Whether women have a constitutional right to abortion will be a major, heated issue at all levels during the 2024 election season. It was Chief Justice Warren E. Burger’s court in 1973 that found such a right, in Roe v….
Last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court concerning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan predictably focused on arcane legal theories such as the “major questions doctrine.” Relatively little time was devoted to the profoundly inequitable structure of the program….
In 1950, Eileen Barton’s rendition of “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Until 2012, that song might well have been Colorado baker Jack Phillips’ favorite. But that year, his…
Jack Phillips hit the news again last week. This time, conservatives’ favorite baker got slammed by a Colorado state appeals court for refusing, for religious reasons, to bake a transition cake for a man celebrating his alleged transition to a…
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…
Rather than granting or denying cert to a case involving a North Carolina charter school, the U.S. Supreme Court Monday sent the case to the Biden administration for further consideration. In a one-sentence directive, the court asked the U.S. solicitor…
The Worst Supreme Court Decisions in History is the title of a new book I am writing. It begins by identifying what makes a Supreme Court decision bad, an issue on which reasonable people can disagree. For me, the most…
The Supreme Court may have the opportunity to reverse two rulings that have proved nettlesome to conservatives for decades if it grants certiorari to two religious liberty complainants in its fall session. Both petitions for cert were filed within the…
Criticisms of originalism are nothing new. The frequency and intensity of originalism’s critics, however, have multiplied since the latest blockbuster Supreme Court decisions on gun rights and abortion. Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has added another salvo in his new…
