law
stcynic | May 21, 2006In discussing a legal case involving the University of North Carolina and their refusal to fund a Christian fraternity (the university later reversed themselves) the other day, Reed Cartwright asked a reasonable question:
I don't see how this is any different than the city of Berekely refusing to subsidise the Boy Scouts because they discriminate. It seems to me that there exists pretty clear precident that allows government entities to not provide freebies to discrimatory organizations. That is why I am confused that UNC thought that it was going to lose.
I didn't have time then to fully…
stcynic | May 20, 2006Randy Barnett has a couple of fascinating posts (see both on this page) about judicial supremacy and judicial review, taking as its starting point a post written by by Positive Liberty cohort (and badass player of Smoke on the Water) Jon Rowe.
stcynic | May 18, 2006The ACLU will sue the city of Black Jack, Missouri on behalf of the unmarried couple who are being denied residency in that town. The city is going to lose and they're going to have to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs, as they should. And for what? What have they achieved out of this other than to show their bigotry?
stcynic | May 18, 2006A second federal court, this one the DC District, has ruled against USAID. Judge Emmet Sullivan issued a summary judgement in favor of DKT International, who challenged the anti-prostitution pledge requirement. See my earlier post on the Federal District Court in New York's ruling on the same issue.
stcynic | May 15, 2006Remember the case a few weeks ago of a professor at Northern Kentucky University leading a group of students in destroying an anti-abortion display on the campus? There are new developments. The district attorney has given the six students involved in the case a plea bargain and they've apparently accepted. In a standard diversion agreement, they will have to do community service and stay out of trouble for a certain period of time and the charges will be expunged. The professor, on the other hand, is going to have to face the full charges.
Why the different treatment? Probably because of two…
stcynic | May 10, 2006A Federal district court in New York has ruled that a Bush administration requirement that any international agencies receiving funding for programs to combat AIDS must sign an anti-prostitution pledge is unconstitutional. See the ruling here. Two international groups filed suit against the US Agency for International Development (USAID), arguing that the restriction violates their first amendment rights. The restriction is found in a 2003 act called the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003.
The problematic provision of the act was designed solely…
stcynic | May 9, 2006Via Tim Cavanaugh at the Reason blog comes this frightening Q&A session involving Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush's new nominee to be head of the CIA:
QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use--
GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually--the Fourth…
stcynic | May 4, 2006As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has just issued an interesting ruling in a case called Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Eschenbach. The case involves the question of whether a terminally ill patient can be prescribed a drug that has not yet gotten FDA approval, but has passed Phase One clinical trials and been approved for expanded human testing. The 2-1 decision, including Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg in the majority, was that said patients do have a right to access to such drugs under the Due Process Clause of the 14th…
stcynic | May 2, 2006As you probably know by now, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled in favor of Vickie Lynn Marshall Anna Nicole Smith by a 9-0 margin in the matter of her continued attempts to get half of her late meal ticket's husband's fortune. Not since Falwell v Flynt have we had a Supreme Court case mentioned on Entertainment Tonight, so this is truly a revelatory moment. Dahlia Lithwick has an amusing article at Slate on what the ruling would look like if the Court wrote for the cable tabloid shows. She adds several sections to the ruling, including this one:
VI.
Did Anna Nicole look good at oral argument…
stcynic | April 24, 2006Eugene Volokh, a respected first amendment scholar, has a follow up post on the subject of the ruling I discussed yesterday and how it doesn't seem to square with some of Judge Reinhardt's earlier statements on free speech in schools. In the Harper ruling last week, Reinhardt argued that there is no first amendment protection for "derogatory and injurious remarks directed at students' minority status such as race, religion, and sexual orientation", even if those remarks are aimed at an important public controversy and are not aimed at any particular person or constitute abuse or harrassment.…
stcynic | April 24, 2006Here's the scenario: a high school student, fed up with what he perceived as the school district's official anti-gay stance, wears a t-shirt to school that says "Be ashamed. Our school has embraced what all decent people should condemn" on the front and "Homophobia is shameful" on the back. The day he wore the shirt, it went pretty much unnoticed. The second time he wore it, however, a school official noticed the shirt and told him that he had to remove it. The student refused and filed a suit to prevent the school from telling him he could not wear the shirt. The court dismissed the case and…
stcynic | April 17, 2006Nat Hentoff has an interesting column at the Village Voice about the Jose Padilla case and the Supreme Court. A little background on the case: in 2002, Jose Padilla was arrested at O'hare airport. John Ashcroft announced the arrest and said that Padilla was planning to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" and that they had stopped him. He was thrown into a military prison, where he was held incommunicado - no contact with family, with attorneys, no charges filed, nothing. A suit was filed on his behalf but in 2004, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal because it had been filed in the wrong…
stcynic | April 13, 2006I was sent a link to this article in Slate, along with a one paragraph excerpt, and my first thought was, "I should send this to Radley Balko, he's been all over this issue of SWAT teams and the problems they cause." Then I followed the link and found that the article was written by Balko. Guess I don't need to send it to him, eh? He's been writing about the militarization of law enforcement for months now, and it really has become a problem. More and more, local police have SWAT teams that they use to execute even routine warrants. The results have often been tragic.
