Some 45 municipalities and communities make up Westchester County, the prosperous, heavily Democratic jurisdiction just north of New York City whose most famous residents are Bill and Hillary Clinton. Like many localities across the country, Westchester has long been a recipient of federal housing…
The Department of Labor may soon be able to garnish your wages without a court order.
On July 16, we saw the definitive end to one of the greatest abuses of power in recent memory. After five years, the Wisconsin supreme court finally halted the Milwaukee district attorney’s notorious “John Doe” investigation that targeted Governor Scott Walker and political allies trying to reform…
Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter, has blown a big hole in the case against Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted of lying to avoid blame for outing a CIA agent. Miller was a key witness in Libby’s trial, but in her new book she has repudiated her testimony.
In an MSNBC townhall in Miami, President Obama vows to fight the court ruling against the executive amnesty he adopted last year.
Last winter President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development published a regulation pursuant to the Fair Housing Act that defines discrimination as actions or policies that while neutral and nondiscriminatory in their intent have a disparate impact, shown through statistics, on a group…
The Scrapbook has devoted plenty of column inches over the years to detailing the incestuous relationship between public employers and public employee unions. Every election cycle, union dues—paid with taxpayer dollars—go to Democratic politicians, who, when in office, thank their donors with…
Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, a Republican, is sponsoring a resolution in the House of Representatives that would, if adopted, direct the legislative body "to bring a civil action for declaratory or injunctive relief to challenge certain policies and actions taken by the executive…
“Detroit civil rights lawyer Shanta Driver made a last-minute decision to argue in a high-profile Supreme Court affirmative action case on Oct. 15 in part, she said, because so few African-Americans appear before the justices.”
Much will be written about Chief Justice Roberts's opinion for the court in Hollingsworth v. Perry, holding that supporters of California's Proposition 8 lacked constitutional "standing" to defend in federal court California's ballot initiative against same-sex marriage. (Whether or not same-sex…
President Obama today nominated three liberals to fill longstanding judicial vacancies on the important Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Will the Senate rubber-stamp the president's nominees—even though the court's fine as it is, with the eight judges currently serving enjoying the…
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being between couples of the opposite sex. Today they’re hearing them on the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman at the federal level. Like Roe…
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg talks about her work outs in an interview with the Washington Post. “When I started, I looked like a survivor of Auschwitz,” she tells the paper. “Now I’m up to 20 push-ups.”
On Friday, a 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously declared President Obama’s “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to be unconstitutional. The judges rebuked Obama both because the Senate was actually in session when he made the…
Attorney Gloria Allred has reportedly been planning a pre-Election Day surprise targeting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The key for the attention-seeking lawyer, it seems, is to uncover "Mitt Romney’s 1991 testimony in the divorce of Staples founder Tom Stemberg," the Boston…
As the New York Times reports, "The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday fined Google $22.5 million to settle charges that it bypassed privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser to show advertisements, and violated an earlier privacy settlement with the agency."
Last week, a federal judge in Washington issued a truly extraordinary opinion. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, went out of her way to challenge one of bedrock achievements of the 20th Century liberal legal establishment: the de-emphasis of economic…
Yesterday, President Obama said, “We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the…
Last week, President Obama clumsily announced that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down "a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." This week, his words are already having an effect in the courts—but not the effect he hoped…
Not even a full year into President Obama's first term, Politico observed that he had reached the point of caricature in using the term "unprecedented" to describe basically anything that occurs during his presidency. By now, Americans have learned to shrug off his use of this rhetorical tick.
Yesterday, we endured an esoteric debate over a jurisdictional statute that practically no one expects to actually affect the Supreme Court's review of Obamacare. Today, by contrast, was the argument we've all been waiting for: the challenge to the constitutional merits of Obamacare's individual…
A new Rasmussen poll of likely voters shows that 74 percent of independents reject President Obama’s contention that (in the question’s wording) “the federal government [has] the constitutional authority to force everyone to buy health insurance.” Only 18 percent concur with Obama’s reading of the…
In a ruling released yesterday, a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t void any part of Obamacare, instead ruling that the health care overhaul doesn’t clearly exceed Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause. While concluding that Obamacare “seems an intrusive exercise of…
One of the supposed “benefits” for the Palestinians of achieving U.N. recognition of statehood in the West Bank and Gaza would be the possibility for the new "state" to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), thereby paving the way for prosecutions of Israeli…
Philip Klein reports:
When the Court hears 80 or so cases in a year, not all of them will be interesting. In fact, some of them will be dreadfully boring. Those tend to be known as "telecommunications cases." (The occasional "fleeting expletive" or "wardrobe malfunction" case notwithstanding.)
Washington lawyers are marking their calendars for the D.C. Courts' 36th Annual Judicial Conference. The theme this year is, "Implicit Bias: Recognizing It and Dismantling It."
Yesterday's ruling by a federal district judge, declaring that Obamacare's individual mandate is unconstitutional, is a noteworthy blow to the highly unpopular overhaul and its ultimate prospects for survival. The New York Times writes:
Amid the controversy arising from the federal district court's decision to strike down portions of Arizona's Senate Bill 1070, one must keep in mind the fact that the case is at its most preliminary stage. Judge Bolton, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, did not issue a final…