Supreme Court
May 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
At the moment I am listening to the ostentatiously liberal Judge Mark Bennett of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa summarize the Supreme Court’s employment law decisions of the past year. Judge Bennett wants us to know that he has got his mind right (i.e., left), and how. I understood that from his disparagement of the conservative Supreme Court justices as “the usual suspects.” That
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March 30, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In an excellent Wall Street Journal column James Taranto holds out hope that the Supreme Court is on the verge of ending the regime of racial discrimination that it has licensed in higher education. I hope Taranto is right, but I think pessimism is warranted. I’m taking the liberty of reiterating my own observations on the subject below. The principle of equal treatment without regard to race is one that
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March 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Having listened on C-SPAN to the oral argument in the DOMA case, I believe the Supreme Court will hold DOMA unconstitutional if it reaches the merits. Presumably, the Court’s four liberal Justices would reach that conclusion. And Justice Kennedy seems ready to join them. Kennedy’s questioning of Paul Clement, who was defending DOMA on behalf of the House leadership, demonstrated considerable concern that DOMA constitutes an unwarranted intrusion by the
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March 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Today, the Supreme Court hears oral argument in U.S. v. Windsor. The case presents the question of whether the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is constitutional. The U.S. government argues that DOMA, enacted by Congress with broad support and signed into law by President Clinton, is unconstitutional. The case also presents issues of jurisdiction and standing. Specifically, the Court is called to decide whether the Obama administration’s unwillingness to
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March 26, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Elahe Izadi at the National Journal suggests that a Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution confers the right to same-sex marriage would help the Republican Party. I agree. Public sentiment seems to be moving rapidly in favor of requiring the state to recognize same-sex marriages. This leaves Democratic candidates increasingly free to “come out of the closet” on this issue and embrace the emerging view. On the other hand, Republican
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March 26, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The transcript of the oral argument in the Prop 8 case is now available. So is the audio. I haven’t reviewed either yet. Ed Whelan has. His review finds him “much more optimistic than some commentators that the Court will find that Prop 8 proponents have standing and will vote to uphold Prop 8.”
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March 26, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Tom Goldstein, as shrewd an observer of the Supreme Court as anyone I’m aware of, believes that the Court “probably will not have the five votes necessary to get to any result at all, and almost certainly will not have five votes to decide the merits of whether Proposition 8 is constitutional.” The Court could avoid reaching the merits by deciding that the defenders of Prop 8 lack standing to
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March 22, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Michael McConnell is a distinguished scholar, law professor (currently at Stanford Law School, my alma mater) and jurist (he served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit). He is also a friend of Power Line which, I understand, he started reading back in 2002, our first year. McConnell has written a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the two same-sex marriage cases the Supreme Court will hear next
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March 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
This month, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which presents the issue of whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the State of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. I wrote here about the Obama administration’s brief arguing that California’s definition is unconstitutional. And I will probably have more to say about the case as it
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March 1, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, the Obama Administration filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. The brief does not explicitly endorse a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Rather, it argues that “Proposition 8’s denial of marriage to same-sex couples, particularly where California at the same time grants same-sex partners all the substantive rights of marriage, violates equal protection.” “Prejudice,” the Justice Department sniffs,
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December 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The distinguished jurist Robert Bork has died at the age of 85. Roger Kimball recalls him here, noting with understatement that the Left’s scorched-earth opposition to his Supreme Court nomination was “obscene.” I have a long account of it in The Age of Reagan, but the core of the matter is this: “George Will was not alone in calling Bork ‘the most intellectually distinguished nominee since Felix Frankfurter.’ That was
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October 31, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia visits Uncommon Knowledge for a wide ranging interview including “the living Constitution,” Roe v. Wade, the constitutionality of the death penalty, the proper reading of the Second Amendment, and the true meaning of stare decisis. The occasion of Justice Scalia’s appearance is the publication of his new book, written with Bryan Garner: Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. At one point in the conversation,
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October 16, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about the oral argument in the Fisher case, a challenge to the University of Texas’s use of race to admit Black and Hispanic undergraduate applicants who otherwise would be rejected under its standard admissions criteria. In this post, I want to explore one important aspect of that case. The University of Texas ensures the admission of a reasonably large numbers of minorities by guaranteeing entrance to anyone
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October 11, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument Fisher v. University of Texas. The case involves a challenge to the university’s use of race to admit Black and Hispanic undergraduate applicants who otherwise would be rejected under its standard admissions criteria. Given the liberality of the University of Texas’s standard criteria, it is absurd that the university indulges in such racial preferences. The university already ensures the admission of large numbers
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October 8, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
With the Supreme Court set to hear argument this week on the use of racial preferences in student admissions by state universities, the deans of Harvard and Yale law schools ( Martha Minow and Robert Post) defend this practice in a Washington Post op-ed. Part of the defense consists, as usual, of touting the supposed virtues of a “diverse” student body. We have written about this tired, disingenuous argument in
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September 16, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about Judge Richard Posner’s book review of Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. In that post, I linked to Ed Whelan’s five part take down of Posner’s review, which revealed it to be a rather crude hatchet job. Posner himself was, if anything, even more revealing during an interview earlier this summer conducted by NPR’s Nina Totenberg. According to
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September 7, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I have long admired Richard Posner, both as a jurist and a thinker. With the possible exception of Bill James, I can’t think of a writer of non-fiction whose work I have read more of. Posner’s latest published work is a review of
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