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The Supremes Take On Gay Marriage

December 12, 2012 by

I hated Con Law in law school. It wasn’t the results that I minded so much. At the time we were still in the afterglow of the Warren Court’s expansion of individual rights. The Court was in sync with the civil rights movement. It had recently struck down, for example, the laws prohibiting racial intermarriage that were still on the books in sixteen states. What I hated about Con Law was the attempt by professors to explain Supreme Court decisions as the logical application of legal principles, when it was pretty clear many were just result oriented political decisions. Ideology cloaked as legal reasoning. If you wanted to strike down a state law on equal protection grounds, you applied strict scrutiny. If you didn’t, you applied a rational relationship test. More...
 

Can the Law Catch Up with Technology?

November 27, 2012 by

In April of this year I had coffee with a neighbor I was interviewing for an article in the Dilworth Quarterly, a neighborhood newsletter for which I contribute occasional feature pieces. Like most of my coffee dates with interview subjects, we swapped stories, found some common ground, and fig ured out a way to bring a Dilworth aspect to the piece, which was a little challenging since the article’s focus was my neighbor’s highly touted and recently published biography of General David Petraeus. Yes, it was coffee with Paula Broadwell, and needless to say, since my interview and article profiling […] More...
 

Out of Left Field

January 04, 2011 by

We all use email everyday, much more often than we use the U.S. Mail, faxes or even telephones. And we have all read horror stories about email evidence in civil and criminal cases. But most of us haven’t given a lot of thought to whether the Fourth Amendment protects emails from seizure by the government without a warrant supported by probable cause. More...