Jamelle Bouie lays out several reasons why popular election of judges is a terrible idea: The need to fund-raise (especially in smaller districts) creates conflicts with the requirement of impartiality; judges start handing down longer sentences to appear “tough on crime” during election season; because judicial elections are usually low-priority, they create the illusion of [...]

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Tim Lee has a great analysis at Ars Technica of this week’s ruling invalidating the controversial Google Books settlement. Tim, like the court, focuses on aspects of the agreement that seem to give Google a unique advantage in the online book market—and hopes that instead Google will now simply defend its copying of books for [...]

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Here’s how far down the rabbit hole we are. Josh Marshall writes: A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional. And the idea that buying health care coverage does not amount to “economic activity” seems preposterous on its face. But the decision that just came down [...]

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For those of you who aren’t reading Cato at Liberty (and why not??), I’ve got a longish post over there that looks at a couple of recent law review articles questioning whether it really makes sense to think about the Fourth Amendment primarily in terms of “privacy.” I find myself pretty sympathetic to the argument [...]

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I just noticed this in Cory Doctorow’s sig; sorely tempted to add it to mine: READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED  agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies [...]

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Scan the last paragraph of George Will’s column on Arizona’s round-up-the-darkies law while I take a deep breath: Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America [...]

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James Joyner captures my thoughts on the recent silliness pretty well. Basically, nobody comes out of this looking good. First, CBS.  Frankly, the journalist in me finds it sort of offensive that they were willing to publish serial plagiarist Ben Domenech on any topic—some things really ought to earn you a lifetime ban from respectable [...]

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My friend Glen Whitman has an excellent essay over at Cato Unbound that takes aim at what’s been variously called “new” or “soft” or even “libertarian” paternalism. I’ve been relatively open to at least some of the ideas circulating under those banners—at least as libertarians go—but Glen’s arguments certainly provide ample reason for severe skepticism.  [...]

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I wrote a few posts in the aftermath of Citizens United arguing that the backlash to it had a misplaced focus on whether the court had decided that “corporations are persons” with constitutional rights.   I did think that, in practice, there are many constitutional purposes for which it would be necessary to treat them as [...]

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A few years back, during his candidacy for the presidency of South Africa, Jacob Zuma was accused of rape by a longstanding family friend. I don’t know enough about the case to say anything about the legitimacy of the verdict—contemporary reporting depicts disgusting vilification of the accuser and support of the politically powerful accused—but Zuma [...]

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