PrawfsBlawg

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Football or basketball? Boise State or Gonzaga?

A thought hatched while watching the first two rounds of March Madness and the various mid-major schools winning or playing competitive: If you run a university and want to make a name for yourself through athletics, would you rather have a good football program or a good basketball program and is it better to throw (a limited amount of) money into developing football or basketball?

The prevailing answer is football, because that draws more alumni interest and money. Schools such as UNC, Kansas, Duke, and Kentucky (or Indiana and UConn back in the day)--consistently great in basketball, generally non-competitive with the rare-blip exception in football--still believe that football success is essential. Jealousy of football contributed to the fall of the original Big East (which has been reborn as a basketball-first conference of Catholic schools, all technically east of somewhere). On the other hand, success in basketball seems easier to obtain--a basketball program costs less than a football program and success can be established by snagging two or three great players. And basketball comes without football's physical and moral baggage.

This question is especially salient for schools such as FIU--non-flagship public schools in a low-mid-major conference (comprised of similar schools and one former SWC school no one else wanted) with a finite amount of money to spend on this project. Consider:

Sustained football success caps out at competition in the conference, conference championships, and invitations to obscure, middish-December bowl games that no one watches against similar low-mid-major schools. The chance to make that leap is limited by the conference. And even if you make the leap, you remain locked out of the highest level of competing for a national championship, which will never look beyond the power conferences and Notre Dame. And all this requires a lot of money and a lot of player, who may suffer severe mental and physical problems because of the sport.

Sustained basketball success could mean consistent appearances in the NCAA Tournament, with early-round games watched or followed by many people and early-round victories offering more opportunities to play top-level teams on national tv. There is a chance, however remote, to play for a national championship. The Tournament Selection Committee is at least a bit more solicitous of non-power-conference schools, this year inviting multiple schools from some non-major conferences.

The question, in short: Is it better to be Boise State or Central Florida in football or Gonzaga or Wichita State or Towson or George Mason in basketball? The prevailing wisdom is the former; I would take the latter.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 23, 2019 at 04:14 PM in Howard Wasserman, Sports, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, March 22, 2019

"A Grimace and a Shrug"

I have the pleasure today of attending a conference on "Academic Freedom and Free Speech on Campus" at Emory, whose Center for the Study of Law and Religion has been kind enough to host me as a visiting scholar this semester. The speakers include Nancy Leong, Jacob Levy, Sasha Volokh, Julie Seaman, David Bernstein, Sigal Pen-Porath, Deborah Lipstadt, Greg Lukianoff, and many more.

The conference is closely tied to Emory's Open Expression Committee, chaired by Sasha Volokh and including stakeholders from across the university. I applaud Emory for having a committee like this, which does an excellent job of avoiding what seems to me a problem with current university management of campus speech issues: that different offices and constituencies with potentially very different views about free speech and/or the university mission or their own office's mission are often spread across campus, and don't necessarily address the same issue at the same time or speak with one voice. (Would that my own university, which more than deserves the "yellow light" rating given it by FIRE--and which has managed the neat trick, not of prioritizing "liberty" over "equality" or vice versa, but of doing a poor job on both--had such a committee, and one that was as active as Emory's committee is. On these issues, Alabama's faculty is at least as responsible as its administration for not doing all that it could and should be to protect free speech and academic freedom.)

The conference turns out to be even more timely, given President Trump's issuance yesterday of his executive order on "Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities." The key paragraph of the order with respect to campus speech is this:

To advance the policy described in subsection 2(a) of this order [to "encourage institutions to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate, including through compliance with the First Amendment for public institutions and compliance with stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech for private institutions"], the heads of covered agencies shall, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, take appropriate steps, in a manner consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment, to ensure institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry, including through compliance with all applicable Federal laws, regulations, and policies.

As Scott Greenfield nicely summarizes it at his Simple Justice blog, FIRE's statement responding to the order amounts to "a grimace and a shrug." On the one hand, it says, "To the extent that today’s executive order asks colleges and universities to meet their existing legal obligations, it should be uncontroversial." On the other, the order and its implementation bear watching for "unintended consequences that threaten free expression and academic freedom," and the order is unclear about "how or by what standard federal agencies will ensure compliance, the order’s most consequential component."

