Law

Lessons of fidelity to something greater than a ruler.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

In 2016 the College of Charleston ended the practice of considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions—affirmative action, as it is called. The change went unnoticed in the college community until the Post and Courier, the local daily paper, reported it on July 29. Whereupon, almost within…

Public views of abortion in all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) would take on an added importance if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

Was the 14th Amendment a new Constitution?

The Patriot Legal Expense Fund is here to help Trumpworld.

Adam J. White on the states’ underappreciated role in our constitutional system(s).

Ending the law’s injustice to Indian children—and parents.

I recently wrote in these pages about a conundrum that has long fascinated lawyers and legal scholars, the blackmail paradox (“You’ve Got Blackmail,” Feb. 5). If I know damaging information about you and that information was not acquired under privileged circumstances—that is, I’m not your priest…

Plus, a celebrity gets arrested.

Our collective descent into ignorance is alarming enough on its own, but when you combine it with a reinvigorated sense of political correctness, the result is a level of outrage that seems to neatly correlate with general stupidity. And so it was when Jeff Sessions spoke to the National Sheriffs’…

An impermanent high-art graffiti gallery in Queens was, for the five years since its whitewashing by a real estate developer, considered another casualty of cold-hearted capitalism. Its absence was a monument to the unwinnable war against the Man. Now the building owner who erased it has to pay…

The Florida Supreme Court became one of the first courts in the world to air its proceedings live on Facebook.

The story of The President and the Porn Actress (our era’s The Prince and the Showgirl) isn’t going away. The tale of pseudonyms and secret payments made through here-today-gone-tomorrow Delaware corporations has proved to be far juicier than anything so tired as an allegation that Donald Trump was…

Editor's note: Kayla Moore told AL.com two days after this story published she was referring to another lawyer the family has employed, Martin Wishnatsky. This story has been corrected to note the change.

When this fall’s rampant #MeToo movement rippled overseas, it found a far superior French hashtag—#BalanceTonPorc, meaning “squeal on your pig”—and an already pending piece of legislation.

On his way out the door, Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), left a parting gift for President Trump. Announcing his immediate resignation on Black Friday—when Americans are traditionally more focused on recovering from their tryptophan hangovers or…

The Islamic State's smattering of remaining strongholds in Iraq and Syria are under siege. At the height of the self-declared caliphate’s power in mid-2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men controlled large swaths of both countries. Today, the jihadists hold only a few towns straddling the Iraqi-Syrian…

Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Alabama's upcoming special Senate election, denies allegations that he romantically pursued teenagers as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. Even if the allegations are true, one statewide elected official in Alabama said it's "much ado about nothing."…

Austria is the latest of several European countries to ban the burka, the full covering worn by some Muslim women in public. Except that Austria didn’t ban the burka per se—that would be religiously discriminatory. Instead, they simply made it against the law to wear anything in public that covers…

In 1996, Hamas gunmen shot to death David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen waiting for a bus in the West Bank. At the behest of Boim’s parents, attorney Nathan Lewin filed suit against charitable organizations in the United States who solicited funds for Hamas. The unorthodox decision to seek…

The Department of Justice is compelling a broad set of Internet records related to an organization established to coordinate anti-Trump protests during Inauguration Day, prompting a legal fight, according to multiple reports this week.

Over the last quarter-century, America has witnessed a remarkable decline in urban crime—most notably in New York City, where murders dropped from a record high 2,245 in 1990 to 335 in 2016. This drop coincided with a change in police practices, with the NYPD leading the way in more active…

With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…

With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that special counsel Robert Mueller should be allowed to proceed in his investigation of Russia's election meddling, and said he'd advise President Trump not to fire him, a step some of Trump's close allies have said he is considering.

Since the repeal of Prohibition, most regulations pertaining to the sale and distribution of alcohol has been left to the states under the "three tier" system of distribution, in which manufacturers sell to distributors and control boards, who sell to retailers, who sell to the public according to…

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced his expected plans to vote "no" on Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court and promised that Republicans would have to overcome a Democratic filibuster in order to seat him.

