In a Supreme Court case decided just this last week, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote: In a functioning democracy, policy choices … usually belong to the people and their elected representatives. This was said as justification for the court not to…
The American public has long held an unfavorable view of the Internal Revenue Service, as evidenced by several historical surveys. A Gallup poll taken more than 25 years ago in October 1997 found that 69 percent of the American public…
Tuesday nights in Indianapolis, I have been teaching an introduction to the classic literature of Judaism. This last Tuesday, the topic was the Talmud, an amazing book, unique in world literature, but a book which has been closed, sometimes partially,…
Last May’s leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization severely damaged the high court’s ability to perform its essential function: that of debating and deciding — in secret — the most important legal…
The full title of Erwin Chemerinsky’s book says it all: Worse Than Nothing — The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism. Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, tells readers that the doctrine of constitutional interpretation now favored by a majority of…
In a previous article in these pages, I nominated Clinton v. City of New York as “one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.” In that 1998 case, the Supreme Court held unconstitutional the line-item veto, which had allowed…
In the hubbub over the Dobbs case overruling Roe v. Wade, many have overlooked the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA. The case was part of a larger project by legal theorists on the right to cut back…
This is part two in a series on what’s not in the Constitution but should be. Part one can be found here. It ought to be illegal for politicians to use public money to buy votes. It isn’t, and here’s…
Our more than slightly off-plumb president is a fount of odd and counterintuitive claims. One of his latest and most cynical is that our Constitution is “always evolving.” I’ll wait here while you think about this for a few seconds….
