October 03, 2008
Biden gets the Vice-Presidency wrong
I didn't watch the debate last night, but like the majority of Americans, I believe that it's no contest who is more qualified to be vice-president: Joe Biden. That said, Biden made a real mistake last night when discussing the vice-president's powers. In answer to Gwen Ifill's question about whether, as Dick Cheney once claimed, the VP is part of...
August 01, 2008
Why Everyone is Wrong About the New LA Fast-Food Ordinance
Lots of chatter over the last few days in the blogosphere about Los Angeles' new ordinance banning new fast-food restaurants in south LA. (Not "South Central": we don't call it that anymore). And everyone is wrong. My friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge, whose picture is in many dictionaries next to the word "curmudgeon", sees it as not-so-creeping nanny state-ism. So...
July 30, 2008
The Schwarzenegger v. Democrats Budget Showdown
Arnold Schwarzenegger has threatened to sign an executive order in 24 hours cutting state employees' pay to the minimum wage until a budget agreement is reached, i.e. until the Democrats cave to his demands. He says that he has the legal authority to do so. In response, state Controller John Chiang, who actually has the constitutional responsibility for cutting the...
July 24, 2008
July 22, 2008
July 15, 2008
May 19, 2008
What if California voters overturn the gay-marriage decision?
Many conservatives seem to believe that the California Supreme Court's recent decision mandating gay marriage constitutes some sort of threat to marriage and the Republic, and they are now attempting to place on the ballot a constitutional initiative to overturn it. And surely this would seem to do the trick: the Court can't say that an initiative amending the state...
March 21, 2008
March 06, 2008
February 12, 2008
The True Value of Legal Education: Lincoln's Birthday Edition
Today in my first-year Torts class we were covering causation, but I also assigned them Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in honor of Lincoln's Birthday. In the last five minutes, I began to talk about it, but then paused when I got a bunch of blank stares. So then I asked, "Okay--so why did I assign this today?" Silence. Then, one...
January 17, 2008
Pardon the Telecoms!
If George W. Bush really believes that the telecoms who broke the law by spying on Americans did so for patriotic motives, then why doesn't he just give them a blanket pardon for doing so? From a Bush Administration perspective, such a move has the extra advantage in that it can serve as another chapter in the Permanent Constitutional Crisis...
January 02, 2008
The DOJ-CIA Videotape Investigation: Morose Thought of the Day
I suppose that it's a good thing that Michael Mukasey has ordered a criminal probe into the CIA destruction (with White House approval) of the torture videotapes. And I suppose that it's also a good thing he has appointed someone who seems to be a career, professional, and very hard-headed prosecutor to the job. But I can't say that I...
October 14, 2007
Thinking like a lawyer
Sometimes legal reasoning is to reasoning as military music is to music. Why should law schools perform common-sense-ectomies on their students?
September 17, 2007
Chemerinsky Reinstated
Apparently, UCI Chancellor Drake has backed off and has reinstated Erwin Chemerinsky's appointment as the Dean of UCI's new law school. Good news for the political independence of universities and for southern California; bad news for us here at UCLA Law School, since we now have a new competitor. Drake can't seem to keep his foot out of his mouth,...
July 12, 2007
Tort Law 101: A Reply to Jane Galt
Jane Galt says that she is no lawyer. It shows. Responding to my post on the Bainbridge-Chemerinsky "debate," Jane takes issue with my assertion that if a company sells equipment to a government, knowing that that equipment will be used to commit egregious human rights abuses, it is not unreasonable to hold that company liable. Here's Jane: It seems to...
July 11, 2007
Bainbridge v. Chemerinsky: A High-Class Smackdown
I have a high-class set of friends. One, Steve Bainbridge (whom I'm also proud to have as a colleague), criticizes another, Erwin Chemerinsky (whom I wish were a colleague), about the latter's representation of the family of Rachel Corrie. Corrie was an American pro-Palestinian activist who was killed when she attempted to stop an IDF bulldozer from demolishing Palestinian homes...
July 10, 2007
The Gonzales Denounement--You Heard It Here First
Now that the Washington Post has revealed that Alberto Gonzales perjured himself while testifying before a Senate committee in 2005 (piling on top of his other perjuries), I will now offer the Ultimate Prediction on what will happen. Likely? No. But if it happens, you heard it here first: 1. The House of Representatives will impeach Gonzales. 2. The Senate,...
July 06, 2007
June 29, 2007
Cass Sunstein and Judicial Minimalism: The Blindness of the Brilliant
It's a little silly for me to criticize a scholar far more distinguished than myself (a large set), but Cass Sunstein's attempt to explain the Supreme Court's recent term shows that he may too enamored of a pet legal theory to engage in the best legal analysis. Sunstein has long contrasted "judicial minimalists" with "judicial visionaries." The former engage in...
June 22, 2007
The Solution to the Imperial Vice Presidency
By now it has made the rounds into the blogosphere that Dick Cheney has refused to comply with an executive order mandating disclosure of certain expenditures because, he claims, the Vice President isn't part of the executive branch--or, perhaps more precisely, the Vice Presidency has both executive and legislative functions and thus isn't really "in" either branch exclusively. This absurd...
June 01, 2007
Well, we got that right.
A year and a half ago I opined about Alito with more here. I feel like a tree full of owls after his petty and small-minded opinion in Ledbetter , and what's a blog for if not to preen a little. The holding bids us recall Anatole France's immortal The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as...
April 25, 2007
Hollow Hope
For those interested in the literature on law and politics, I have a long posting today (and a colloquy with Mark Graber) on Rosenberg's classic book, The Hollow Hope. Check it out, and while you're there look over Balkin's blog. It really has no equal in its chosen area....
January 13, 2007
With lawyers like this, who needs lawyer jokes?
The spectacularly despicable behavior of Cully Stimson, a lawyer in the Defense Department, who has publicly tried to get corporations to muscle law firms not to represent Guantanamo inmates by yanking their business, has been widely deplored in remarkably harsh terms. I'm not aware that he's facing disbarment yet, but I looked in the DC rules of professional conduct and...
December 02, 2006
Insulting speech in and out of schools
The speech restriction issue Mark takes up below does not seem to me to be as tractable as he makes it sound, especially outside schools in the larger society. And I don't think he pays enough attention to duties compared to rights in this context, especially as regards an operational definition of language that "insults other students"....
Insulting speech in schools
Schools should be allowed to prevent students from insulting one another. That's not a content-neutral rule.
September 26, 2006
"Justice courts" and their injustices
A depressing chronicle of petty tyranny, and a reminder of the futility of substantive rights without procedural protections and the tendency of unchecked discretion, exercised in secret, to invite abuse.
March 09, 2006
Sauces for Goose and Gander
Just a few days after the United States Supreme Court holds in FAIR v. Rumsfeld that the federal government may condition funding of universities on law schools' willingness to accept military recruiters on campus, the California Supreme Court holds that the city of Berkeley may refuse to provide subsidies to the Boy Scouts and other groups that discriminate against gays...
