Story at USA Today and CBS News. Among those who had questions about the prosecution from the start: Tom Kirkendall. Also see: Ron Coleman.
More: What jurors might have disliked about both the Clemens and the John Edwards prosecutions; a New York Sun editorial on the Clemens acquittal; Sally Jenkins, WaPo, via Fran Smith.
My new post at Cato at Liberty takes a look at yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Illinois, a Confrontation Clause case involving an accused rapist. It’s one more data point bolstering the observation that if the three most liberal members of the current Court (Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor) vote together with some frequency, it’s more because they share a certain philosophy about the law than because they’re all women.
P.S. I see Eugene Volokh got there first, drawing similar conclusions (& welcome Nabiha Syed, SCOTUSblog readers).
Popehat’s Ken and Ron Littlepage of the Florida Times-Union on Angela Corey, the evidently thin-skinned Florida special prosecutor in the Martin-Zimmerman case. A letter Corey sent to the Florida Times-Union, in Ken’s view, “betrays anger management issues, entitlement problems, a weak grasp of pertinent First Amendment law governing statements of opinion, and a rather frightening attitude from a government official with such power.” Earlier here and here.
Steve Chapman puts them in perspective, and commenters at the conservative Town Hall site freak out. Then a donnybrook breaks out at National Review, with Matthew Schmitz, Ramesh Ponnuru and Schmitz again advancing the view that religious liberty means liberty for everyone, even Muslims who might wish (say) to enter contracts for a religiously grounded non-interest-yielding savings account.
Speaking of religious liberty, my discussion with Tim Carney and David Boaz last week about whether libertarians are somehow deficient on the topic continues to yield interesting reactions, including one from Rick Esenberg.
If you’re annoyed at federal bossiness, don’t just blame environmentalist groups. A group called the National Electrical Manufacturers Association is keen on restricting your choice, and it’s located right in Rosslyn, Va. where it can do something about it. [Future of Capitalism]
At Fortune, Jonathan Segal (Duane Morris) covers an employment-law trend much documented in these columns, though the “civil rights” construct is a bit of a distraction: the intersection of entrepreneurial lawyers, high damage possibilities, uncertain legal standards and widespread real or apparent noncompliance is enough to propel the Fair Labor Standards Act into its current prominence without any need for a discrimination angle.
“I would say that Judge Kozinski doesn’t have an ideology so much as a Dungeons & Dragons alignment: Chaotic Neutral.” [Kyle Graham]
Banks’ failure to comply with automatic-teller accessibility rules could open up a “goldmine for professional plaintiffs,” thinks Kevin Funnell. [Bank Lawyers’ Blog] More: Cohen/Atlas.