Bong Hits for What?
Thanks to Dan for the introduction and to the whole Co-op team for hosting me. And thanks for your indulgence over the next few weeks as I share a few thoughts on constitutional law, criminal law, and...
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If the Law is a[n] ass, what is the state?
The famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts the head and torso of a long-haired, mustachioed man. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes evident that the man’s torso and arms are composed of...
View ArticleYour money or your life
A flurry of scholarship on Lochner v. New York surrounded its 100-year anniversary in 2005. It’s clear why Lochner gets so much attention. But as a matter of constitutional doctrine, I wonder if we pay...
View ArticleThe court comes to school: lessons on prosecutorial discretion
Last Wednesday, my criminal law students had to go only a few feet to hear a session of oral arguments before the Utah Supreme Court. Both the Utah Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals...
View ArticleManners on the internet
I’m sure more experienced bloggers will have much to say about this New York Times article about civility (or lack thereof) on blogs. I’m particularly interested in the article’s focus on blog...
View ArticleIRAC in Iraq
“How much do you care about IRAC?” This was one of the many questions about exams posed to me recently, a nervous first-year student’s reference to the formulaic structure of legal argument drilled...
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Sartorial Exclusion
April is the criminalest month here at Co-op. Thanks to the regular bloggers for the invitation to visit; I’m pleased to join other criminal law professors as a guest. With so many criminal law...
View ArticleTorture for Tots
Readers of Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog might have noticed yesterday abstracts for several new papers from heavy hitters in the legal academy. My favorite of these April 1 abstracts was the Cass...
View ArticleEarly Morning, April 4
Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed forty years ago in Memphis. Much attention has been paid to the last paragraph of his last sermon: Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult...
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Thou shalt not commit a neuroscience.*
Yesterday evening, Harvard Law School hosted a panel on the question, “Should Criminal Law Be Reconsidered in Light of Advances in Neuroscience?” Moderated by Oliver Goodenough, the panel featured...
View ArticleOne train may hide another
Readers interested in criminal procedure, or constitutional law, or law and sexuality, or just a good read with some fascinating historical details, might enjoy David Sklansky’s “One Train May Hide...
View ArticleFalse(?) Etymologies
I love a word with a good story, especially one with a plot twist. One such word is Neanderthal. Many years ago, my father told me of a dainty German scholar named Joachim Neumann, a theologian and...
View ArticleThe Road to Hell
Two notes about Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court decision that upholds Kentucky’s method of lethal injection and almost certainly ends the quasi-moratorium on executions. First, the plurality and...
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What is a judicial fiat, anyway?
Justice Scalia’s strong words in Baze v. Rees, directed at Justice Stevens’s concurrence in the same case, attracted praise at the Volokh Conspiracy (and from Dave Hoffman here) last week. In Baze,...
View ArticleOne more thought on methods of execution
Medellin v. Texas is the recently decided case involving a Mexican national on death row in Texas and a dispute about when the international commitments of the country as a whole bind individual states...
View ArticleWhy so… socialist?
Sometime in the past few days, just in time for the President’s birthday, posters of Obama in Joker-style makeup appeared on a Los Angeles overpass. The images quickly spread across the internet and...
View ArticleJerry Cohen
I was sad to learn, via Crooked Timber, that the philosopher Gerald Cohen died yesterday. Law professors haven’t paid the same attention to his work that they have to Rawls or classical liberal...
View ArticleViolence Specialists
In the terminology of a recent book by two economists and a political scientist, “violence specialists” are those who use violence professionally. Violence and Social Orders is a grand theory of human...
View ArticleForce and Resistance
Last week I wrote about the term “violence specialists” as a description of police officers and military personnel. It’s nearly impossible to discuss violence without encountering disputes about the...
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Wheel of Justice
Once upon a time, I lived in the little town of Picayune, Mississippi. This morning I discovered that the Picayune Police Department has adopted a novel approach to fighting drug crime: the Wheel of...
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