Lawrence Lessig has published a long and thoughtful essay entitled, “Democracy After Citizens United” in the Boston Review. Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard University, is more commonly known for his legal and political work in the fields of copyright and trademark law, but lately has made reforming More…
So Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be President Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee. The emerging conventional wisdom is that Kagan, a rare nominee for the high court who hasn’t been a judge, is a very smart blank slate. On at least one category of issues that Kagan will face More…
CNN reports that former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) will be a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in the fall. Six years ago, Al Franken — the man who took Coleman’s job — had a similar gig at Harvard, as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center. Franken used More…
Amid the obstructionists’ claims that health care reform is “socialist” or a means of speeding Grandma towards her deathbed, a large focus of the conservative position on health care reform has been that frivolous lawsuits drive up health care costs and require doctors to practice “defensive medicine” that’s costly and More…
Glenn Thrush reports on how the National Republican Congressional Committee is attacking Democrats over President Obama’s comment that Sgt. Joseph Crowley and Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own home and then complaining about the police showing up to investigate. More…
So just who are those “civil liberties groups” that have encouraged the Obama administration to issue an executive order creating a system of prolonged preventive detention?
As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups More…
Here’s an insightful observation from Harper’s Scott Horton today about Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s latest defense of the academic freedom of John Yoo, who reportedly may be asked to leave his tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley if an internal Justice Department report finds More…
As expected, the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as solicitor general Thursday. Kagan, the first woman to hold the post, was confirmed by a vote of 61-31.
As I reported earlier, she had some vehement Republican critics. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made a point of noting, in More…
The nomination of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for solicitor general — the government’s top legal representative in cases before the Supreme Court — is now being debated on the Senate floor. The Senate is expected to vote on the nomination by the end of today.
Despite some tough questioning More…
“Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism,” asked Harvard law professor Noah Feldman in an op-ed in The New York Times today, “or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?”
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