Later this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes hearings on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Although the Committee will have a lot of legitimate issues to consider, some outsiders are trying to interest it in two unusual topics: natural…

On the day before Lincoln left Springfield on his way to assume the presidency of a nation on the brink of civil war, he walked for the last time down the stairs from his office, paused on the boardwalk, and looked up at the battered shingle that advertised his law firm: LINCOLN & HERNDON. "Let it…

On November 16, United States District Judge Ed Kinkeade ordered Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey and New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman to be deposed by ExxonMobil lawyers in December. The two are further subject to legal discovery from ExxonMobil's legal team. These are…

On November 16, United States District Judge Ed Kinkeade ordered Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey and New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman to be deposed by ExxonMobil lawyers in December. The two are further subject to legal discovery from ExxonMobil’s legal team. These are…

Every November, the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies assembles at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington. In even-numbered years, it has become tradition for leading conservative and libertarian lawyers to ponder how the recent election would affect the courts and the…

The Fall 2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books features a review well worth your time by Jeremy Rabkin, a professor at the splendidly named Antonin Scalia Law School (previously the George Mason University Law School). The professor has written on Randy Barnett's new book, Our Republican…

President-elect Trump's advisers are indicating he will likely stick to the shortlists released during the presidential campaign when given the chance to name a Supreme Court nominee.

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University's law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University’s law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Is there anyone concerned at the ugly turn the election has taken with the release of a few pages of Donald Trump's taxes from 1995? The ugliness is not that Trump's taxes have been revealed, per se, but that it was done, in part it appears, by getting an elderly lawyer to violate his duty of…

The Guardian reports that "Murders in the US rose 10.8% last year, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, according to data released Monday by the FBI."

The House of Representatives is currently considering legislation passed by the Senate that would change the law of foreign sovereign immunity in order to allow the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 attackers were citizens, for its supposed culpability.…

It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Harvey Mansfield's latest "Conversation with Bill Kristol" is a discussion of his wonderful 1993 book, America's Constitutional Soul. But I was all the more pleased to tune in and discover how Kristol begins their discussion: by comparing America's…

Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland joked about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday, saying it came "at a good time" for union workers since he was unable to cast the deciding vote in a March case that ended up in a 4-4 deadlock.

"It might may (sic) no difference, but for [Kentucky] and [West Virginia] can we get someone to ask [Sanders's] belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern…

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent outburst against Donald Trump has been roundly criticized by people of all political stripes. Insofar as her comments suggested a clear bias about cases that could come before the Supreme Court, they were clearly a mistake and a departure from the norms of Court…

Last month a federal district judge in Wyoming invalidated an Interior Department rule setting stricter standards for hydraulic fracturing ("fracking," in commin parlance) on public lands. The decision dealt a blow to the Obama administration's environmental agenda, and news coverage focused on…

In this week's issue, venturing a thumbnail sketch of Justice Thomas's brand of constitutional interpretation, I noted a significant difference between Justice Thomas and other conservative "originalists": Unlike many "first-generation" originalists, Thomas expressly interprets the Constitution as…

Virginia Republicans are considering efforts to block Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe’s new executive order restoring the voting rights of the state's former felons. McAuliffe's order, announced on Friday, would give nearly 206,000 violent and nonviolent convicts who have served their time the…

Reviews and News:

The literary critic Edmund Wilson was ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but he didn't doubt Lincoln's genius as a writing man. "Alone among American Presidents," Wilson wrote, "it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with Adam J. White, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, on replacing the late Justice Scalia.

As Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott spoke with evident pride about how many times he’d sued the federal government. The total came to 31, and invariably the lawsuits challenged actions that Abbott believed violated federal statutes or the Constitution. Now, as Texas governor, he is no longer in…

At first she was the “Aunt From Hell,” with an #AuntFrom-Hell hashtag to match. Jennifer Connell, age 54, had sued her young nephew, Sean Tarala, for $127,000 over an incident at the boy’s eighth birthday party in 2011. Sean had impetuously jumped into Connell’s arms to greet her when she arrived…

Oh, holy Moses. It’s probably the headline of the year, and possibly even of the millennium. From Haaretz, November 23: “Jewish Law Was Never Meant to Be Set in Stone.”

Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important cases this term. In 2008 Fisher, a white high school senior in Texas, applied for admission to the university and was turned down. She sued the school, claiming that its…

President Obama used the terror attack in California this week to push gun control. In his weekly address, Obama called the massacre an "act of terror" but then pivoted to talking about American gun laws.

