law
stcynic | July 17, 2006Radley Balko's long-awaited report on the militarization of local police departments, and the resulting tragedies, is now available on the Cato website. It's titled Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. You can download the full text in PDF format, or purchase a copy in book form. It's a frightening report, detailing the numerous tragedies that have resulted from botched raids by these paramilitary units.
stcynic | July 17, 2006Richard Epstein, the libertarian legal scholar from the University of Chicago, has an op-ed piece in yesterday's Chicago Tribune about the dangers of how Bush is using presidential signing statements. He points out how differently Bush is using them than his predecessors did:
There is nothing new about a president adding a "statement on signing" to legislation he has approved. Since the country was founded, presidents have used these statements for relatively innocuous purposes: to thank supporters, explain their support for the bill or express satisfaction--or dissatisfaction--with…
stcynic | July 12, 2006I'd never seen this court ruling from a Federal district judge in Texas until seeing it quoted in this post at Volokh. You think Scalia is blunt and pointed in his dissents? Wait till you see some of this ruling. He accuses the attorneys on both sides of having written their briefs "entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed." I'll post the full ruling below the fold:
Plaintiff brings this action for personal…
stcynic | July 12, 2006Christopher Patti, an attorney with the University of California, emailed me to correct my brief post on yesterday's ruling in CLS v Southern Illinois. Here I am, the guy who always tells people not to rely on media reports about court rulings because they so often get them wrong, and what do I do? Exactly what I tell others not to do. He was kind enough to point me to the actual court ruling, which shows that my brief description of the case was inaccurate.
The case did not deal only with the question of whether universities had to recognize religious student groups, but whether they had to…
stcynic | July 10, 2006As I said at the time, the search of William Jefferson's office on Capitol Hill was entirely constitutional. A Federal Judge has now confirmed that, rejecting arguments from lawmakers that the FBI violated the constitution's speech and debate clause when they searched his office with a legal warrant as part of an ongoing bribery investigation.
In a 28-page opinion, Hogan dismissed arguments that the first-ever raid on a congressman's office violated the Constitution's protections against intimidation of elected officials.
"Congress' capacity to function effectively is not threatened by…
stcynic | July 5, 2006Claude Vorhilon, better known as the head of the Raelian space cult, has had a libel suit he filed against a writer in Canada thrown out of court:
When laughing him off as a "scatterbrained swindler" and a "clown," an Ottawa columnist did not libel the man known as Rael, a Quebec Superior Court has ruled.
Dismissing an $85,000 damage suit against columnist Denis Gratton and Le Droit newspaper, Justice Maurice Larame said arguments by Claude Vorhilon, who calls himself Rael, are "airy-fairy."
"It is strange, to say the least, that Rael should be offended by terms used about him when they are…
stcynic | July 4, 2006Josh Claybourn of In The Agora has written a law review article on state laws against gay adoptions. Jason Kuznicki and I provided some constructive criticism of that article while he was working on it, for which he thanked us in the article. Sadly, the journal it was to be published in has gone under. Josh has now made a PDF of that article available on his website and I think it's well worth reading. He analyzes the application of precedent on the basis of four basic questions:
Do laws against gay adoptions violate substantive due process rights under a strict scrutiny review? Do they…
stcynic | June 30, 2006Reading and understanding court rulings can sometimes be difficult. When that ruling is 185 pages long and has multiple concurrences and dissents, it can be downright confusing. Sandefur has done us all a favor and posted a series of essays explaining what the ruling means over at Positive Liberty. Even if you've read the ruling, as I have most of it, this will likely help you understand what it all means. Here are the posts:
Part 1: The majority opinion
Part 2: Kennedy's concurring opinion
Part 3: Scalia's dissenting opinion
Part 4: Thomas' dissent
Part 5: Alito's dissent
stcynic | June 29, 2006The Oklahoma judge on trial for using a penis pump under his desk during trials was convicted of indecent exposure by a jury today. Several thoughts come to mind.
