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Emily, apart from what you think of Chief Justice Roberts, what do you think of the current role of the Supreme Court in American society as a whole? It seems to me that the Supreme Court today has a smaller role in shaping the public policy agenda of the United States than it has had in recent memory. The court takes very few ...

If I had to describe the major theme of the October 2007 term, it would be the court as a minimalist court with no surprises. There were no major revolutions this term. Even the big cases were narrow and interstitial. The court mostly took baby steps. It may not seem that way this week, with big cases like Boumediene, Heller, and Kennedy v. ...

In case some readers here may have tried to visit the Volokh Conspiracy today, we're, um, having problems due to incoming traffic. The site is not letting any of us bloggers log in to post, so although we have a ton of posts we want to write about Heller, we can't actually log in. I may post some stuff here instead, although posting on a ...

Deb, I had the late great James Vorenberg for criminal procedure. He was a wonderful teacher and mentor; I was sad that he passed away before I became a criminal-procedure professor myself. I'm not sure why you think the identity of my criminal-procedure professor back in law school might be relevant. But for what it's worth, I had Vorenberg. On ...

Deborah asks an excellent question: ''What is it in particular about Gitmo that courts can't handle?'' I don't expect judges to be very good at knowing who is or is not a terrorist because I doubt the evidence the government has resembles the kind of evidence judges are used to seeing. Judges are used to seeing particular kinds of evidence in ...

Phil, I find myself in the awkward position of disagreeing both with Scalia's comments about Boumediene and your critique of them. You offer three reasons why Scalia's comments are wrong. Your first point, that we are really at war with ''a very diverse constellation of [radical Islamist] groups'' rather that ''radical Islamists'' ...

The 9th Circuit handed down a very important decision today in Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co. holding that users of text-messaging services ordinarily have a Fourth Amendment reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of the text messages stored on the service provider's network. Judge Wardlaw wrote the opinion, joined by Judge ...

Diane makes an excellent point that no one appears upset with the D.C. Circuit's reliance on foreign practices in the recent currency case. In my view, the lack of reaction helps to confirm a theory I offered in a blog post in 2005 in response to an essay on the topic of citing foreign law by our own Deb Pearlstein: The opposition to foreign law ...

With all this talk of the possibility of Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the most obvious precedent for it. Not so long ago, a former U.S. senator and a loyal Democrat was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Like Hillary, he was born in the Midwest and had studied law at Yale.  Like Hillary, he ...

Diane, Adam, I wonder if the difference between you is more about the meaning of the term ''lawyer's lawyer'' than about Chief Justice Roberts. As I have heard the term used, a ''lawyer's lawyer'' is a lawyer whom the top members of the bar see as a top member of the bar. If that's the definition, then I agree with Adam about John ...