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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It’s always hard to predict the effects of new legislation: Congress can call it a “job creation” bill, but at the end of the day, they’ve got to hope the world cooperates with their good intentions. But for the democratic process to function, legislators at least need to feel reasonably confident that they understand the […]

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Sane conservatives seem to have joined the backlash against the loathsome smear campaign recently unleashed on Justice Department lawyers who have done pro bono work representing Guantanamo detainees.  They argue, rightly, that we shouldn’t denigrate “the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients.” But I think there’s an important historical point here that deserves […]

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A surprising number of the responses to my recent video on social remix complain that the various videos of kids acting out their own versions of the Lisztomania “Brat Pack” mashup video simply don’t count as a form of creativity.  To be sure, they are not  timeless works of starting originality, but this sort of […]

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Sonny Bunch over at America’s Future Foundation gets all wound up over the idea that copyright is centrally about creating an instrumental incentive for production: Yes, copyright was created in part because there were concerns that authors wouldn’t bother creating new work if they were consistently stolen from, leading to Yglesias’s oddly solipsistic reading of […]

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At the risk of rambling on redundantly, I want to stress one thing about my attitude toward the Citizens United case: We’ve been focusing on this question of “corporate personhood” because that’s the legal frame we’ve been handed, but it’s pretty much irrelevant to my thinking about this question. The root conviction here is just […]

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Something that’s implicit in a lot of defenses of the Citizens United ruling I’ve seen in the past day is probably worth noting explicitly: The ban on independent corporate/union expendituures for “electioneering communications” that the court struck down was actually quite narrow.  Basically it covered TV and radio advertising, and didn’t touch myriad other forms […]

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Federal prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the investigation into Arizona thug Joe Arpaio. I suppose he’s unlikely to spend his last  pathetic years chained to a peg in the ground in some sweltering “tent city”—but one can dream.

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