Is John Roberts a good judge? Ten years ago, President Bush appointed him chief justice of the United States. His anniversary, coinciding with the Supreme Court’s reconvening last month, naturally caused lawyers, scholars, and politicians to reflect upon his legacy on the Supreme Court.

What’s the biggest domestic public policy success of the last two generations? In our view, it’s the plummeting crime rate that began with a changed approach to crime in the Reagan years.

I first learned of Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett on Twitter—fittingly—in 2013, when he asked me for a copy of my then-Twitter header image of the U.S. Supreme Court justices holding Care Bears (except Justice Scalia, who is photoshopped holding broccoli). Since that time, I've had the…

In 1878, William Gladstone described the U.S. Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” Gladstone was right.

In a Labor Day speech, Hillary Clinton promised that, when she is president:

A top Democratic believes President Obama may break the law to implement the Iran deal. The Democrat is Brad Sherman, a congressman from California, who made the comments after meeting with Obama personally about the Iran deal.

In Africa today, President Obama said that he think he's a "pretty good president." So good, indeed, that if he ran for a third term, he "could win." But he cannot, he acknowledged, because it's against the law.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made news recently, when she said—bragged, it seemed—that she and her fellow liberals on the Court were going out of their way to stifle their individual voices in high-profile cases. When the liberals find themselves on the losing side of a case, she explained, they…

Look, it's not the end of the world.  

Justice Anthony Kennedy, while dictating one of the most sweeping social changes in history in his opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage across America, waxes magnanimous towards foes of the expansion of the millennia-old definition of marriage. He said those who…

President Obama wants Congress to send the trade bill to his desk. Right away.

In a speech today in South Korea, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Internet "needs rules to be able to flourish and work properly." This, according to Kerry, is necessary even for "a technology founded on freedom."

Democratic senator Sherrod Brown is subtly accusing President Barack Obama of sexism in his attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren, also a Democrat. 

There are almost no Republican donors teaching at Harvard Law School. Ninety-eight percent of the political donations from faculty go to Democrats. 

Bill Kristol, chairman of the Emergency Committee for Israel, has released a statement calling on senators to strengthen the Corker-Cardin Iran bill:

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal talked about religious liberty on NBC's Meet the Press this morning:

Commentators have exposed how bad the Iran deal is in various ways; the point, however, is to kill it.

Less than four months ago, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice had concluded that the transgendered are among the classes of persons protected, unbeknownst to the framers of the legislation at the time, by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Tuesday's press…

Senator Ben Sasse has introduced a law to eliminate the amnesty tax bonuses, according to a press release from his office.

Hillary Clinton's internal review of her personal email account did not involve opening and reading each piece of mail, according to a report in Time magazine.

Under federal election law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate with the super PACs that support them. But since Hillary Clinton is not yet an official candidate, she's been coordinating with Correct the Record, a project of the Democratic-aligned super PAC American Bridge 21st Century.

Chief Justice Roberts has said he likes mystery novels; once, as a lower-court judge, he invoked Sherlock Holmes's "dog that didn't bark." But at the King v. Burwell arguments, Roberts himself was in effect the dog that didn't bark, saying far less than expected and thus leaving reporters to puzzle…

The revelation that Hillary Clinton used a private email address for most if not all of her official internal correspondence is raising all sorts of questions.  According to widespread reporting, Mrs. Clinton turned over some 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago, long after…

Hillary Clinton is under increasing pressure for her exclusive use of a personal email address during her four years as secretary of state. In October 2011, Mrs. Clinton was interviewed by Savannah Guthrie of NBC's Today Show, and Guthrie asked about her personal email address. While Mrs. Clinton…

A CNN reporter, citing experts, said that Hillary Clinton broke the law by using her personal email account to conduct official State Department business while she was secretary of state.

MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell responded this evening one his show to reports that Hillary Clinton only used a private, non-governmental email address while secretary of state:

In a readout to the press, the White House described President Obama's meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus earlier today.

If you are a German and fancy Pegida, or a Brit and fancy UKIP, or a Frenchman and enjoy marching with the National Front, it’s a reasonable guess that you don’t like immigrants. If you’re an American, the story is different. There is a lady in the harbor to welcome the legal ones and a man in the…

The White House has argued that President Obama's executive amnesty order last week was made well within the existing law. But in remarks in Chicago tonight, President Obama went off script and admitted that in fact he unilaterally made changes to the law.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan officiated a same-sex marriage over the weekend, the Associated Press reports. It was her first.

