Obviously, this is only going to last as long as it takes the Supreme Court to give the green light again, or for the state to find a new lethal injection formula that might lessen the chance of being tortured to death, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has taken the obvious step. The […]
Category: civil liberties
I was just about to write a post noting that virtually every commenter to this post ignored the actual point of the post and simply returned to argue again and again the peripheral question of whether
A couple of our commenters made this point well, too, but this post very effectively expresses my puzzlement over various male commenters who seemed to think that having a foot tapped and hand rubbed
Matt says: A reasonable politics of “family values” needs to contain some penalties for heterosexuals with anti-family behavior (see, e.g., Dick Vitter, Rudy Giuliani) and support for gays with pro-family behavior. What they have right now is just loathing of gay people masquerading as defense of the traditional family. This is true, but there’s another […]
Kenneth Ackerman, a Washington lawyer and amateur biographer, has penned Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, a book focusing on the experiences of John Edgar Hoo
GFR has more details, concluding that under Minnesota law that signaling someone in a public place that you’d be interested in engaging in consensual lewdness is not, in fact, illegal. (To be cl
A classic tale from the War (on Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs: Anastasio Prieto of El Paso gave a state police officer at the weigh station permission to search the truck to see if it contained “needles or cash in excess of $10,000,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed […]
I’m frankly not sure even what to say to Josh Patashnik’s response to my post from earlier today. Essentially, he concedes the merits of the arguments Matt and I made but argues that ̶
A great article by Erwin Chemerinsky about the latest appalling cutback on habeas corpus rights. The odious Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act gave a one-year time limit to file a habeas p
I’m not sure why Gary is so worried that a broad array of federal and local officials will have access to satellite survey data with virtually no safeguards in place. After all, if the blogosphere is to be believed even “classical liberalism” now requires that branches of the government be self-policing and statements of state […]
Benjamin Wittes urges Alberto Gonzales to resign “to make possible a serious discussion of the future of FISA.” I think — at least in a fantasy world in which Congressional Democrats
Brad Plumer has a discussion of requirements that welfare recipients in San Diego submit to warrantless searches of their homes. This kind of policy presents one of the thorniest problems in constitut