The Supreme Court has ruled, by a 5-4 vote, in favor of Wisconsin Right to Life, which had been embroiled in long struggle with the Federal Election Commission over ads the anti-abortion group was prevented from broadcasting. The spots would have asked voters to urge Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl not to filibuster Bush’s […]

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Apparently, the Supreme Court justice grounds his reasoning on vital constitutional questions in what he’s learned from pop action shows: The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” […]

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Scott Lemieux observes that (contra what many suggest) there’s no reason to expect Supreme Court decisions weakening Roe to simply “throw it back to the states”—as the very law at issue in the recent ruling demonstrates pretty clearly. Because, as we all know, terminating a pregnancy, like growing pot for personal use in your backyard, […]

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An interesting point from Ezra as an afterthought on his recent appearance at Cato: Towards the close of the event, someone in the audience argued that moving towards a national system would hugely retard medical innovation. I never understand the evidence for this claim. A huge amount of the tech advances come from public institutions […]

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In response to today’s Supreme Court ruling in Philip Morris v. Mayola, which threw out a $79 million punitive damage award against the tobacco giant (now going by Altria), both Chris Hayes at The Nation and Scott Lemieux at TAPped note a split between the court’s conservative justices: Alito and Roberts joined the majority, while […]

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Sick, sick, sick. Ezra links to a report from Human Rights Watch on prison rape, including the first-person account of a man doing time for DUI offenses who was serially gang-raped and essentially told by prison officials that they couldn’t (read “wouldn’t”) do anything about it. Their best advice? Find a tough guy you can […]

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If you’re interested in constitutional interpretation (and, really, who isn’t?), you’ve got to be practically giddy about a debate between Justices Breyer and Scalia on jurisprudential theory: Audio and video are available at the Federalist Society website. If you don’t have time for the full hour and a half now, there’s a four-minute appetizer excerpt […]

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The Washington Post‘s “Bench Conference” blogger Andrew Cohen is sorely vexed by an “atrocious,” “shrill” article on Kelo and eminent domain in Parade. Here’s Cohen: In some ways this hysteria isn’t surprising given the reaction last year’s big Supreme Court eminent domain ruling received from mainline journalists. The convention [sic] wisdom had it then (and […]

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We seem to be having yet another of our occasional, moronic flare ups of that perennial Kabuki fight, the flag burning debate, and today seems like as good a day as any to say something about it. Of course, there isn’t a whole lot to say—it’s a simple enough issue and the ground’s well covered—but […]

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I was once again invited to do my civic duty by going through the Brazil-esque process of juror selection at a courthouse in downtown D.C. today, and I found myself thinking of a quandary my friend Baylen Linnekin faced last year. A commited anti–Drug War activist, he’d had an opportunity to serve on a drug […]

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