A. This gives a whole new meaning to "penal code".
B. I can't wait for the release of "Judges Gone Wild", taped at Mardi Gras.
C. If this guy threatened to throw the book at a defendant, it was probably the Kama Sutra.
D. If the universe had a sense of humor, this case would have ended in a hung jury.
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal. And don't forget to tip your waitresses.
stcynic | June 29, 2006Good ol' DaveScot is back (with a brand new dance) and this time he's blathering about jury nullification. The problem is that he doesn't seem to have a clue what jury nullfication is. What makes it even funnier is that he actually quotes the definition of jury nullification and then still doesn't understand what it means. Here's the definition he quoted, from Wikipedia's entry on the subject:
Jury nullification is a jury's refusal to render a verdict according to the law, as instructed by the court, regardless of the weight of evidence presented. Instead, a jury bases its verdict on other…
stcynic | June 29, 2006The Supreme Court today handed Bush a major defeat on the question of how to handle the detainees at Gitmo. In the case of Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the Court ruled 5-4 that the President did not have the authority to try those detainees by military tribunals. The ruling was 5-3, with Chief Justice Roberts having to recuse himself because he was part of the DC Circuit Appeals Court panel whose ruling was under consideration. Kennedy joined with Ginsburg, Souter, Stevens and Breyer in the majority decision, with Alito, Thomas and Scalia in dissent.
It's a very complex ruling that involves multiple…
stcynic | June 28, 2006The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun holding hearings on the issue of presidential signing statements. PSS are statements that the President signs along with a piece of legislation that gives his interpretation of certain provisions of the act. Such statements are not new, but Bush has used them more often than any other President in history, by a wide margin, and for increasingly deceptive intent. In principle there is nothing wrong with such statements, but if they essentially say that the President reserves the right to ignore those provisions he doesn't like, that's pretty obviously a…
stcynic | June 27, 2006Here's more reason to be skeptical about Bush's executive order last week concerning eminent domain. Radley Balko reports on the Cato blog that not only did the Bush administration refuse to file a brief on behalf of the property owners in Kelo, but it took a lot of lobbying from conservative groups to get them not to file a brief on behalf of the city.
stcynic | June 26, 2006You'll recall that last week, Sam Walker told Radley Balko that Scalia had gotten his research considerably wrong in his opinion in Hudson v Michigan. Walker has now written an op-ed piece for the LA Times making the same argument. That prompted Orin Kerr to argue that Walker's complaint is invalid because it's not dishonest for someone to cite a scholar on the facts while disagreeing with his solution:
Scalia cites Walker's book accurately about existing police practices, but then takes the normative position that in light of those changes there is no need to further expand the exclusionary…
stcynic | June 25, 2006After the elections in Alabama recently, I mentioned that Roy Moore had lost in the primaries in his attempt to become governor of the state. But I forgot to mention that the entire slate of Moore candidates lost, not just thim. There were 4 men running for spots on the state Supreme Court who were Moore clones, all of them claiming that state judges and elected officials can ignore Federal court rulings if they disagree with them. All 4 of them lost. Perhaps there is sanity left in Alabama yet.
stcynic | June 21, 2006Wow, this is pretty big news and Balko found it. In last week's Hudson ruling, Scalia makes the following argument as a reason why it was not necessary for the judiciary to enforce the knock and announce rule because there are safeguards in place within the law enforcement community to take care of the problem:
Another development over the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline. Even as long ago as 1980 we felt it proper to "assume" that unlawful police behavior would "be…
stcynic | June 21, 2006Phyllis Schlaffly is sort of the old faithful of conservatism - you can count on her to say something stupid every 10 minutes. Her latest stupidity comes from an Agape Press article about Chief Justice John Roberts and the fact that she's already disappointed in him. Now, that's no surprise to me. I said during his confirmation hearing that those on the right who think Roberts is going to be another Scalia are going to be disappointed. Roberts will be fairly solid conservative vote, but he is not an ideologue and he's not a bomb-thrower; Scalia is both. So the fact that Schlaffly is…
stcynic | June 20, 2006The Thomas More Law Center, representing a group called San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial, has been rejected by a judge in its attempt to intervene in a 17 year old lawsuit against the government that demands the removal of a giant cross from public property. Regardless of one's opinion on whether the cross should be removed or not (and frankly I don't much care either way), you just have to laugh at the absolute absurdity of the TMLC thinking that they had any chance of intervening in the case. And you have to laugh even harder at the fact that they say they're going to…
stcynic | June 19, 2006For those who think libertarians are nothing more than, as one wag put it, conservatives who like porn, this exchange demonstrates otherwise. Situations like the Hudson v Michigan court ruling last week put libertarians and conservatives squarely at odds with one another, which is why the National Review is busy defending the decision while the Cato Institute is hammering it. Andrew McCarthy - no, not the one from St. Elmo's Fire - is a former prosecutor defending the ruling and Radley Balko is responding to him. And I think you'll agree that Balko is pretty much dominating this debate. I…