In a move that there is absolutely no chance they will ever regret making, Senate Democrats today managed to push through a rule change that now makes it impossible to filibuster cabinet and judicial nominations (except for seats on the…
This might be where the term "Yankee ingenuity" came from, although if it was, somebody was being sarcastic: Two New Yorkers invented this and had it patented in 1862. At the time, the battles of First Bull Run and Shiloh…
At least according to the city charter.
In what is surely an incredible coincidence, the partner of the reporter (Glenn Greenwald) who has been embarrassing the NSA over the past few weeks was just detained at Heathrow airport under the Terrorism Act, held for nine hours, questioned…
I don't know that I'd call this "a lawsuit for the ages," like the New York Times does. But that's mainly because around here that title is reserved for the four-year struggle over a $65 million legal claim that the plaintiff called a…
Here's the problem with trying to maintain a comprehensive list of the dumb things legislatures do: they keep doing them. It was just a few days ago that I posted "Official State Crap: Connecticut," the most recent in the remarkably…
Present but not voting Of course, no reference to Jeremy Bentham would be complete without mentioning that his badly preserved corpse is still on display at University College, London. Bentham did not attend UCL but became affiliated with it in…
From the book In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, noted by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic : Law clerks in this era all learned that none of [Justice William O.] Douglas' rules were ever to be ignored….
It has tried this before, as you may recall, and that didn't really turn out so well. That time was also much more of a serious group effort, whereas at least so far this is just a resolution sponsored by…
Well, technically, just to the Wehrmacht: "If like Poland you're not ready for the onslaught, you too could be ruthlessly torn apart and partitioned between rival dictatorships! Let Bobbs-Merrill intervene on your behalf." This is from an interesting article by…