It was a SWAT team in…
stcynic | April 6, 2006Our old pal Hans Zeiger, aka Hannity-in-Training, is back with yet another column at the Worldnutdaily that completely distorts the reality of the court cases going on and, predictably, distorts the position of the ACLU. The issue involves the question of whether the government can continue to spend money and resources to support the Boy Scouts (by hosting jamborees and the like) on military bases and similar government facilities. A Federal judge ruled that they cannot and the case is now being appealed. Let's take a look at Zeiger's amazing ability to shift the premise of the other side's…
stcynic | March 28, 2006A couple of people over the last few days have emailed me links to articles about whether Justice Scalia should recuse himself from today's Hamdan case (a case involving whether detainess at Gitmo must be given civil trials in American courts) because of his recent remarks indicating how he would vote in the case. Newsweek reports the facts:
During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction…
stcynic | March 27, 2006One of the fastest growing Christian right legal groups is the Liberty Counsel, run by Matt Staver. This is Jerry Falwell's personal favorite and they've been in the spotlight a lot lately, gaining on the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center in name recognition as a result. Predictably, the invocation of liberty in their title turns out to be little more than a punchline. They're now threatening a lawsuit against a blogger for designing a parody of a billboard put out by an "ex-gay" ministry. Here's the parody:
And here's the response…
stcynic | March 21, 2006In a post below, I referred to Philip Hamburger's arguments concerning Hugo Black and separation of church and state as a weak argument that really amounts to an attempt to poison the well by focusing so closely on Black's early KKK ties rather than on the actual arguments put forth not only by Black but by lots of other scholars and judges as well. My friend Jim Babka has challenged my position, arguing that Hamburger's argument is more sophisticated than I am giving it credit for and that it's an argument that should be taken seriously. Since my original post really just glossed over this…
stcynic | March 16, 2006When I learned of last week's California Supreme Court ruling on whether the city of Berkeley had to subsidize the Boy Scouts despite their discriminatory policies, my first thought was, "I can't wait to see what Hans Zeiger says about this." Zeiger is a budding Sean Hannity wannabe who writes for the Worldnutdaily, a student at Hillsdale College, an Eagle Scout, and an amusingly irrational thinker. Thankfully I didn't have to wait long for his predictably ridiculous response to the ruling.
He begins, as one might expect, with a highly dishonest statement of the ruling in the case:
Second,…
stcynic | March 15, 2006I've mentioned before being on the Worldview Weekend mailing list. This is basically a group of religious right types who meet, appropriately, in Branson fairly regularly. They send me a list of articles on their website every week and it's typically a source of much amusement. No group that features the deep thoughts of Kirk Cameron can possibly fail to entertain. My favorite of the new batch is this essay by Steven Voight on the 14th amendment, wherein he promises to reveal "startling" research that will overturn "decades of legal assumptions" about the doctrine of incorporation. If only…
stcynic | March 14, 2006Take a look at some of the bills being submitted in Missouri. In addition to the "Christian Nation" amendment I mentioned recently, they also have bills that would:
1. Allow prayer in public schools - where it's already allowed individually, but if its mandated or sponsored by the school, the courts will continue to strike it down.
2. Allow schools to teach "Bible as literature" and comparative religion classes - which is also already legal if done objectively and would get struck down by the courts if it's not.
3. Eliminate the requirement that schools teach about contraception in sex ed…