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Category Archives: Lawyer stuff

Prop 8 upheld

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The California Supreme Court, as expected, upheld the validity of Proposition 8. A quick reading: before we held that same sex couples were constitutionally entitled to the legal use of the term “marriage” to describe the legal relationship to which they, along with opposite sex couples were entitled to enter. I.e., civil unions with the […]

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Olbermann missed something

Monday, May 18, 2009

I just got through watching Keith Olbermann attacking Michael Steele, who suggested that gay marriage was bad for small business. Olbermann pointed out that gay weddings would pump about $16 billion annually into the economy for photographers, restaurants, etc. You know, the same exorbitant expenses incurred by straight folks. It’s clear Olbermann is not a […]

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Not a favorable comparison

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Steven Benen, at the Washington Monthly, takes exception to the fact that the UK is banning political extremists from entering that country: I can vaguely understand why these measures might be tempting, but it’s developments like these that remind me why U.S. civil liberties are worth appreciating. I agree with his position that these bans […]

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The Republican Philosophy in a Nutshell

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The folks at ThinkProgress have done an admirable job of exposing Karl Rove’s latest bit of hypocrisy here. Seems Karl no longer feels that the President’s choice for the Supreme Court deserves absolute deference. No surprise there, and in any event, exposing Rovian hypocrisy makes shooting fish in a barrel look like rocket science. But […]

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Not much, but the best we can do

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Jay Bybee, who wrote one of the recently released torture memos, is now a federal judge on the Court of Appeals. That’s one step below the Supreme Court, for anyone who’s counting. Lately there has been a lot of calls for his impeachment, something he would richly deserve. Some members of Congress have even oh-so-cautiously […]

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Another step back

Thursday, April 16, 2009

This is quick. After writing the previous post, I learned that Obama has explicitly barred prosecutions of those who did the torturing, officially approving the “just following orders” defense that we (as it turns out) self righteously rejected at Nuremberg. The idea that anyone would have a “good faith” belief in the validity of a […]

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A Short Lesson in Constitutional law

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Just before Obama’s press conference (which I thought went well) I happened to catch a snippet of Chris Matthews opining with certainty that the bill recently passed by the House, which seeks to tax those bonuses, was obviously a bill of attainder and quite obviously unconstitutional. This, along with a related meme that the bill […]

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Thorny issue

Monday, March 9, 2009

Charlie Savage of the Times, who has earned his stripes on this issue, examines Obama’s instructions to the Justice Department that it consult with the Justice Department before relying on any signing statement issued by any of his predecessors. Apparently, Obama felt it was impolitic to pick on Bush alone, so he has required his […]

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A hard case

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

There’s an old saw in the legal biz: Hard cases make bad law. If that’s true, then the Supreme Court is about to make bad law. In 2002 a West Virginia jury awarded $50 million dollars in damages to a coal plant operator that it found was fraudulently forced into bankruptcy by a company owned […]

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Failing Upwards

Monday, December 22, 2008

Folks of my generation will no doubt remember the Peter Principle, first propounded by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book of the same name. Peter and Hull proposed that in any hierarchical organization, a person tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence. This principle has long since been […]

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