended;
- David Kopel applauds, especially the Medicaid ruling limiting strings on federal support of states;
- Michael Greve turns thumbs down: “the Chief’s supposed act of statesmanship has bought nothing that is worth having.”
- Clark Neily: “as litigators know very well, it is always more important what a court did than what it said. … Notwithstanding the majority’s assurances … the Court ratified what many perceive as the most significant expansion of federal power in 75 years.”
- John Podhoretz: Roberts’ artful dodgery on tax issue does the Court no credit. Similarly: Jim Huffman;
- From a David Frum reader: did Roberts bail because the four justices to his right got too frisky on severability?
- And Cato’s star-packed event looking at the meaning of the NFIB v. Sebelius decision will take place live on the web this coming Monday, Jul. 2, 1:30-4:45 Eastern.
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The wise general does not always march forth and capture a city, even one of great strategic importance, if he knows his forces are unlikely to hold it against the inevitable counterattack. He may be better off taking only the territory he has a good chance of holding on to.
P.S. And see this Sun-Tzu-citing Will Wilkinson analysis.
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I was at this interesting event yesterday and you can follow my live-Tweeting here.
George Will gets to the essence of this grotesque assault on civil liberties, fed by demagoguery over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision:
McGovern [Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.] stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.
Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights.
Incredibly, versions of this radical rights-stripping measure has been endorsed through resolutions by the state legislatures of Vermont, Hawaii, and New Mexico, with backing from groups like Public Citizen. [Ilya Shapiro and Kathleen Hunker, Cato; Hans Bader, CEI; earlier] More: Professor Bainbridge (“utterly moronic”)] Among sponsors of this extraordinary measure: Reps. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), David Cicilline (R.I.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), John Conyers, Jr. (Mich.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Peter DeFazio (Ore.), Eliot Engel (N.Y.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Bob Filner (Calif.), Gene Green (Tex.), Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), Janice Hahn (Calif.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Maurice Hinchey (N.Y.), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (Ill.), Walter B. Jones, Jr. (N.C.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.), Christopher Murphy (Ct.), Richard Neal (Mass.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.), John Olver (Mass.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Louise McIntosh Slaughter (N.Y.), Adam Smith (Wash.), John Tierney (Mass.), and Peter Welch (Vt.). Murphy is running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut.
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“…we [Judge Janice Rogers Brown and I] dress as Lillian Hellman and Yosemite Sam respectively.” — Michael Greve on his participation in the presumed conspiracy to restore the dreaded “Constitution in Exile” of pre-New Deal days. [Liberty and Law]
Soon-to-be Prof. Greve (he will be joining the George Mason law faculty after many years at AEI) was at Cato this week to discuss his remarkable new book, The Upside-Down Constitution. At the risk of damning with faint praise, I will say that his book is the most stimulating work I know of on the subject of federalism to have been published in my lifetime. If I could sum up his thesis, it would be that one of the past century’s gravest constitutional malfunctions has been that the states (not a misprint, he means the 50 states) have overrun their proper role in the constitutional scheme. More on his thesis here, here, and, on “Madison’s nightmare,” here. In all seriousness, I recommend The Upside-Down Constitution highly; although it’s demandingly complex in places, I can’t imagine reading it without one’s understanding of the constitution, and federalism in particular, being permanently changed.
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