President Obama was asked whether he'll be delaying executive action on immigration until after the mid-term election. He told reporters he was still reviewing options but that he's going to act "within the legal constraints of my office."

Possible 2016 presidential candidate Chris Christie refused speak out against the police in Ferguson, Missouri, following the ongoing unrest there.

"A lot of the liberal commentary about this week’s D.C. Circuit decision on Obamacare is hard to square with the way liberal judges have tended to approach these cases," notes Ramesh Ponnuru. "I have in mind the commentators who say the decision is 'corrupt,' its theory 'preposterous,' and the…

In making the case for closing tax loopholes used by corporations, President Obama says in his weekly address that the American people "don't get to pick which rules you play by." Neither should corporations, Obama argues. 

In the past week alone, President Obama has twice been rebuked by the Supreme Court for having run afoul of the Constitution (a 9-0 decision) or federal law (5-4).  Unchastened, he brazenly picked the very day that the second decision was announced to reassert the Obama Doctrine — namely, that if…

The IRS comissioner insists his agency did not break the law or relevant statutes. But under questioning by Rep. Trey Gowdy, the IRS commissioner also admitted that he doesn't know the law or the relevant statutes:

If there is any realm of policy that the American Founders were most firmly committed to having be decided by the most representative branch — the Congress — it was presumably the realm of taxation.  Those who wrote the Constitution were not content even to let the Senate initiate tax policy. …

Harry Reid on when the White House notified Congress of the Bergdahl-Taliban swap: "What difference does it make?"

From 2005 through 2008, legal scholars and Democratic politicians heaped relentless scorn upon the Bush administration for arguing that the president's constitutional commander-in-chief powers superseded statutes that might limit his discretion. And so it is quite interesting to watch the Obama…

Among the questions being raised about this weekend's exchange of  Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five top Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo is why Congress was not informed of the move ahead of time. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Meet the Press on Sunday that concerns over the health and…

Talking today with law enforcement officials at the White House, President Obama said changes to immigration law is necessary "for our safety and security."

This week, the Supreme Court affirmed a New York town council's tradition of beginning its meetings with a prayer. In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the court held, by a bare majority, that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause does not prohibit such prayers led by local clergymen, even when the…

It is becoming increasingly apparent that President Obama’s notion of governance is that federal laws should be passed to cover as much of human life as possible, and that he should then decide which of those laws to enforce, when, and against whom.  The latest example of Obama’s selective…

It is becoming increasingly hard to tell whether Obamacare is the law of the land, or just the law of the parts of the land that don’t reside in (or aren’t in the good graces of) the executive branch.  One wonders:  Is it really too much to expect an administration that championed the passage of a…

PHOENIX — In the waiting room of Maricopa County’s Tent City Jail, a weathered screen flashes red, green and yellow words with a euphoric fireworks effect worthy of an early 2000s Word document.

In school, a child who gets a 67 percent will generally get a D.  But for Obamacare, 67 percent is apparently grounds for an A.  Talk about grading on a curve.

The wrecking ball swung again toward the crumbling Obamacare edifice yesterday. Ironically, it continues to be the Obama administration that is operating the heavy machinery.

A recent AP/GfK poll shows that a majority of Americans, 55 percent, disapprove of how Barack Obama is handling the Iran issue. There’s good reason for skepticism about Iranian intentions—after all, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif threatens that if the interim deal agreed to on November 24 in…

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…

Democratic congressman Nick Rahall says he voted for the Keep Your Health Plan Act because President Obama's Obamacare fix lacked the "legal underpinning" he believes is necessary:

Remember back (a few short weeks ago) when the Democrats were arguing that Obamacare was the law of the land, that it hadn’t been struck down by the Supreme Court (as if avoiding that ignominious fate by a razor-slim 5-4 vote were a selling point), and that Republicans—and the American people—just…

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reported last week that in 2011, the IRS paid out $3.6 billion in fraudulent refunds on tax returns filed by identity thieves.  Even that amount was an improvement over the previous year when the total fraud was $5.2 billion.  However,…

“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.”

It looks like labor unions might be getting tax relief from Obamacare, according to a report from kaiserhealthnews.org.