One could say a little more--one might grimace a little more heavily. That colleges and universities should meet their existing legal obligations, or abide by their own clearly stated standards in the case of private institutions, should indeed be uncontroversial. But whether the federal government should take a heavy role in ensuring that they do can be much more controversial. That can be true even for those of us who believe strongly in vigorous protection for both academic freedom and free speech on campus; think that universities should take a broad view of both; and worry that many administrations have shown very little willingness to do so, especially if it might mean getting bad publicity or upsetting (or disciplining, as it sometimes should) students, who to those universities are also "customers" in a national market for students and their tuition dollars.

I'm reluctant to either repeat myself and thus ride a hobby horse, or do too much to promote old work, but I'll end up doing a little of the latter to avoid doing too much of the former. The federal executive order comes after years of similar efforts on the part of state legislatures and proposals in Congress, so there's plenty of existing literature out there. With apologies for linking to Twitter and with the caveat that I take no statement there as anyone's fully worked out position, I do not think, with Jamal Greene, that such an order "would very clearly be illegal and unconstitutional." (To be fair, Greene was writing before the text of the order was issued.) Such bills or orders might be unconstitutional. It depends very much on what they do, and how far they intrude upon such academic governance issues as hiring; even if one favors greater ideological diversity on campus, that doesn't mean government can force that outcome by commandeering what ought to be disciplinary and departmental decisions. But Greene's broad conclusion is far from "very clear," and--obviously depending on what such a law or order says and how it is implemented--there are reasonable arguments that such a law or order can be constitutional. In the case of this order, the "consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment" language suggests that it may turn out to be somewhere between self-limiting and meaningless in any event. (At The National Review, Stanley Kurtz argues that the order is "not the weak and largely symbolic move some claim. On the contrary, it’s a game changer." He may be right that the order will encourage universities to give a higher priority to ensuring that campus speech is protected. Beyond that, I find his assertion far too confident and exaggerated, and suspect it is more of an effort, all too common in public discourse, to make things so by saying they're so.) 

There are also very good arguments that such laws are a bad idea regardless. Again, they may be a bad idea even if one strongly believes in the protection of free and open expression on campus and of academic freedom, and thinks universities have done a poor job of meeting their duties on this score. Those of us who have argued that the law, and citizens and institutional stakeholders, should be more attentive to the role and function of various institutions in facilitating free speech, among other First Amendment freedoms, might argue that: 1) a vital, and in the long run valuable, aspect of these institutions is self-governance; 2) government interference with that self-governance, even in the service of the crucial value of free speech, might be a cure worse than the disease; 3) there may be room, especially in a nation with more than hundreds of public and private colleges and universities, for varied visions of the university mission; and 4) a key element of self-governance is the responsibility of both stakeholders--like faculty--and citizens to argue about those visions and to hold these institutions to account. At least for folks like me, that means insisting that if they are to have autonomy in governing themselves, they meet their corresponding duty to do so consistently with the respect for free speech and academic freedom that are certainly part of my vision of. the university.

On these points, I recommend a pair of posts by Keith Whittington. And from my own older work, you might look at this 2007 article, arguing vehemently against academic bills of rights on institutional autonomy grounds while insisting that that autonomy carries grave responsibilities with it for universities and their stakeholders, or pages 128-30 of my book First Amendment Institutions. I cite to other scholars who have argued that "such bills might survive a constitutional challenge," while arguing that things like an Academic Bill of Rights (or the new executive order) are "a mistake." Such efforts misunderstand the truth for search, and neglect the value and potential of both institutional autonomy and institutional pluralism. 

[Comments are closed, partly for irony value and mostly because I am otherwise occupied and don't have time to moderate the comments, as I prefer to do.]

 

Posted by Paul Horwitz on March 22, 2019 at 11:04 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Game of Papers/Game of Thrones

This McSweeney's piece suggested quotations from The Princess Bride that double as comments on paper (I have used "I do not think it means what you think it means"). I wondered: What quotations from Game of Thrones might serve a similar function? The obvious one is "You know nothing, Jon Snow."

What else can serve this function?

