Dan Hannan, the MEP man has written … a 750 word thing for The Washington Examiner v 3.1. See if you can guess what it is about. It starts with a history lesson: Around 10,000 years ago, our ancestors discovered farming. Almost immediately, they discovered something else, too: That it is easier to plunder somebody […]
Category: constitutional interpretation
Atypically for something written by John Yoo, I actually agree with much of the first part of his Clarence Thomas apologia. Thomas is the most principled conservative on the Court, his contribution (w
Most of this lament for the polarization of the Roberts Court I addressed in a TAP article recently. The short version is that 1)Roberts will certainly fail in his attempt to create a consensual Court
LT comments in the thread earlier today that (s)he can see some relevance of animals to the abortion debate. And I can actually see it in one narrow context. In his essay in What Roe Should Have Said, Akhil Amar argues: There are indeed plausible textual reasons for not treating the unborn as persons within […]
Jack Balkin and Eugene Volokh duked it out yesterday on BloggingHeads in what Balkin calls the “Bill of Rights Edition” of Blogging heads. They take on the First and Second Amendments. My
On the issue of affirmative action and the alleged principled “originalism” of the Court’s conservatives, Simon Lazurus has a very good summary: On the contrary, as legal and histori
Jonathan Zasloff beat me to Cass Sunstein’s discussion of Roberts and Alito’s “minimalism,” but since I’m working on and thinking about a scholarly article about it I thought I’d add my two cents. Sunstein’s basic point — that Alito and Roberts cast pretty much the same votes as Scalia and Thomas but are less interested […]
I have an article up in TAP about the affirmative action cases and “originalism.” The cases make clear that for even justices who occasionally practice it rarely gets in the way of strongl
Some initial observations based on a first reading of the Court’s opinion striking down voluntary school integration programs in Louisville and Seattle: Nothing in the text of the Constitution c
At this thread over at TAPPED, some commenters tried to defend Scalia’s credentials as a principled originalist who was never political. In response, I mentioned Bush v. Gore, which not only had no conceivable “originalist” justification but failed to conform even to basic standards of the rule of law in order to legitimize the presidency […]
Today’s “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case actually turns on relatively narrow grounds. The problem with Roberts’ opinion is that it turns on a claim that punishing the student was justi