law
stcynic | December 27, 2005Here's another example of the Worldnutdaily's dishonest headlines: 17-year-old challenges Pledge of Allegiance. It's a link to an article in a Florida newspaper about a student who has filed suit, represented by the ACLU, against a school that punished him for not standing for the pledge of allegiance. He's not challenging the pledge, as Michael Newdow did, he's challenging the authority of the school to punish him for not participating. That issue, by the way, was decided more than half a century ago in the Barnette decision which ruled that schools could not force a student to recite the…
stcynic | December 27, 2005Here's a typically hysterical article from the Worldnutdaily: Canada new destination of choice for pedophiles? The article, predictably, is highly inaccurate. They're trying to whip up some irrational fear as a result of the Canadian Supreme Court's recent ruling that legalized group sex clubs in that nation. Here's the CNN report on the ruling:
Group sex among consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Wednesday as it lifted a ban on so-called "swingers" clubs.
In a ruling that radically changes the way courts determine what poses a…
stcynic | December 22, 2005Truth is stranger than fiction:
David Letterman has been temporarily restrained by a woman who believes that he torments her over the airwaves using a secret code.
New Mexico resident Colleen Nestler filed court documents late last week, alleging that Letterman has been using code words, gestures and "eye expressions" for more than 10 years to convey his desire to marry her and train her as his cohost.
As a result of Letterman's alleged methods of torture, Nestler claims she has suffered from "mental cruelty" and "sleep deprivation," and has been forced into bankruptcy.
She was granted a…
stcynic | December 22, 2005This is frightening. While we're dealing with reports of NSA spying on Americans without warrants (while simultaneously claiming that Congress authorized such spying and that they didn't go to Congress for authorization because they wouldn't give it) and the Pentagon spying on peaceful organizations whose politics they don't like, get a load of what's happening across the pond. England is now going to track the movement of every single car and build a database of where each and every vehicle, and thus the vehicle's driver, has been at all times:
Britain is to become the first country in the…
stcynic | December 22, 2005I don't smoke. Not only do I not smoke, but my mother died because she smoked and I had to watch her struggle with 22% total lung capacity and later a lung transplant. If anyone should be anti-smoking, it should be me, right? And I am anti-smoking in the sense that I don't smoke and I don't think others should either. I wish every smoker would quit. But I frankly think that we have gone enirely overboard with our anti-smoking hysteria in terms of government intervention, and a large part of that is due to the nonsense we hear constantly about the dangers of second hand smoke.
In New York and…
stcynic | December 8, 2005In response to my post about Kathleen Sullivan failing the bar exam, Timothy Sandefur emailed me the following. It is posted here with his permission:
--------------------------------
The California bar exam is atrocious. Sheer hell. Three days, six hours a day. First day: Three hours of multiple choice questions and three 1-hour long essay questions. Second day: Three 1-hour long essay questions and two one and a half hour "performance exams," which is where they give you a packet with cases and stuff and you have to write a memo or a brief or something. Third day, same as the first. It's as…
stcynic | December 8, 2005This is an incredible story. Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School and one of the biggest names in legal scholarship, just failed the California bar exam. That's causing no end of snickering around the blogosphere, but apparently the California exam is considered the toughest in the nation and it's not unusual to fail it. Still, you certainly don't expect a scholar of Sullivan's eminence to do so.
stcynic | December 7, 2005Radley Balko has a post about one of the most outrageous cases you'll ever hear about. A man is on death row in Mississippi for shooting a cop. Ordinarily, most people would think that's okay. But the facts are unreal. The cops were involved in a drug raid but the residence was a duplex. The cops announced their presence at the front door of one unit, but another group of cops busted down the door of the other unit without announcing that they were cops, thinking they were going in the back door of a single family residence. This was all in the middle of the night. The guy in the house wakes…
stcynic | December 4, 2005This is a guest post from Sheila Kennedy, former director of the Indiana ACLU and now professor of law and public policy at IUPUI. She emailed it to me and said she was having trouble registering with Typekey and wanted to leave it as a comment. But it's so long and detailed that I offered instead to make it a full guest post:
What the Constitution Protects
By Sheila Kennedy, IUPUI
There's been a lot of discussion of a memo written by Samuel Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, in which he stated "The constitution does not protect a right to…
stcynic | December 3, 2005I just came across this excellent post by Dan Herzog at Left2Right about the common conservative rhetoric of being opposed to "legislating from the bench." When he announced the Harriet Miers nomination, President Bush declared that "Harriet Miers will strictly interpret our Constitution and laws. She will not legislate from the bench." Likewise, the White House's information page about Miers' replacement as a nominee, Samuel Alito, says, "Judge Alito does not legislate from the bench...". Herzog explains what this code language is really intended to mean:
The usual target in this discussion…
stcynic | November 26, 2005Just how embarrassed must this guy feel for making the following statements:
Massachusetts' attorney general is launching an investigation into several supermarkets that opened on Thanksgiving in defiance of the state's Puritan-era Blue Laws.
