5.5 Hours of Argument Time!
** UPDATED at 5:51PM on 11/14/11 to address questions about what the Court’s oral argument grant may signify regarding its likely decision on the merits As SCOTUSblog reports, and to nobody’s surprise,...
View ArticleWhat if the Supreme Court Struck Down the Individual Mandate?
Less than a year ago, in Henry Hudson’s courtroom in Richmond, challengers to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) scored their first victory. At the time, Luke Norris and I speculated about what might...
View ArticleKrugman at the Margin
A recent blog post by Paul Krugman makes an economic argument that I find puzzling. Though the analysis is pretty elementary and therefore presumably easy for him, I think he’s dead wrong under his own...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Harvard Law Revue’s Warped Sense of Humor, Pre-War Edition
Cover of the May 4, 1940 issue of the Harvard Law Revue In the spring of 1992, controversy erupted at Harvard Law School over the law review staff’s annual parody edition, the Harvard Law Revue, which...
View ArticleDo SNL Writers Read Just Enrichment?
Those who remember my post about the ample representation of nonwhite, nonmale judges in movies and on television might like Steve Buscemi’s monologue from last night’s Saturday Night Live. In the...
View ArticlePublic Interest Lawyering?
“What should a wholly selfless young attorney do with herself?” Discussions about legal careers typically distinguish first and foremost between public interest work and private practice; for example,...
View ArticleTexas’s Brief Opposing Supreme Court Review in Fisher v. University of Texas
Two months ago, I wrote about the procedural defects I saw in the Texas affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas. At the time, I made a prediction: It is perhaps no surprise that the...
View ArticleThe Fisher Plaintiffs: Where Are They Now?
Following up on my post last week about Texas’s cert. opposition brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, I wanted to highlight Texas’s status updates on the two plaintiffs – and the unconventional...
View ArticleRecess Appointments of Federal Judges
Does the Constitution permit recess appointments of federal judges? On Wednesday President Obama announced his recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a...
View ArticleThe Roberts Court, Ideology, and Statistics
They say you can prove anything with statistics, but I’m not so sure. An article in Sunday’s New York Times presents a recent ACS study that purports to challenge the “conventional wisdom” that the...
View ArticleAll Quiet on the Fisher Front
UPDATE: The Court once again did not consider Fisher at its last conference. The waiting continues. * * * All those Fisher fans out there might be wondering what it means that the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Justice Alito on Originalism in US v. Jones
An Originalist GPS? I’ll leave analysis of the Fourth Amendment implications of United States v. Jones to people who know a lot more than I do. But one interesting aspect of the decision that caught my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
True Friends Don’t Need Invitations: The Solicitor General as Amicus
I recently published a Comment in The Yale Law Journal criticizing the Solicitor General’s Office for petitioning for Supreme Court review in as few as fifteen cases per year. The Comment questions...
View ArticleWhy the Supreme Court Might Not Grant Cert in the Prop 8 Case
The conventional analysis among legal commentators seems to be that the Supreme Court will inevitably have the final word on Prop 8, in the wake of the 9th Circuit’s recent decision striking down the...
View ArticleNavigating the Jurisdictional Thicket Around Fisher v. University of Texas
Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to review the affirmative-action case Fisher v. University of Texas, it will have to leap the procedural hurdles that Texas raised in its brief in opposition and...
View ArticleThe Case That Could Decide Fisher’s Fate
Fisher has arrived, bringing with it the noisy public debate over affirmative action that Grutter had hushed for what turned out to be only a brief interregnum. Commentators are understandably focused...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Commenters Who Disagree with This Post Will Be Monitored by Drones
Photo by Alex Gibney In January, the New Yorker ran a story about an Army-veteran-turned-radical-art-school-student who has posted about a dozen signs around New York City “designed to look as if...
View ArticleLamenting an Argument Lost, for Now
In a few days, the U.S. Supreme Court will play host to a momentous showdown over the powers of the federal government. The courtroom is not large, with room for just 400 or so, sending Washington...
View ArticleApplying to College? Say Cheese!
The 2003 affirmative action decisions, Grutter and Gratz, struck a classic O’Connor compromise. The predetermined point allocations for minority applicants in Gratz were unconstitutional because they...
View ArticlePolitical Campaigns Learning from Political Scientists
While I was studying political science in college, my adviser, Alan Gerber, published a paper recounting a novel voter-turnout technique involving “social pressure” that, as he and his co-authors...
View ArticleThe Case That Didn’t Spell Fisher’s Fate
Back in March, I called Knox v. SEIU “the case that could decide Fisher’s fate.” It could have. But it didn’t. To review, after the Court granted cert. in Knox, the respondent labor union attempted to...
View ArticleCert. Granted in Case on Mootness
A lurking question in some of my prior posts on Fisher v. University of Texas is whether Fisher could prevent Texas from mooting the case by refusing to accept Texas’s offer of full judgment ($100, or,...
View ArticleThe Health Care Back Story, Up for Grabs
Once the health care rulings are parsed and dissected, one question will remain: what internal deliberation brought the Court to this fractured, rather unexpected set of opinions? As Linda Greenhouse...
View ArticleJan Crawford for the Coup
On Thursday, I predicted that the back story to the health care decision would “stand as the biggest potential coup for Court reporters for some time.” Because four days counts as “some time,” let’s...
View ArticleLogical Impossibility and Burdens of Proof
In a case decided yesterday by the Tenth Circuit, a jury found a man (“Shippley”) guilty of conspiring to distribute at least 50 grams of methamphetamine, 500 grams of cocaine, or any quantity of...
View Article