Law Students

Courtesy of Co-Blogger Chris, a Columbian in Columbus

Posted on April 22, 2009

Today / 03.13.08

Posted on March 13, 2008
Today in History (1862) - The U.S. government forbids all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation. On the same day in 1865,....

Good Movies About the War in Iraq

Posted on March 13, 2008
Judging by the Vietnam precedent, wherein the first significant movies like Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were released after the last American had left (1975), I'm guessing we have a while to wait. In contrast to A Yank...

Here We Go Again

Posted on March 12, 2008
Geraldine Ferraro has taken up Ramesh Ponnuru's cry that one can't criticize Barack Obama without being called a racist. Like Ponnuru, she cheerfully ignores that one only opens oneself to the accusation by bringing up race at all. For example,...

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How Willingness Became Weakness

Posted on March 05, 2008
Michael Gerson in today's Washington Post engages in a thought experiment in order to conclude that Obama cannot stand by his campaign pledges without becoming a foreign policy failure. Gerson declares that Obama will make an "inaugural pledge to 'pay...

The Spreading Confusion About Child Pornography

Posted on March 03, 2008
Echoing the theme of a 2006 lawsuit against Google (which the plaintiff rapidly moved to dismiss), Sen. McCain seems to conflate two distinct problems in the threat posed to human dignity by internet pornography. ... However, there is a darker...

After Hiatus, Back to Con Law

Posted on March 02, 2008
I encountered Erwin Chemerinsky in his professorial (as opposed to author/ litigator/ talking head) capacity for the first time in his videotaped BarBri lecture on constitutional law, one of a few subjects in which none of the lecture felt like...

Truth and Reconciliation

Posted on March 02, 2008
From Freeman Dyson's excellent NYRB review of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, by Michael J. Neufeld: The author of this book condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the United States government for...

Remembering Buckley Accurately

Posted on March 01, 2008
1. Writing in the New York Times (not National Review, so never mind those who claim to have read it in their subscription) in 1986, he composed a kind of dialogue between School A, the protectors of civil liberties and privacy, and School B, the protectors of public health (he being in the latter category): But if the time has not come, and may never come, for public identification, what then of private identification? Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals...

Today / 02.26.08

Posted on February 26, 2008
Happy birthday to Jeremy Bentham, and welcome to the blawgosphere to Tom Bruce and the rest of the Cornell Legal Information Institute.

Bar Exam Hiatus

Posted on February 07, 2008
With less than three weeks left before the February bar exam, I'm going offline until the 28th. Then I'll be posting until March 15 -- the fourth anniversary of De Novo -- when I will stop blogging. My law student status technically ceases next Thursday when I graduate, and the bar exam is the last vestige of it...

Religious Voter Guides: The Good, the Questionable, and the "Lawyers Approved That? Really?"

Posted on February 02, 2008
In order for contributions to it to be tax-deductible, no 501(c)(3) entity can allow a substantial part of its activities to be lobbying, i.e. attempting to influence legislation. I'm not really sure how this works out for, say, the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, which seems to spend a lot of time on legislation judging by the emails it sends me...

What Bush Does When He Finds Something Really Unconstitutional

Posted on February 01, 2008
A favorite grudge against Sen. John McCain among conservative leaders and lawyers is that he sponsored campaign finance reform legislation that they deem to be a violation of the core First Amendment right to political speech. Particularly troubling for them was the non-lawyer McCain's supposedly urging his Congressional colleagues who had reservations about the law's constitutionality to vote for it and let the Supreme Court decide which provisions passed constitutional muster...

Strange Timing by the Columbia Spectator

Posted on January 30, 2008
I'm trying to think of a more inopportune time since the Gujarat riots to publish an opinion piece about how meek and mild Hindus are. I cannot think of a more bizarre moment to make this statement: "Keeping a low profile is a manifestation of the non-interventionist mindset that has enabled Hinduism to survive some 8,000 years in spite of assaults like the Muslim invasions, the Goa inquisition, and more recent encroachments like the Gospel Fellowship Trust India’s campaign to aggressively convert Dalits and impoverished tribesmen to Christianity...

NYC Government: Persian Gulf War Never Ended

Posted on January 28, 2008
In a list of periods of conflict for determining whether one receives a property tax exemption reserved for veterans, the City of New York gives the following: - World War I: April 6, 1917 - November 11, 1918 - World War II: December 7, 1941 - December 31,1946 - Korean Conflict: June 27, 1950 - January 31,1955 - Vietnam War: February 28,1961 - May 7, 1975 - Persian Gulf War: August 2, 1990 - Present Does anyone know if this is a standard list from the federal government about the dates for active duty?