The laws were passed in the 1600s to keep colonists at home or in church on Sundays. Parts of the laws, such as the ban on Sunday liquor sales, have been repealed, but a prohibition on most stores doing business on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, has not.
"If these stores want to open, there's a way to do it: Change the law," David Guarino, a…
stcynic | November 22, 2005And here is why, despite Prof. Zywicki's behavior, I continue to read Volokh every day. For legal scholars like Randy Barnett and the kind of information that can be gotten only from blogs like that. Barnett writes that the case of Gonzales v Raich, last year's infamous medical marijuana ruling, is still alive in the courts. I had no idea. Barnett explains why:
Yes, the case goes on. The Supreme Court only ruled on the Commerce Clause theory we won on below. This left us on remand to the Ninth Circuit to reassert our claim that the application of the Controlled Substances Act to Angel Raich (…
stcynic | November 18, 2005Right-wing British historian David Irving, who once famously said that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, has been arrested in Austria on a warrant accusing him of denying the Holocaust.
Irving, 67, was detained Nov. 11 in the southern province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989 under Austrian laws making Holocaust denial a crime, police Maj. Rudolf Gollia, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said Thursday...
The Britain-based Holocaust Educational Trust congratulated Austrian authorities on the arrest. Trust chairman Lord Greville Janner, noting…
stcynic | November 15, 2005Someone on Volokh noticed that Underneath Their Robes, the amusing blog I mentioned yesterday, is now gone and the entire site is password protected. I suspect that his boss at the U.S. Attorney's Office didn't like the idea of him dishing about judges they appear in front of. And while I guess that's understandable, it's also rather humorless and probably short sighted. Underneath Their Robes was enjoyed by a lot of judges and clerks, who clearly got the joke even while thinking that A3G was a woman. I hope the poor guy doesn't get fired for being clever and amusing.
stcynic | November 15, 2005There's been quite a bit of press attention on alleged euthanasia of terminally ill patients stuck in hospitals in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina came through. The Louisiana attorney general's office is investigating several possible instances of this. Crispin Sartwell has a compelling column on the subject that puts things in perspective. Long quote starts below the fold:
But before we start prosecuting healers for making what must have been the most difficult decisions of their lives, we had better really try to imagine the circumstances they were in.
The staff at Memorial had assumed…
stcynic | November 14, 2005There are two very fascinating stories out at the moment that involve one of my favorite subjects, the judiciary. The first is in the New York Observer and it's about the "Little Supremes" - 30 something whiz kids, all of them former law clerks and now either tenure-track law profs or government counsels or high-powered litigators, who likely form the potential Supreme Court short list in 20-30 years from now. It's an intensely interesting article, at least to me, because the personality type is so easily recognized. Anyone who has coached high school debate at a national level has known the…
stcynic | October 18, 2005The FBI has just released its annual crime report for 2004. Violent crimes are down again, having dropped consistently for the last decade and a half (now at a 30 year low). But here's the shocking statistic that shows that the police are spending more time and money trying to stop people from smoking a joint than protecting us from real victimization. In 2004, there were 771,605 arrests for marijuana alone, 90% of them for possession only, not distribution. Meanwhile, arrests for all violent crimes combined totaled 590,258. I suggest it's time to seriously cut back on law enforcement budgets.
stcynic | October 10, 2005At a time when we have mandatory minimum laws putting people busted for drug possession in prison for 5-10 years or more, how about this story about a cop in San Diego - a cop who operated a website telling parents how to protect their kids against predation on the internet - who has been convicted of possessing child pornography and of soliciting phone sex and naked pictures from a teenage girl (after he convinced her he was 16 years old). What is his punishment? How about 30 days of community service and probation. Oh, but if he violates his probation he could get one year in jail. And this…
stcynic | September 26, 2005Mark Olson has written a third response in our exchange over the issue of the limits of individual rights. I think this response makes significant progress in defining where exactly we disagree. He has better defined his position and it's true that he is not taking the extreme anti-rights position that the government should pass any law it views as helping maintain personal morality. In fact, he admits that the government has gone too far in that direction and that some of the examples of such laws that I cite are valid examples fo what I oppose and should be repealed. Unfortunately, he doesn…
stcynic | September 22, 2005Mark Olson has responded to my reply to his post juxtaposing a "rights" position with an "ethics" position. Unfortunately, he still misunderstands the reason why I say his dichotomy is false. He concludes:
Have I answered the claim of "false dichotomy"? Clearly Rights based legal thinking exists. Clearly Ethics based legal thinking exists. Mr Brayton clearly opposes many Ethics based laws. Others, at the very least those who penned those laws, disagree. Thus dichotomy must exist, for we have two disagreeing viewpoints.
But he's missing the point of my argument. I'm not arguing that the two…