Matt beat me to the most obvious response to Jeffrey Rosen’s modified limited hangout on Chief Justice Roberts. Although it’s indeed reasonable to have claimed that Roberts was better than some of the other alternatives, this is quite different than his contemporaneous arguments about Roberts, in which he asserted that the new Chief could shift […]
Category: constitutional law
One one level, I’m sympathetic to Ilya Somin’s response to Adam Cohen’s “gotcha” column about “judicial activism.” It’s true that most conservatives hav
Marty Lederman has a useful, bookmarkable list of every Balkinization post about the title subjects. Seeing them all in one place reminds me that I while I can take even the most essential blogs for g
6 CA upholds the warrantless wiretapping program 2-1…on standing grounds. Great; the prefect ruling for the age of Yoo. The secrecy of the arbitrary executive insulates even the illegal actions of the arbitrary executive from judicial scrutiny. Call me defeatist, but this also sounds like exactly the kind of feeble dodge that Kennedy is going […]
Marty Lederman identifies the two crucial pieces of data from the first full term of the Roberts Court. The first is that “the Chief Justice voted for the more conservative result (by most obser
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
I’ve discussed before the phenomenon of a textbook repeating the right-wing canard that Bush v. Gore was 7-2. And now I see that Oyez, normally a valuable resource, is printing a lie about the vote in the case: the per curiam opinion held 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court’s scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional. […]
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
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
The Court’s 5-4 decision today in Hein v. FFRF makes it much more difficult to challenge programs — in this case, the Bush administration’s decision, thorough executive order, to funnel taxpayer money to religious organizations — that raise serious Establishment Clause questions. I’m not at all persuaded by the Court’s holding; in the words of […]
Proving once again how astute Nader was to argue that control of the executive branch is irrelevant, a dismal looking day at the Supreme Court with the moderate Sam Alito writinga 5-4 opinion gutting
The Times on the Bowles decision: If the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, wanted to announce that it was getting out of the fairness business, it could hardly have done better than i