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 21, 2019 at 04:17 PM in Culture, Teaching Law, Television | Permalink | Comments (3)

Personal jurisdiction problems in Nunes v. Twitter (Updated)

At the Civ Pro Listserv, Alan Trammell (Arkansas) questions whether there is personal jurisdiction in Virginia in Nunes v. Twitter (to say nothing of bovinal jurisdiction over Devin Nunes' Cow).

The jurisdictional allegations are a garble and, Alan notes, not consistent with recent P/J precedent. (of course, the entire complaint is poorly drafted nonsense, so no surprise the attorney would get this wrong, as well). But here is what we can glean. Twitter is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in California. Liz Mair is a Virginia citizen and the sole member of Mair Strategies LLC. Devin Nunes Mom and Devin Nunes Cow are unknown. Nunes is a California citizen and a representative of that state.

There is general jurisdiction over Mair and Mair Strategies, both of which are "at home" in Virginia under recent precedent because domiciled there. That is easy. In fact, I would guess that Nunes sued in Virginia because that was the surest way to get Mair.

As for Twitter, it is not domiciled in Virginia, so it is not obviously at home under the new analysis. The complaint alleges that Twitter is "at home" in Virginia, in between allegations of Twitter's ubiquity, being registered to do business in Virginia, targeting Virginians with advertising, and earning revenue from source customers; it later alleges that Twitter engages in "continuous and systematic business in Virginia." This sounds in the old "doing business" test for general jurisdiction, which the Court has rejected three times in the past decade. Giving counsel the benefit of the doubt about his understanding of current P/J doctrine, he might be setting up one of two arguments: 1) By mentioning registration, it jumps into an ongoing scholarly debate about whether registration constitutes consent to personal jurisdiction or 2) the Court has left open the possibility that a company can be at home beyond its state of incorporation and PPB in extraordinary circumstances, so maybe he is going to argue this is the extraordinary case and Twitter the extraordinary defendant. I doubt either works here, but each at least reflects a current understanding of jurisdiction.

However great the marketing, advertising, and revenue drawn from Virginia, it has nothing to do with this lawsuit, so it no longer provides the basis for general jurisdiction. But that advertising and revenue does not give rise or relate to the mean comments on which Nunes is suing, so it cannot form the basis for specific jurisdiction. Another option for specific jurisdiction is a Walden/Calder argument. But Nunes has no obvious connections to Virginia, other than that it is close to where he works in DC; his connections to Virginia are not greater than his connections to any other state besides California. The mean comments about Nunes do not discuss him or his conduct specifically in Virginia and were not "directed to" or "aimed at" Virginia. A Walden/Calder argument might work in California or DC, but my guess is he does not want to sue in either place, where he potentially is wildly unpopular.

Update: Some email exchanges raise the question of why he went to Virginia. Alan pointed out that Henrico County, Va. is not a conservative bastion. My theory: His lawyer thinks he can get Twitter anywhere on a doing business theory and Virginia is the only place he knew he could get Mair. And Virginia has rural areas, so that helps with reaching the cow.

Update: A commenter asks whether Nunes could establish specific jurisdiction over Twitter because the offending tweets came from Virginia. All Twitter has done is provided a nationwide platform for anyone, anywhere to use for their tweets, having no involvement in this particular tweet or that particular user. I think more purposeful direction of the conduct at the forum state is required; knowledge of where the tweet might (or did) come from is not enough.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 21, 2019 at 11:07 AM in Civil Procedure, Howard Wasserman | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Petition to the FTC to Ban Non-Competes

I am proud to be part of a petition submitted today the FTC bringing together the Open Markets Institute, the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and over 60 other signatories — including labor organizations, public interest groups, and dozens of legal scholars. The petition calls on the FTC to use its regulatory power to issue a federal rule to ban the practice nationwide (similar to the ban that already exists in California and in some other states for certain industries and parts of the workforce).  If you are a reader of this blog, you probably know that I have argued in my research on noncompetes, including in my book Talent Wants to be Free that they harm not only workers but also innovation and economic growth. In my new article, Gentlemen Prefer Bonds: How Employers Fix the Talent Market, I argue that they further have a negative effect on certain identities, including women, minorities and older workers. As my research and others have argued, the FTC and the federal antitrust division should be involved in protecting competition and preventing anti-competitive practices in the labor market, just like in the product markets. 

