Last summer, I made a little ‘splainer for the Washington Post briefly explaining how Qualified Immunity works (and doesn’t). [Link] This afternoon, a very nice reporter reached out to me for some followup. She’s doing a longer piece on QI, and had some questions specifically about the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence here. I dashed...
The Fourth Amendment established one of our most important protections against government power: if the police search you or your stuff for evidence, their search must be ‘reasonable’; and if they do get a warrant then it has to be specific, and they’ll need probable cause. In writing, it couldn’t be more straightforward. In practice, however,...
In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures that lived scores of millions of years ago, that terrorist hijackers flew planes into the...
The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court often have important repercussions around the world, so it’s perhaps not surprising that is studied by lawyers and academics far beyond the Court’s jurisdiction. The results of such studies are often more useful for their insights into how others see us, than for...
Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Jonathan Adler posted another critique on Sunday of the New York Times’s silly article claiming the Roberts Court to be the “most conservative in living memory.” Adler makes some of the same points we did last week, finding fault with the Times’s definitions of...
Over the weekend, the NYT printed an article calling the Supreme Court under C.J. Roberts the “most conservative in decades.” “The court not only moved to the right,” the article said, “but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political...
There are four Mondays left in June. Four more days in which the Supreme Court is expected to announce its decisions in the 27 or so cases still out there this term. That’s about one case per day from now till then. We’re picturing the Justices pulling all-nighters, stacks of...
“Why is this case here, except as an opportunity to upset Melendez-Diaz?” So wondered Justice Scalia during oral argument a couple weeks back in the case of Briscoe v. Virginia. For some background, see our previous post on this case here. Briefly, the Supreme Court held last year in Melendez-Diaz...
While the boys were still alive, they were chained to the engine block of an old Jeep, and to pieces of railroad track. Then the Klansmen dumped the boys in the river, where they drowned. One of the Klansmen later reported that Seale “would have shot them first, but didn’t want to get blood all over the boat.”
The boys were killed because they were black, and because Seale thought they might have been civil-rights workers.
The Supreme Court heard a very important argument this week in the case of Maryland v. Shatzer. It was one of those situations where the oral argument makes a huge difference in the outcome of the case. We read the briefs earlier this month, and remarked to colleagues that both...
For the record, our position on gun control is to use both hands, relax, and control your breathing. But let’s talk about the law. Last year, the Supreme Court historically decided that the Second Amendment gives individuals a constitutional right to possess firearms. The ruling, in District of Columbia...
The “Prosecutor’s Fallacy” is one example of why we think Statistics should be a required course in college. Let’s say the police have the DNA of a rapist. Only 1 in 3,000,000 people chosen at random will match that DNA sample. Your DNA matches. At your trial, the DNA expert...
The Supreme Court did something today it hasn’t done for generations — it took an “original writ” of habeas corpus (a request made directly to the Supreme Court itself, instead of first filing it in a lower court), and then it ordered a federal District Court to hold a...
The Supreme Court this morning ruled that it’s a violation of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause for the prosecution in a drug case to simply admit a sworn lab report, without the chemist’s testimony, to prove that the drugs were controlled substances. This is what we predicted, of course, making...
In a groundbreaking unanimous decision this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for school officials to perform a strip search of a student suspected of possessing prohibited drugs. And school officials who do this in the future will have to pay damages. Writing for the Court in...
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