Targeting Religion in Texas
Today a state district judge ordered that the more than 460 children who had been removed from a polygamist sect in Texas be returned to their families. The chief objects of official discussion so far...
View ArticleChinese Law in Confucian and Other Cultural Contexts
Over the past few days, I have been attending a conference in Ithaca on "Law in Context" that occurred as part of an ongoing collaboration between scholars at the Peking and Cornell University Schools...
View ArticleFrom the Executive to Administration
In an article entitled "Our Schmittian Administrative Law," recently posted on SSRN and forthcoming in HLR, Adrian Vermeule makes an extremely intriguing argument about the inevitability of so-called...
View ArticleHeaven's Border
Last night, I saw "The Edge of Heaven," the extremely well-executed second film in a trilogy by Turkish director Fatih Akin. The film concerns three parent-child pairs, all involving the only children...
View ArticleBoumediene and the Constitution's Common Law Backdrop
Among its many important pronouncements, Justice Kennedy's opinion in Boumediene took a significant step towards adopting a more historically nuanced approach to the common law backdrop of the...
View ArticleA Macbeth in Staccato
From the first lines of text delivered in rapid-fire Polish to the pervasive punctuation of gun fighting, the TR Warszawa Macbeth staged at an outdoor venue beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is characterized...
View ArticlePreserving the Right of Resistance
For a couple of weeks, I will be guest-blogging over at Prawfsblawg and will be cross-posting there. In light of Justice Scalia's insistence on the exceptional requirements of war in Boumediene, and...
View ArticleWhere Can Legal Academic Work Flourish?
I don’t really mean this as a metaphysical question. Recently, I have soured on the café as a venue for working. Despite—or perhaps because of—decades of addiction to caffeine, and despite a previously...
View ArticleDavis Through a Religious Liberty Lens
Last month, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called “millionaire’s amendment” to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a provision that had loosened campaign finance restrictions on opponents of...
View ArticleThe Virtual Conference Cocktail Party
After hearing of a fifteen-foot-high Cass Sunstein being stationed on a screen behind the other participants at a recent conference panel, I started to wonder whether virtual attendance at professional...
View ArticleSelective Exceptionalism?
Adam Liptak’s series on “American Exceptionalism” in the NY Times, the latest installment of which treats the exclusionary rule, connects in some counterintuitive ways with the relatively recent...
View ArticleThe Persistence of a Legal Fiction
I just finished writing an exceedingly brief review of Bradin Cormack’s A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 for Law and History. As often...
View ArticleHow Should an Originalist President Pardon?
The culmination of a presidency marked by as expansive a view of executive power as that of George W. Bush should be an expansive exercise of that most unchecked of executive capacities, the power to...
View ArticleForeign Authorities (Ancient and Modern)
When Senator Coburn today asserted, after asking Judge Sotomayor whether states have the right to determine the definition of death, that he did not actually expect her to answer the question, but...
View ArticleA Different Kind of Diversity
As Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island astutely observed, if confirmed, Judge Sotomayor will not only be the first Latina on the Supreme Court, but will also be the sole member of that body who has...
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