July 12, 2008
At the Supreme Court, the right-wingers are always up to no good, and almost always in charge. Or so it seems to the sizable slice of the journalistic-academic-cosmopolitan world typified by The New York Times' editorial page.
A new wrinkle in this summer's assessments is that the conservative cabal appears to have co-opted liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens....
July 5, 2008
The big decision on June 26 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep a loaded handgun for self-defense at home is the high-water mark of the "original meaning" approach to constitutional interpretation championed by Justice Antonin Scalia and many other conservatives. At the same time, the decision may show "originalism" to be a false promise.
Scalia's...
June 28, 2008
Justice John Paul Stevens, the 88-year-old dean of the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, is a gentleman of the old school. So it carried a special bite when he read from the bench late last month an unusually bitter dissent, castigating the conservative majority. He fumed against an unprecedented decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun-control law. The conservatives had argued that the 217-...
June 28, 2008
Almost 60 House liberals, along with prominent lawyers, journalists, and retired officials and military officers, are lobbing an inflammatory charge--"war crimes"--toward a large number of the Bush administration's most senior current and former officials and lawyers. These critics accuse them of approving torture and other illegal interrogation methods.
We are likely to hear a growing...
June 21, 2008
Our Constitution works best when its custodians--the president, Congress, and the judiciary--behave well. In the matter of suspected "enemy combatants," all three have behaved badly. That's why the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been such a running sore. Even if Guantanamo ends up being closed, the human-rights and public-relations debacles that it symbolizes will continue until a new...
June 14, 2008
When it comes to national security-fighting wars and defending the nation-the courts have long deferred to the president and Congress. After 9/11, the Bush administration counted on judges staying out of the way as it figured out what to do with suspects rounded up in the War on Terror. The administration built a prison at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because it was...
May 24, 2008
I wholeheartedly support gay marriage. And I am happy for the many gays who rejoiced at the California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision on May 15 ordering the state to stop calling committed gay couples "domestic partners" and start calling them "married."
So why do I see the decision as an unfortunate exercise in judicial imperialism? Let me count the ways. Then I'll touch on how...
May 17, 2008
Now and then events converge to remind us of how often plaintiffs' lawyers pervert our lawsuit industry for personal and political gain, under the indulgent eyes of judges, without rectifying any injustices, at the expense of the rest of us.
We have recently witnessed the spectacle of three of the nation's richest and most famous plaintiffs' lawyers heading to federal prison for various criminal...
May 10, 2008
Is Barack Obama--now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination--nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or "racial fears," or "race-baiting," or racial "double standards," as some commentators have suggested?
The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many...
May 3, 2008
Amid the new round of headlines about the Bush administration's use of extremely harsh methods--some say torture--to interrogate suspected terrorists, the most important question is getting the least attention.
That question is how we should revise our laws to govern future interrogations, especially those of newly captured terrorism suspects who seem especially likely to have potentially...
