Today on Findlaw, I explore the problematic misuse of executive privilege in the Bush administration. That misuse continued late last week when former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove refuse to honor the subpoena of a House subcommittee looking into whether or not wrongful pressure was brought upon US attorneys in the prosecution of a ...

  Tony Snow was a kind man who enjoyed sparring with his former colleagues in the press.  As well deserved as most of the criticism of the Bush administration has been - on Iraq, on the economy, on the environment, on just about everything except Roberts and Alito --  that criticism also at times exceeds the boundaries of ...

  Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson are right to probe with hypothetical the dimensions of the newly-minted, or perhaps ancient, right of self-defense, or right to own handguns, in one's home, or maybe outside it, or maybe also to own other weaponry, or maybe not, so firmly established in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) per those ...

Right at this moment, the Supreme Court is not an issue in the campaign, although partisans on both sides will no doubt keep trying to make it one as we get closer to November.  One reason the court is not an issue right now is that the chief justice has done a superb job of lowering the court's profile. It's hard to get the nation ...

Yesterday, in Giles v. California, Justice Scalia, true to the originalist method, kept to the text of the Constitution and enforced the Confrontation Clause for the benefit of a criminal defendant complaining that his conviction was wrongful because he did not have the ability to cross-examine the out of court testimony of his girl-friend about ...

Dr. Jim Dobson is a likeable man of wit and intelligence whom I have long admired for his support for the family. Recently, however, he—and his national political director, Tom Minnery—undertook on Dobson's nationally syndicated radio program to engage in a hypercritical distortion of an influential and powerful presentation on faith (a ''Call to ...

While deducing from the calendar who is likely to write an opinion from any given sitting is a matter of considerable speculation, there is reason to believe that Justice Scalia may be writing D.C. v. Heller. Should that prove to be true, it is worth recalling Justice Scalia's own definition of originalism, and his particular ''originalist'' ...

Last night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, it was my pleasure to moderate the Sixth Annual Templeton Lecture on Economic Liberty. The lecture endowed by Dr. John Templeton was one of the first endowed programs of this magnificent center, and it has become one of Philadelphia's most looked-for events. Consequently, it is ...

I was on Meet the Press only once. Paired with Mario Cuomo, for whom Tim once worked, other lesser hosts might be expected to favor their old boss. Not Tim. Tim was indeed a partisan—for truth as best as it could be ascertained by the human mind in the exploration of opposing points of view. On that Sunday, it was my task to defend the ...

After Abu Ghraib, a whole bunch of fits and starts with military commissions, not to mention too loudly the disastrously wrong-headed, deadly, and costly occupation of Iraq, Boumediene will make perfect sense to most of the world that will be mercifully saved from reading the opinion.   The decision in Boumediene will no ...