Coverage today of the petition in Bloomberg can be found here. The Open Markets press release is here. The full text of the petition can be found here.

Posted by Orly Lobel on March 20, 2019 at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Compliment Sandwich

Law professors spend a lot of time assessing the work of others and giving feedback on that work.  We give feedback as part of scholarship workshops, as part of hiring and tenure reviews, and as part our interactions with students, just to name a few situations.  Some law professors are really incredible at giving feedback.  Others less so.  Perhaps because of the wide variation in styles and effectiveness, I’ve had a number of conversations with other law professors on the most successful ways to give feedback on another’s work.

One model—a model that I prefer—is what a friend of mine calls “the compliment sandwich.”  The basic idea is to situate your criticism between an opening compliment and a closing compliment.  Sometimes the compliment is nothing more than a quick aside before and after lengthy criticisms—a compliment about having chosen an important topic to begin, for example, and a compliment about how you think the paper adds to the field to end.  The “bread” in that compliment sandwich is very thin—“almost more like a cracker or a pita, than real bread,” my friend joked.  Other times the criticism is negligible next to the compliment—kind of like a finger sandwich:  mostly bread with just a tiny bit of filler.  But you get the basic idea—like a sandwich, criticism is easier to consume and digest if it is wrapped up in something that is both neat and agreeable.

I have been thinking a lot about the compliment sandwich recently because I’ve heard a few people speak negatively about those who are too quick to compliment others.  There are, for example, a handful of law schools and law professors who seem to eschew any positive comments at workshops as a point of pride.  Instead, the feedback delivered is uniformly critical, and the tone of the criticism can be extremely negative.  The decision to be only critical in feedback seems intentional—they seem to eschew compliments and focus only on the problems with a person’s work because that is what “serious” people do.

Continue reading "The Compliment Sandwich"

Posted by Carissa Byrne Hessick on March 20, 2019 at 11:45 AM in Carissa Byrne Hessick, Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (16)

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Racial bias and diversity jurisdiction

Scott Dodson's new article (forthcoming in Duke L.J.) came at a good time, as I began diversity jurisdiction (and the rationales for it) Monday and continue on it tomorrow and have presented some of his ideas in class. Scott argues that outsider bias does not justify diversity jurisdiction, while considering other reasons for having (and perhaps expanding) that jurisdiction. This includes suggestions that diversity jurisdiction might alleviate racial bias in state courts.

Reorienting diversity jurisdiction around racial bias (regardless of in- or out-of-state) offers a strong new argument against the complete-diversity requirement, as illustrated by New York Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan sued four Alabama-based African-American civil rights leaders (Shuttlesworth, Lowery, Seay, and Abernathy) who had signed the Times ad; this prevented removal to federal court, by destroying complete diversity and adding non-removable forum defendants. The complete-diversity requirement made no sense in Sullivan even on the local-bias rationale: Having a local defendant did not cure the bias when: 1) the local was an African-American who was functionally an outsider in 1960 Alabama and 2) there was an obvious outsider (The Times) waiting to be hosed.

The racial turn adds to this position. There unquestionably was bias against the African-American defendants in state court because of their race (the trial court allowed Sullivan to enforce the judgment against the four men). Scott's argument suggests their presence in the case, rather than keeping the case in state court, should have been the basis to make it (and cases like it) more readily removable.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 19, 2019 at 06:38 PM in Article Spotlight, Civil Procedure, Howard Wasserman | Permalink | Comments (0)

Admissions ...

As profs, and especially as prawfs, teaching graduate students, we are rarely involved in college admissions. And yet...we probably should be more knowledgeable and offer more of our input to the process. Much has been written about the recent scandals, but here's my two cents, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times:

Posted by Orly Lobel on March 19, 2019 at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Shephard's Drone

Brett Frischmann has done something fabulous.  He brought his scholarly expertise and insightful research to the world of fiction. After the publication of his excellent book with Evan Selinger, “Re-Engineering Humanity”, which was selected as one of the Guardian's best books of 2018, now comes the novel Shephard's Drone. Here's the teaser:

When a geneticist sees an infant die, minutes after receiving a routine genetic modification shot, she’s forced to question what she’s always believed about her field—and determined to find out what went wrong. Her search for answers uncovers a deeper truth about how technology shaped human evolution.

