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Our Unlovable Constitution
A new study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg concludes that the world’s democracies are no longer emulating the U.S. Constitution, and are instead resorting to other templates that guarantee more...
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Pew Poll: Obama vs. the Bishops
Among Catholics who have heard about the issue: 55% favor exemptions from HHS directive 39% don’t Protestants: 51% yes 39% no All voters: 48% yes 44% no Quick Analysis: This is not a non-issue. Poll is...
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A Peculiar Kind of Reasoning
I’ve been MIA recently, most due to some other projects I’ve been working on. But I’ll have some deeper thoughts on the following later on…right after I’ve succeeded in picking my jaw back up from off...
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Jurisprudence Blogging 1: Austin
This is the first in a series of posts about general jurisprudence. In this post, I will cover Austin’s view. I will give a simple overview on what his views are, what is good about them and what is...
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Hexalogue
A certain kind of religious activist takes it as a given, and as an imperative, that the Decalogue must be displayed prominently on and in public buildings. Gratefully, these folks are rare; sadly,...
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Presuppositional Constitutionalism
Does the Constitution assume certain presuppositions on the part of those it means to govern? If so, what are those presuppositions? I submit the answer to the first question is yes, and explain the...
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The Doomsday Provision
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. Why do we...
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How do you interpret a constitution?
The biggest cause of confusion faced by Originalists—the folks who think the Constitution means what it originally did in the late 1700s—isn’t the one you’d probably guess at first. You’d probably...
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How do you interpret a constitution?
The biggest cause of confusion faced by Originalists—the folks who think the Constitution means what it originally did in the late 1700s—isn’t the one you’d probably guess at first. You’d probably...
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The Text Is All We Have
Today’s story about the Justice Department obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records from the Associated Press, apparently without a warrant and without any sort of prior notice to the people or...
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Let the Character Assassinations Begin
It comes with the territory obviously, but its predictability doesn’t make it any less ridiculous or frustrating. Jeffrey Toobin and David Brooks have fired the first shots, outlining the many failings...
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Tinkering with the Nuts and Bolts of Electronic Surveillance
Three things amaze me most about the description, including the screen capture images, of the NSA data-mining software revealed by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald, which you can read about in some...
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What You Need to Know About Klayman v. Obama
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rendered a decision today in a case called Klayman v. Obama. It’s sixty-eight pages long and it’d be pretty dense stuff for most...
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All Rise! Ye Ordinary Court Is In Session
Some of you regular readers out there may wonder why it is that so few of the lawyers who write for Ordinary Times didn’t author any posts about the high-profile Hobby Lobby case that was argued before...
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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part I: Background and Standards of Law
A description of the Ordinary Court project may be found here. Likko, C.J. delivered the opinion of the Ordinary Court as to this Part I. A Petitioner Kathleen Sebelius is the Secretary of Health and...
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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part II: Justiciability of Corporate Claims
A description of the Ordinary Court project may be read here. Part I of the opinion may be read here. Likko, C.J. delivered the opinion of the Ordinary Court as to this Part II. A matter of some...
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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part III: Justiciability of Individual Claims...
A description of the Ordinary Court project may be read here. Part I of the opinion may be read here. Part II of the opinion may be read here. [NB: The original version of this post neglected to...
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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Parts II and III: Dissenting and Concurring...
Kowal, J., dissenting in part and concurring in part: I write separately below. In short, the Greens elected to exercise their unalienable right of conscience through the corporate form. Their...
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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part IV: Government’s Showing, Disposition
A description of the Ordinary Court project may be read here. Part I of the opinion may be read here. Part II of the opinion may be read here. Part III of the opinion may be read here. Kowal, J.’s...
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In My Opinion’s Wake
Some may ask, I think legitimately, how I can conclude that a corporation lacks religious rights under the First Amendment but affirm that it has free speech rights under the First Amendment, believing...
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Shakespeare in American Politics
By T. Greer. I was delighted to receive Marjorie Garber‘s Shakespeare After All in the mail this morning. Garber’s book is a thousand page review of everything Shakespeare ever wrote, with each play...
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A One Party Nation
A Parade of Horribles for the Democratic Party The party of Donald Trump is poised to have more control over the levers of power than any political party in United States history. This is the absolute...
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The Judicial Depoliticitization Amendment
I propose an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: Section 1. The number of Justices serving upon the Supreme Court of the United States shall be nine, including the Chief...
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The Most Constitutional Right
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith [Public domain]Shortly after the election of 2016 was resolved, with a plurality of voters nationally favoring Hillary Clinton but the Electoral College favoring Donald...
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Up The Union
The seal of the Commission on Presidential Debates reading, “THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER,” hangs above the stage of the first presidential debate of 2016 at Hofstra University in Hempstead,...
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Rebuilding from Ashes
Image Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain It may not feel like it right now, but you got lucky with Trump. Let me be clear, this is not a defence of Trump, I’m not...
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Marxist – Leninist – Trumpist?
If you’ve been paying attention to politics over the past decade, you will have observed that there has been a major political realignment taking place over that span. From the Romney-Obama election...
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Against the State of the Union
Tonight is President Biden’s second State of the Union address (his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2021 was technically not a SotU because he had just been inaugurated). Most likely...
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Against ‘National Divorce’
Bad Idea or Worst Idea? The idea of a ‘national divorce’ – a parting of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states into separate national agglomerations – has been floating around the conservative ecosystem recently,...
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A Constitutional Parable
There is a lot of concern about losing our rights as Americans. We are blessed with freedoms that are unheard of in much of the world, freedoms that came at a high price over hundreds of years. Among...
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