Shortly after S.B. 8 went into effect, I queried who would become the new Estelle Griswold of Texas? Who would deliberately violate the law to set up a test case? Dr. Alain Braid is the that person. Braid wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled "Why I violated Texas's extreme abortion ban." He recounted:
On Thursday, federal district court judge Emmet Sullivan issued a decision ruling that the Biden administration's use of "Title 42" public health authority to expel migrants at the border (including those otherwise eligible for asylum) is illegal. While the ideological valence of the two cases is very different, the reasons why the Title 42 expulsions are illegal are very similar to those that recently led the Supreme Court to rule against the federal eviction moratorium. In both situations, the...
From Williams v. Lazer, decided Thursday by the Nevada Supreme Court:
From the Petition for Prohibition and Mandamus in Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest v. Chang, filed yesterday in the Hawaii Supreme Court:
Two unrelated food policies—one here in the United States and one in France—are drawing fire from environmentalists and sustainability advocates, who argue the approaches they mandate waste resources and money and don't improve environmental quality.
9/18/1857: Justice John Hessin Clarke's birthday.
Revolving bail funds are the closest thing there is in activism to a perpetual motion machine. A bail fund steps in on behalf of a defendant to pay the bail bond set by a court. With bail paid, arrestees can go home, keep their jobs, and resist pressure to accept a plea deal in order to leave jail. As long as the defendants show up for their trial dates, the bail money is returned to the fund and can be used again and again and again, as long as bail exists.
The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) scientific advisory committee voted 16 to 2 against recommending booster shots for people who were inoculated with the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine more than eight months ago. The FDA is not obliged to follow the panel's recommendations, but typically does so.
Today is Constitution Day. It is an appropriate time to celebrate the accomplishments of American constitutional law. But it is also a good time to consider whether we have been too soft on some of its greatest failures. I suggest three such rulings cry out for far more condemnation than they have so far received: The Chinese Exclusion Case (1889), Euclid v. Amber Realty (1926), and Berman v. Parker (1954). These rulings are well-known to specialists in their respective fields (immigration and...
A report that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser released this week concludes that the Aurora Police Department, which has attracted much attention in recent years due to horrifying incidents such as the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, "has a pattern and practice" of "racially biased policing," of "using excessive force," and of "failing to document stops as required by law." The investigative team that prepared the report, which included former prosecutors, public defenders, and police...
Do voter identification laws ensure secure and trustworthy elections, or are they a way for political parties to manipulate the democratic process in their favor?
Part of the way that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats want to pay for their $3.5 trillion social welfare "infrastructure" plan is by forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices they charge the government for their medications. Democrats argue that benchmarking the prices paid for certain prescription drugs to prices paid by other developed countries will offset around $500 billion in government spending over the next ten years. Voilá—one-seventh of their...