I had the privilege of reading it when it was just a draft manuscript with a different title...now it's gotten even better. As one of the blurbs by Joshua Cohen says, "Brett Frischmann writes like a mad scientist, altering the code of life to elicit new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. His novel is an experiment conducted on our brains and hearts, to condition us for the future." 

go read it!

​

Posted by Orly Lobel on March 19, 2019 at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nunes v. Devin Nunes' Cow

I do not have much to say about Nunes v. Twitter, which includes as a named defendant "Devin Nunes' Cow." The lawsuit is absurd, reflects no understanding of the First Amendment or defamation law, is poorly drafted, and should be sanctioned frivolous under Rule 11 (or the Virginia counterpart). Folks are having fun with it across the Interwebs.

But some are expressing concern that this lawsuit, while facially ridiculous, is part of a broader campaign by Trump supporters and allies to bring defamation lawsuits, even patently meritless (if not frivolous) ones, hoping that the costs of defending will bankrupt or silence critics. If so, it calls to mind the campaign among Alabama officials against civil rights activists and the northern press that led to New York Times v. Sullivan. But the attorney fee provisions in state SLAPP laws are designed to protect defendants against this strategy, making that the more important component of these laws (rather than the special motion to strike, which is really just a 12(b)(6)) and the component that unquestionably should apply in federal court.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 19, 2019 at 11:42 AM in Civil Procedure, First Amendment, Howard Wasserman | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time to Channel Madison

Alexander Hamilton has been fashionable of late, but for a solution to our extreme political polarization, we should look to James Madison. As Madison recognized, people are not angels. We cannot rely on the virtue of government officers to do the right thing. Rather, we need to design our political system in a way that creates the proper incentives for public-spirited conduct by elected officials.

To be sure, Madison didn’t get it all right. While he was correct on theory and many of the practicalities, he came up short on implementation. The critical structural flaw in our political system lies in its “winner-take-all” nature. That feature does much to fuel our high levels of partisan conflict. My experience as a state legislator made this clear.

Like many first-time candidates, I pledged to judge ideas by whether they were good or bad, not by whether they were Democratic or Republican. And as a three-term legislator, I worked across party lines regularly. But I also found that try as one might to stay above the partisan fray, one inevitably gets sucked in. That’s because each side understands that if it gains control of the levers of government power, it can promote its agenda, while if the other side gains control of government power, there is little that can be done to achieve one's own goals or to stop the other side from achieving its goals. Recent Supreme Court appointments are illustrative.

Continue reading "Time to Channel Madison"

Posted by David Orentlicher on March 19, 2019 at 10:28 AM in Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

Monday, March 18, 2019

The Triumph of Jot-for-Jot

Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Ramos v. Louisiana. The petition asks the Court to extend the Sixth Amendment's unanimous jury requirement to the states and to overrule Apodaca v. Oregon, which rejected that aspect of incorporation. The Court will almost certainly overrule Apodaca (perhaps unanimously).

Ramos will mark the end of a long debate within the Court. Decades ago when incorporation began, some Justices took the position that the Court should not impose the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the States jot-for-jot (in other words, identically). That view has declined over time, and Apodaca is its final vestige. In both McDonald and Timbs,the Court described Apodaca as an anomaly. Next Term the anomaly will disappear.   

Posted by Gerard Magliocca on March 18, 2019 at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

More right-wing snowflakes are outraged

This story about calls by some UC-Davis students and California Republicans for the firing of a Davis professor who called (on Twitter, several years ago) for the killing of police officers reminds me of a comment I made last summer about calls by the Broward County Police Benevolent Association to boycott the Miami Dophins for not forcing players to stand. The political right, on and off campus, has as little patience for objectionable speech as the political left and is as ready to call for boycotts and firing of speakers who say mean things they do not like.

The Davis situation and the Dolphin situation share another similarity (as does the ongoing controversy at Sarah Lawrence College, which has gotten far greater attention but is still a call to sanction a professor for "expressing his views"). As one person put it on Twitter: "[T]erms that absolutely no one in the media has used so far to describe this episode include snowflakes, call-out culture, victimhood culture, outrage culture, cancelled, coddled, PC run amok, censorship, self-censorship, fragility, identity politics, or micro-aggressions."