Beginning with a speech last Thursday, President Obama is seeking to rejuvenate his administration's push to alter immigration laws and perhaps draw some attention away from the Obamacare launch debacle that has been dominating the headlines for much of October. The day following that speech, a new…

Eugene Robinson makes the case for Obamacare by writing, essentially, that it is a done deal.  Time to get over it and move on.  This is a corollary of the "law of the land" argument, which asserts that the thing has been written in stone and those who are still opposed and favor repeal should quit…

Yesterday, President Obama signed a number of supposedly uncontroversial bills into law.

Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas has introduced a bill which, if it were put to a national referendum, could not lose.  The title alone makes it a sure winner:

Despite a law passed 15 years ago, some Internal Revenue Service employees continue to use the designation "Illegal Tax Protester" and other similar designations in their case narratives, according to an audit just released by TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration). While the IRS…

The latest sequester victim: lawyers. As of September 1, court-appointed panel attorneys for the federal defender program will be hit with a $15/hour reduction in compensation.  The following announcement appeared Monday on the United States Courts website:

Vice President Joe Biden met with law enforcement officials and delivered a statement on immigration. Via the pool report:

As Jonathan V. Last observed earlier today, the George Zimmerman trial illustrates the immense power and discretion afforded to state and federal prosecutors.

We're way past overload on Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman commentary, but there is a tiny tributary of the story that has been largely overlooked. And it's worth a moment because it points to a larger problem regarding both the state and the public.

Asiana Airlines released a statement this morning saying it in fact will not sue TV station KTVU for falling for a prank and announcing the wrong names of captains of plane that crashed in San Francisco. The airline had previously said it intended to sue.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told a Fox News reporter to "read the Federal Register" in response to whether the president had the authority to change parts of the Obamacare law:

Democratic senator Tom Harkin, who's retiring at the end of this term, had some blunt words for the Obama administration over the recent change to Obamacare. "This was the law. How can they change the law?"

Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York after getting caught seeing prostitutes, believes the world's oldest profession should remain illegal:

The Obama administration has announced that it's delaying Obamacare's employer mandate—but not the individual mandate. The Obama administration's solicitude for big business apparently doesn't extend to workers and families and individuals.

In a blatant exercise of arbitrary rule, the Obama administration announced this evening that it has unilaterally decided not to implement a key provision of Obamacare on schedule.  By law, Obamacare’s employer mandate — its requirement that businesses with 50 or more workers provide federally…

Hofstra University Law School has released a press release celebrating a settlement its "Occupy Wall Street Clinic" reached with the City of New York over "a protester who sustained injuries while being arrested at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration." 

In a mid-year report to Congress, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson weighed in on the controversy surrounding the IRS's review of exempt organization (EO) applications. The Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) "is an independent organization within the IRS and helps taxpayers resolve problems…

The boss last night on Fox News:

The inspector general who filed the report on the IRS targeting conservatives and former IRS commissioner agree: The law is relevant. The statements were made at a hearing today on Capitol Hill:

Corporate governance is a much-discussed topic, and the operation of corporations has proven a fertile field for investigative journalism. But even though many colleges and universities are multibillion-dollar-a-year operations, the subject of university governance has been largely neglected. This…

Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer was asked on TV this morning whether he thinks the IRS actions violated the law:

Mother Jones, the liberal magazine that somehow obtained audio of a private Mitch McConnell campaign meeting, now wonders whether the top Republican in the Senate is breaking the law. The direct accusation is that Senate staffers did work to help McConnell's reelection, which if done on official…

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…

President Obama has grown fond of saying that he’s “not a dictator,” “not a king,” and “not the emperor,” but is instead “the president.”  Whether his tendency to clarify a seemingly obvious point reveals his inner desires or not, his actions in a variety of ways suggest that he doesn’t think the…

The other day, Vice President Joe Biden revealed that he told his wife to fire warning shots off their balcony if an intruder were near. "If there's ever a problem," Biden said he told his wife, Jill, "just walk out on the balcony here--walk out, put that double barrel shot gun and fire two blasts…

The relationship between lobbyists and legislators is a delicate subject and cloaked in language that is meant to obscure and confuse. But the lobbyist is always looking to get something for his client and sweet reason is not necessarily sufficient to make the case.  There are legislators who…

It’s an old basketball adage that teams that apply a full-court press don’t like to be pressed themselves. They like to force the action, not have it forced on them.  In a similar vein, those who seek to centralized power by spearheading the passage of new federal laws generally don’t like to obey…

A New York appellate court has ruled that the New York Times's request for a list of gun owners in New York City, under the Freedom of Information Law, violates the state's statute. The ruling overturns in part a lower court's ruling.

If Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is found guilty of traveling to the Dominican Republic to engage in sexual intercourse with underage prostitutes, he could face up to 30 years prison. The appropriate law, which would seem to apply in this instance, is the Prosecutorial Remedies And Other Tools…

Have you heard much about President Obama’s $787,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” (now estimated to cost $831,000,000,000) lately?  In its last report, published in 2011, the president’s own Council of Economic Advisors released an estimate showing that, for every $317,000 in “stimulus” spending…

President Barack Obama has signed a law that will allow cash prizes to be offered for information leading to the arrest of some foreign criminals, the White House announced. The law is officially called the "Department of State Rewards Program Update and Technical Corrections Act of 2012."

We are in the midst of a crisis of federalism and we don’t even know it. In November, the states of Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use, while 16 other states and Washington, D.C., already permitted the medical use of marijuana. Yet at the same time, the Controlled…

Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York is saying that "now ... is that time to have a serious about gun control," in response to the shooting today in Connecticut.

Early this morning, the Hill reported that the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is relying on a private company — a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group — to play a central role in establishing and running Obamacare’s insurance “exchanges.”  As the Hill writes, the…

The $831,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” that President Obama spearheaded and signed into law requires his administration to release quarterly reports on its effects.  But “the most transparent administration in the history of our country” is now four reports behind schedule and has so far not…

A new study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce finds that, when it comes to “threatening or disruptive behavior,” union members have far more rights—or, at least, far more license—than their fellow Americans. The Chamber's study, “Sabotage, Stalking, and Stealth Exemptions: Special State Laws for…

If you want to get some sense of where the economy is heading, don’t ignore what the courts are doing. No need to repeat much of what you have heard—some of it may be true—about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a.…

Obamacare survives on June 28, 2012. It falls on November 6, 2012.

Attorney General Eric Holder avoided commenting on the Fast and Furious scandal in Boston today. The Boston Herald reports:

Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano celebrated the Supreme Court's Arizona decision in a statement. But Napolitano expressed concern in a statement that a key component of the law, which allows law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of folks who are…

Last year, the mega-law firm Dewey & LeBouef generated revenue totaling $782 million. It was the 20th largest firm according to the National Law Journal. Its clients included the Los Angeles Dodgers, the NFL Players Association, and eBay. But over the last five months, 206 of its partners defected.…

The New York Times gushingly describes how President Obama’s unique background — he’s “a man from many worlds,” “a transcender of tribes,” and, yes, “a former constitutional law professor” — has allowed him to unearth a creative “middle way” on the question of redefining marriage.  That “middle…

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…

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

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.

The solicitor general had an interesting morning. He argued before the Supreme Court's nine justices that Obamacare's individual mandate isn't a "tax"—even though he'll argue tomorrow that the mandate is a "tax." And then the government's top litigator invoked the possibility of incompetent…

The U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear a challenge to the Obamacare ruling issued by a 3-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.  That appellate court panel struck down Obamacare’s individual mandate but not the rest of the legislation, despite the White House’s assertion that…

When Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu suffered concussion-like symptoms in a recent NFL game, he did what any decent husband might do: He walked to the sideline and called his wife Theodora to tell her he was fine. Polamalu, like so many football players, has a long history of concussions,…

Indiana state supreme court justice Steven David, a recent appointee of Governor Mitch Daniels, authored a 3-2 opinion that openly admits to overturning several centuries of common law understanding. At issue was this question: If police officers attempt to unlawfully enter the home of a free…

The Wall Street Journal:

Schools for Misrule Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America by Walter Olson Encounter, 296 pp., $25.95

It's a surprise to see a New York Times columnist call for a restoration of the Constitution in Exile. It's an even bigger surprise to see that the columnist is Linda Greenhouse.

Legal activist groups filed an extraordinary lawsuit yesterday to prevent the U.S. military and CIA from undertaking the "targeted killing" of persons suspected of posing a terrorist threat to the U.S. The filers are asking the court to block not merely the targeted killing of U.S. citizens…

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…