Constitutional Law

With the Obama-Romney election nearly upon us, my column today updates readers on the status of various presidential election reform efforts (a topic about which I have written columns for this site in the past).

Justice Scalia made news last week for some remarks he offered concerning “easy” constitutional disputes.  In particular, he suggested that challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty, laws restricting abortions, and limits on the rights of gays and lesbians to engage in homosexual activity should be easy to reject because they fail the test of textualism/originalism, the mode of constitutional interpretation that he has said he prefers.  In the space below, I analyze this mode, and discuss whether its use in the way Justice Scalia favors is, in reality, so easy

In the column below, I analyze a ruling last week by a Mississippi federal district judge granting a preliminary injunction in a case involving a controversial Mississippi law regulating abortion clinics.  The case raises important questions about abortion access, and also about the power of federal district court judges.

Some Background on the Mississippi Law and the District Court's Action

Much attention has been directed toward the asserted clashes between the federal government’s recently adopted policies concerning health insurance coverage for contraceptive services, on the one hand, and religious liberties, on the other.  But state laws and policies present just as much, if not more, potential for infringement of religious liberties.  In the present column, we analyze a recent case from the state of Washington that sheds important light on the current state of the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, and that also illustrates many of the big u

The role of money in federal elections has never been more prominent than in this, the 2012 presidential, cycle.  It is thus quite natural that commentators these days would lavish attention on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 blockbuster Supreme Court ruling saying that corporations and unions, just like individual persons, are entitled under the First Amendment to expend money to independently advocate in favor of or against candidates for elective office.

“I’m a self-loathing law student,” confessed one of the students in my Critical Race Theory seminar this week. Several others immediately owned up to the same affliction. I will stipulate that self-loathing is probably not an affect we all should strive to achieve. But I was heartened anyway.

Arizona v.

My most recent column for Justia’s Verdict, Part One in this series, began to look at issues raised by the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant review in the Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case.

The Supreme Court’s grant of cert. last month in the Texas college affirmative action case, Fisher v.

A lot of recently enacted laws in Arizona have spawned major constitutional controversy.  But laws don’t have to be newfangled to generate heat.  In the space below, I analyze some of the constitutional issues raised by the recent invocation of longstanding Arizona laws that require candidates for elective office there to demonstrate proficiency in the English language in order to appear on the ballot.

The Dispute Involving English Language Competence and Officeholding Eligibility