Paulsen Will Never Prevent an Abortion

Posted on January 28, 2008
Although I am sure Michael Stokes Paulsen is quite able in arguing the case for abortion prohibition in a more academic format, his Balkinization post about the Roe Holocaust* was disappointingly tiresome. Legal scholars who make such arguments seem to be either ignorant of or indifferent to the fact that Anglo-American law never treated abortion as a species of killing...

Crimes of What?

Posted on January 27, 2008
Toward the end of her Ms. review of Susan K. Cahn's Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, France Winddance Twine, a professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, "Meanwhile, scholars estimate that the number of girls in juvenile detention for crimes of poverty and sex nearly doubled in the 1990s...

I Do Declare, That's Not What It Means to Be American

Posted on January 26, 2008
I am trying to figure out what Sarah Lyall meant in the first sentence of a Times article, which says, "It was a lofty idea: formulate a British 'statement of values' defining what it means to be British, much the way a document like the Declaration of Independence sets out the ideals that help explain what it means to be American...

Refiguring on the Slate

Posted on January 25, 2008
In Phil Carter's and Brad Flora's "complete guide to the Army's recruiting incentives," published in Slate last November, they state, "Among 2004 recruits, 92.5 percent had a high-school diploma, while the same could be said for 87 percent in 2005, 81...

In Which PG Tries to Explain Many Things

Posted on January 23, 2008
This is an overgrown response to commenter Bob, one of several people defending the Japanese internment in the comments to this post. In the following, I will endeavor to explain - the difference between a "military area" and a "combat zone"; - the seemingly mysterious ability of Japanese people to evade prosecution for spying even while whites are being convicted; - why putting adults in an area that they are shot for leaving without permission is usually deemed a loss of liberty and not a mere "relocation"; - U...

What It Means to Vote Pro-Choice

Posted on January 21, 2008
I received an email from Molly Jackson at Pro Choice America, asking bloggers to participate again in Blog for Choice Day (Roe's anniversary). She said, "This year, we're asking people to blog about why they vote pro-choice." I consider myself a pro-choice voter, but some people probably wouldn't...

Today / 01.22.08

Posted on January 21, 2008
Today is the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.

God's Already Been Discovered

Posted on January 20, 2008
The latest emails from the American Family Association are hyping the "Rediscovering God in America Conference," which will take place in Orlando, Florida this week with hundreds of Florida pastors and special guests Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. Phrases like "Rediscovering God in America" or "putting religion back in the public square" always puzzle me because I feel like God is very much present in Americans' lives and that lived faith is very much present in the public square...

Why the Media Has Less Interest in Democrats' Religious Convictions

Posted on January 19, 2008
The Democratic front-runners seem less inclined to say that we have to amend the Constitution to bring it into line with "God's standards."

What Al Qaeda Believes about American Muslims

Posted on January 18, 2008
A passage in Curtis Bradley's and Jack Goldsmith's foreign relations casebook created a concern for Stephen Griffin and Eric Muller that the book unintentionally "endorse[s] a false, revisionist, and partisan history of the Japanese American internment," by suggesting that there was a fact-based fear of Japanese-Americans' becoming fifth columnists traitors who would assist Japan's invasion of the U...

Wait, Who Said the Clinton Campaign Was Racist Toward Obama?

Posted on January 15, 2008
Ramesh Ponnuru might be getting out ahead of the rest of the right, which has been predicting ever since Obama became a potential candidate for '08 that any criticism of him would bring accusations that the criticizer is racist. (They had to change this to "any comment of any kind" after Biden got hit with the Chris Rock references by exclaiming over Obama as the "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean...

TownHall Looking Generous in Comparison

Posted on January 14, 2008
When trying to leave a comment on a TownHall.com blog last year, I got signed up to their newsletter and can't seem to get off it. Most of what they send me is predictable and some is just advertising, but occasionally they manage to surprise me. One such email came the day after Christmas, with the headline: "America's wounded troops facing homelessness need your help this winter...

Old Liberalism and New Labor

Posted on January 14, 2008
I liked Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, but this remark from her blog (which I read for the first time just now) bothered me: "And what about the unemployment rate? The old liberal faith was that 'full employment' would create a workers' paradise, with higher wages and enhanced bargaining power for the little guy and gal...

ENDA and the insufficiency of disparate impact

Posted on January 13, 2008
I'm going to begin this post apologising for the inarticulateness of my previous post. It was completed at 3:30 am, so I claim a good excuse :p Since then, I have realised that the Sherman Act has been quite authoritative on the issues that the Court outlines, but nonetheless, I fear the new precedent the Court has set...