You know oral argument isn’t going well when a justice of the Court asks you to defend your decision not to throw in the towel already. Yet that is precisely what happened to Donna Andrieu, an assistant district attorney from New Orleans, charged with defending her office’s decision to withhold [...]
In October, the Nebraska State Democratic Party ran this advertisement. Seemingly innocuous, it closes with Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson registering his intent to oppose any attempts to weaken Social Security or Medicare. Senator Nelson’s appearance is what makes the advertisement exceptional. His decision to work directly with an outside group [...]
Turnaround for Children, a New York-based nonprofit, has been partnering directly with high-poverty schools and districts to transform the physical and emotional environments in which children spend the school day.
Judge Leon’s ruling reflects a legitimate doctrinal concern: even for a particularly disfavored type of commercial speech such as cigarette advertising, there are limits on the extent to which companies can be forced to serve as a conduit for government speech unrelated to the truth of their advertising and completely inimical to their own commercial interests.
This past Monday, Fourth Amendment watchers began gathering at the Supreme Court on the eve of oral argument in United States v. Jones. Narrowly, the case was to resolve a circuit split on whether law enforcement can surreptitiously place a GPS device on a car, and then monitor movements for [...]
Members of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical last Wednesday when asked to establish a new constitutional rule prohibiting the use of unreliable eyewitness testimony at criminal trials. Under existing law, unreliable eyewitness testimony is excludable only when the source of unreliability stems from police misconduct. In Perry v. New Hampshire, Public [...]
Arizona was back in the news last week with Governor Jan Brewer’s highly controversial move removing the chairwoman of the state’s “independent” redistricting committee. Seeing the process now corrupted by an ideologically aligned governor and legislature, what can the voters in Arizona to make the process more independent and more immune from partisan influence?
Whatever their excesses or ideological inconsistencies, they have clearly tapped into a widely felt discontent whose strength is manifested not so much by verbal communication as by the act of gathering together and providing a visible demonstration of solidarity and demographic strength. A stronger conception of the freedom of assembly would capture, better than courts’ current doctrine, the unique benefits which such a movement can bring to the process of American self-government.
In a succinct and persuasive paper entitled “If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online?“ David Jefferson explains why online voting is unrealistic. A computer scientist by trade—and chair of Verified Voting’s board of directors—Jefferson elaborates technical differences between purchasing textbooks on Amazon.com and registering your vote [...]
On Tuesday, Mississippi voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” The ballot initiative is the result of efforts by the anti-choice movement to ban abortion in the state and [...]
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