And just to head-off a response: The prof's speech, while obnoxious, is constitutionally protected and comes nowhere close to incitement.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 18, 2019 at 06:14 PM in First Amendment, Howard Wasserman, Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (4)

Diversity and Judicial Review

I'm writing about Winston Churchill's views on the American Constitution, and one focal point of my paper is his thought that judicial review is a function of diversity. In other words, the more diverse a state is, the more frequent or robust judicial review will be. Testing this claim is challenging. How do you control for other relevant variables? How do you measure diversity? And so on.

Here is a simple test that occurred to me though. What is the least diverse constitutional democracy? I think the answer is Japan (or Japan is one of the least diverse). Under Churchill's diversity idea, one would expect that Japan would use judicial review far less than other such democracies. It turns out that this is true. I'm looking for a precise figure, but it appears as if the Japanese Supreme Court has struck down less than ten statutes in its entire history. Could there be another explanation for this? Sure, but it is an interesting data point. 

 

Posted by Gerard Magliocca on March 18, 2019 at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Transparency as a Sword

As a general matter, I support transparency in the criminal justice system.  It is difficult to obtain reliable data about crime and criminal prosecutions --- especially data from state and local systems.  Because we elect many state and local criminal justice officials, this lack of data and transparency is troubling.  If the public is unable to discover what criminal justice actors are doing, then they will find it difficult to hold those actors accountable.

And so, I was surprised to hear a number of people here in the state of North Carolina complaining about a state law that requires the gathering and dissemination of criminal justice data.  The law requires the collection and reporting of information about when judges waive the collection of court fees in criminal cases.  Here’s the full text of the relevant statute:

The Administrative Office of the Courts shall maintain records of all cases in which a judge makes a finding of just cause to grant a waiver of criminal court costs under G.S. 7A-304(a) and shall report on those waivers to the chairs of the House of Representatives and Senate Appropriations Committees on Justice and Public Safety and the chairs of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety by February 1 of each year. The report shall aggregate the waivers by the district in which the waiver or waivers were granted and by the name of each judge granting a waiver or waivers.

The people who are complaining about this law argue that it creates pressure for North Carolina judges not to grant waivers to criminal defendants.  To be clear, the legislature can’t prohibit judges from granting all waivers---if defendants are indigent, then the Constitution forbids the state from imposing these court fees. 

Since I learned about this law, I’ve been wondering:  Is there a way to square my desire for more readily available criminal justice data with the idea that these reports are a bad idea?  After all, for those of us who wish to study the criminal justice system, more data is better than less data.  And if voters need transparency in order to hold their official accountable, then shouldn’t they have this information about their judges?  After all, judges are elected here in North Carolina.

After some reflection, I think that this sort of information could be very valuable.  But it would depend on the nature of the information that was gathered and how much of that information was disseminated.

Continue reading "Transparency as a Sword"

Posted by Carissa Byrne Hessick on March 18, 2019 at 06:43 AM in Carissa Byrne Hessick, Criminal Law | Permalink | Comments (4)

Friday, March 15, 2019

Call for Papers: Tenth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium

Call for Papers: Tenth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO SCHOOL OF LAW

Continue reading "Call for Papers: Tenth Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium"

Posted by Sarah Lawsky on March 15, 2019 at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Birch Bayh RIP

I wanted to note the passing of former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. He is the only American other than Madison who drafted more than one ratified constitutional amendment (the 25th and the 26th). He also was the author of Title IX. That is quite a record. My law school has a lecture in constitutional law named in Senator Bayh's honor. Sadly, he was never able to come in person to attend. 

Posted by Gerard Magliocca on March 14, 2019 at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Another right is clearly established--flipping cops the bird

So says the Sixth Circuit (h/t: Volokh). At least for the moment--the court only affirmed denial of defendant's 12(c) motion.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on March 13, 2019 at 06:09 PM in Civil Procedure, First Amendment, Howard Wasserman, Judicial Process, Law and Politics | Permalink | Comments (3)