The New Editor - Legal System

ObamaCare: Wednesday's Supreme Court Oral Arguments

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:30:00 -0600

Here is the link to Wednesday morning's US Supreme Court arguments, in both audio and written transcript form.

Update: Here is the link to Wednesday afternoon's US Supreme Court arguments, in both audio and written transcript form.

ObamaCare: Tuesday's Supreme Court Oral Arguments

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:23:00 -0600

Here is the link to Tuesday's US Supreme Court arguments, in both audio and written transcript form.

ObamaCare: Monday's Supreme Court Oral Arguments

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:34:47 -0600

Here is the link to today's US Supreme Court arguments, in both audio and written transcript form.

Obamacare Is Bigger than Roe v. Wade

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:03:00 -0700

The Cato Insitutes's Ilya Shapiro:

... the Supreme Court has now set the stage for the most significant case since Roe v. Wade. Indeed, this litigation implicates the future of the Republic as Roe never did. On both the individual-mandate and Medicaid-coercion issues, the Court will decide whether the Constitution's structure -- federalism and enumeration of powers -- is judicially enforceable or whether Congress is the sole judge of its own authority. In other words, do we have a government of laws or men?

Connecticut Supreme Court Justice to Susette Kelo: "I'm Sorry"

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:03:00 -0600

Reason magazine's Damon Root:

[CT Supreme Court Justice] Palmer should be sorry. So should U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy, whose five votes upheld Palmer's erroneous judgment and put the final nail in the coffin.

Read the full post.

Does America have a lawyer problem, or a law problem?

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:03:00 -0700

Glenn Reynolds:

... I do think that there's a real problem with America's current legal environment, and I think that we're in pretty much the same situation as Greece: If we want the kind of economic growth it's going to take to get us out of our current economic and indebtedness crisis, we're going to have to drastically reduce the number of laws and regulations confronting new and existing businesses.

Read the whole piece.

The Nuts and Bolts of the ObamaCare Ruling

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:32:00 -0700

Georgetown University professor of constitutional law Randy Barnett and Florida International University professor of constitutional and health care law Elizabeth Price Foley note, "According to the government's theory, wrote Judge Vinson, 'the more harm the statute does, the more power Congress could assume for itself under the Necessary and Proper Clause.'

Barnett and Foley further write:

The Obama administration attempted to cloak an unprecedented and unsupportable exercise of federal power in the guise of a run-of-the-mill Commerce Clause regulation. When the weakness of that theory was exposed, it retreated to the Necessary and Proper Clause and the taxing power. Judge Vinson's decisive rejection of all these theories is another significant victory for individual liberty -- the ultimate purpose of federalism -- and it lays the intellectual groundwork for every decision on the mandate yet to come.

Read the whole piece.

Elena Kagan: Constitution Was Meant To Be "Interpreted Over Time"

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:14:00 -0600

But by whom -- and how? Isn't that what the amendment process is supposed to be about?

From Real Clear Politics:

Judges, the Constitution, & Gun Control Laws

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:38:00 -0600

Thomas Sowell:

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.
...

If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.
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What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.

But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not."
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Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.
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The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job. The media's job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media's vision.

Read the whole piece.

Justices extend gun owner rights nationwide

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:34:55 -0600

5-4.

Tossing A Few Legal Queries Into The 'Void'

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:03:00 -0600

George Will has a few questions he'd like to see Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan answer.

Obama Nominates Kagan to Seat on Supreme Court

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:28:00 -0600

Read the Wall Street Journal report here.

For high court nominee, no (political) experience necessary

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:03:00 -0600

George Will:

As [Supreme Court Justice John Paul] Stevens departs, the eight remaining justices are all products of the Harvard, Yale or Columbia law schools; all are former federal judges. Professor Terri L. Peretti, a Santa Clara University political scientist, notes (in Judicature, November-December 2007) that the court has often included judges with political experience.

The greatest justice, John Marshall, who made the court a nation-shaping force, had been a state legislator and congressman. Between 1789 and 1952, most justices had some legislative or executive political experience. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former president, was followed by Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York governor. Hugo Black had been a senator from Alabama. Earl Warren had been California's governor, which became a problem: Because President Dwight Eisenhower, like many others, believed that political thinking sometimes supplanted jurisprudential reasoning in Warren's decision-making, he sought judicial experience in his remaining four nominees.

In 1971, Richard Nixon nominated the last two justices without such experience, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. The last justice with experience in elective politics was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had been an Arizona state legislator before becoming a judge.

MSNBC: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to Retire

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:35:18 -0600

Update: From AP:

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the court's oldest member and leader of its liberal bloc, says he is retiring. President Barack Obama now has his second high court opening to fill.

Stevens says he will step down when the court finishes its work for the summer in late June or early July.

Another Law in the 'Public Interest'...

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:02:00 -0700

Actual Ohio law:

"No family household shall purchase more than 24 cases of 12 bottles of 750 milliliters of wine in one year."

Of course, it has nothing at all to do with protecting Ohio wine producers...