September 30, 2012
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument next week in Fisher v. University of Texas, the high court’s first case on the use of race in higher education admissions since its 2003 decisions in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Why did the court decide to revisit this issue after less than a decade? Much of the speculation on this question centers on the shift in the...
July 19, 2012
In recent years, two prominent American universities have experienced catastrophic leadership failures that exposed young people in their charge to horrible abuse. The failures grew out of a lack of courage to resist the demands of powerful special interests. As Penn State tries to reform its campus culture, what can it teach Duke?
You probably know about Penn State, where top administrators,...
June 28, 2012
JACKIE JUDD: Good day and welcome to Health Reform and the Court. I’m Jackie Judd. The historic decision from the Supreme Court today leaves the health overhaul law largely intact. The individual mandate is declared constitutional. The court also ruled that states cannot be financially penalized if they choose not to expand Medicaid to millions of the uninsured. Those are the headlines, here...
March 23, 2012
Times change. And many laws that were once essential to help us progress eventually become outdated, counterproductive, and in need of revision, if not repeal.
But by then such laws have often become sacred cows, perpetuated long past their glory days by self-serving politicians, interest-group lobbies, and media nostalgia or bias. Their reach is very hard to restrain unless an unusual...
March 15, 2012
How big is the constitutional challenge to the Obama health care law, which the Supreme Court will hear on March 26-28?
For starters, it's big enough for the justices to schedule six hours of arguments -- more time than given to any case since 1966. After all, the Affordable Care Act is arguably the most consequential domestic legislation since the creation of Medicare in 1965.
It's also big...
November 14, 2011
By agreeing today to hear challenges to President Obama's 2010 health care law, the Supreme Court set the stage for a decision -- probably in late June and in the midst of the presidential campaign -- that could be among its most important in decades.
The case, which will probably be argued in March on a date still to be announced, is especially momentous because it not only will determine the...
September 14, 2011
Beneath the thousands of pages of legal arguments in the health care lawsuits to be decided sooner-or-later by the Supreme Court lies an easier-to-grasp, if largely unarticulated, background question.
Can Congress and the president use an unprecedented and potentially limitless expansion of the power to regulate interstate commerce to avoid the political hazards of calling a tax a tax? Or might...
August 8, 2011
Nafissatou Diallo seems "vivid and compelling" when describing how (she says) Dominique Strauss-Kahn violently sexually assaulted her--though not when discussing her murky past, shady associates, $100,000 in bank deposits, and the like.
So says Newsweek, which interviewed her for a cover story. Many viewers of her TV appearances agree. So why shouldn't she get her day in court?
She...
June 1, 2011
"Terrible things [are] sure to happen," including many "murders, robberies, and rapes."
That was dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia's dire prediction on May 23, when by a 5-to-4 vote the Supreme Court sort-of-ordered California to reduce its prison population of about 150,000 by 37,000 as a remedy for "cruel and unusual" denial of medical care to inmates.
Thirty-seven...
January 31, 2011
Jackie Judd talks with legal analyst Stuart Taylor about the legal blow today to the new health care reform law. Federal Judge Roger Vinson, in Florida, declared the entire law void.
Listen to audio of the interview.
JACKIE JUDD: Good day, this is Jackie Judd for Kaiser Health News. A legal blow today to the new health care reform law. Federal Judge Roger Vinson, in Florida, declared the...
