even lawyers can be showboating idiots https://libertyjusticecenter.org/me...licies-in-response-to-supreme-court-decision/ https://libertyjusticecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Indiana-Medical-School-letter.pdf
Notes on "The Restrained Roberts Court" https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/17/notes-on-the-restrained-roberts-court/ excerpt: In the July 31 issue of National Review, in an article titled "The Restrained Roberts Court," I explain why some common criticisms of the current Supreme Court are simply untrue. In particular, I explain that the Roberts Court overturns precedent and holds legislative enactments unconstitutional significantly less often than did the Warren, Burger, or Rehnquist Courts. In other words, the Roberts Court is meaningfully less "activist" than its post-WWII predecessors, at least as measured by conventional metrics. From the article: Commentators and reporters generally accept that the current Court is more likely to overturn precedent and invalidate laws than we have come to expect. Yet this widely shared perception is wrong. Based on available metrics, the current Court is less likely than its predecessors to overturn precedents or invalidate legislative enactments. If such actions are the hallmark of judicial imperialism, the Roberts Court is not particularly imperialist. . . . the Roberts Court is the least likely of any court since World War II to overturn precedent. The Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts all overturned Supreme Court precedents at a higher rate than the Roberts Court, and it is not particularly close. Compared with its predecessors, the Court under Chief Justice Roberts has largely maintained the status quo. This is not anything new. Folks have been charging that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has been abandoning precedent for years. As I have shown in prior posts going back years, the data did not support such charges then, and it does not support such charges now. While it may well be the case that the current Court, over time, may begin overturning precedents at a higher rate than its post-WWII predecessors, we have not seen that yet (and that is true whether one treats the Roberts Court as a single court, or if we divide it into a "First" and "Second" Roberts Court with the change occurring either when Justice Kavanaugh replaced Justice Kennedy or Justice Barrett replaced Justice Ginsburg.) more at the link
[Josh Blackman] Conservatives Should Not Be Surprised By Justice Barrett's Cautious Approach https://reason.com/volokh/2023/07/2...prised-by-justice-barretts-cautious-approach/
I dunno. I'm more convinced of the Balls and Strikes accusation where they Scott Foster decisions while evening up the count later. Corporations should not be treated as people nor be held to standards that shield them from liability. Frogs in a boiling pot etc... Some of the latest "moderate" votes by Gorsuch and Kav are noteworthy though I'm assuming that will change (media perception?) when another Republican President holds office and some are able to retire without people b****ing about court unfairness or proposing ideas like adding seats.
The Supreme Court Grants Certiorari in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis: How the Case Could Bolster Attacks Against Corporate DEI Initiatives https://www.jenner.com/en/news-insi...ter-attacks-against-corporate-dei-initiatives excerpt: On June 30, 2023, just one day after the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases striking down race-conscious college admissions programs,[1] the Court agreed to hear a case next Term that could bolster legal challenges to corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.[2] The case, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, concerns Title VII, the statute that prohibits employment-discrimination on account of race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), and national origin. Muldrowgives the Court an opportunity to resolve a circuit split about the types of discriminatory employment practices that are actionable. This case has the potential to lower the standard for bringing a Title VII action, which would expose employers to a wider range of litigation implicating their DEI initiatives. While Muldrow does not squarely address DEI efforts, the Supreme Court’s forthcoming opinion could put those efforts at greater risk. If the Court were to interpret Title VII broadly, an employee excluded from a DEI program because of a characteristic Title VII covers, such as race or sex, could succeed in a reverse-discrimination suit even if exclusion from the program did not cause any significant harm. Broadening Title VII in this way could spill over into other areas of anti-discrimination law as well. Although the Court may well decline to take this approach, Muldrow is worth monitoring given these potential implications. more at the link
Affirmative Action for rich kids: It's more than just legacy admissions https://www.npr.org/sections/money/...ich-kids-its-more-than-just-legacy-admissions A few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions. The ruling held that the race-conscious admission programs of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It's now deemed unconstitutional for colleges — both public and private — to weigh race as a factor in who they should admit. Affirmative action for minority kids may now be dead. But a blockbuster new study, released today, finds that, effectively, affirmative action for rich kids is alive and well. They may or may not always do it on purpose, but a group of the most prestigious private colleges in America are handing a massive admissions advantage to rich kids over less affluent kids — even when they have the same SAT scores and academic qualifications. The study is by Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, of Harvard University, and John N. Friedman, of Brown University. We at Planet Money have already dubbed Raj Chetty the Beyoncé of Economics because of his long list of popular hits in empirical economics. And, let me tell you, this is another ***Flawless classic in his catalog. I mean, not only is the study eye-opening, but Chetty is also kind of sticking his neck out here, by shining a spotlight on the admission practices of his employer, Harvard. But they can't fire Beyoncé! (He has tenure). Among a number of other discoveries, the economists find that kids from the richest 1% of American families are more than twice as likely to attend the nation's most elite private colleges as kids from middle-class families with similar SAT scores. The silver spoon these wealthy kids are born with can, apparently, be used to catapult them past other equally bright, but less privileged kids into some of America's best colleges. Chetty and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that fancy schools are promoting a kind of neo-aristocracy, with admission programs that help to perpetuate a family's class privilege from one generation to the next. The advantages they grant to rich kids are about more than just legacy admissions, a practice in which elite colleges give preferential treatment to kids of alumni and donors. The economists find that other types of evaluation and recruitment play important roles in giving rich kids a leg up, as well. ... But these childhood advantages are not what this study is about. In this study, the economists compare rich kids and their less affluent peers who have achieved roughly equal academic credentials (measured by SAT scores and GPAs). Yet, even then, the rich kids are still way more likely to get into elite colleges. It's pretty shocking when you consider how much harder it is for a less well-off kid to measure up academically to a rich kid, who, from a young age, has benefited from tremendous resources aimed at bolstering their academic credentials. ... Admissions in a world after race-based affirmative action Mind you, Chetty and his colleagues studied admissions data before the recent Supreme Court decision, when most of these schools had some sort of race-conscious affirmative action program. Even in this world, as Chetty and his colleagues found in a previous study, kids from the richest 1% of American families were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution. Now, with race-based affirmative action dead, it's plausible that the underrepresentation of lower and middle-class families at these schools could look even worse in coming years, because race is strongly correlated with income and wealth. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, we've begun to see a national debate about admissions policies at America's elite schools. Just days after the ruling, a group of advocacy organizations filed a complaint against Harvard for their legacy admissions policy, arguing that it primarily benefits the kids of wealthy, white families. President Biden criticized legacy admissions and other similar policies that "expand privilege instead of opportunity." And a wave of universities, including Wesleyan, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT — one of the "Ivy-Plus" schools in this study — have begun ending their legacy admission programs. But many schools, including the majority of the Ivy-Plus colleges, are still clinging to their legacy admission programs. If their goal is to have their students go on and make a significant impact on society, Chetty and his colleagues find, that doesn't make a lot of sense. They find that rich kids who are admitted because of their legacy status or their athletic background or their non-academic ratings are actually a bit less likely to see outsized success after graduating, compared to middle- or lower-class kids who don't have those credentials. The economists find that raw SAT and ACT scores — and, more generally, academic ratings like GPA — are much more predictive of future success than anything else. Of course, these colleges may still be reluctant to end their programs that give a leg up to the richest kids in America. The colleges assert that legacy programs help build community and school loyalty. Probably more relevant is the importance of legacies to these fancy private colleges' business models: rich kids are more likely to pay tuition — and their parents are more likely to give donations and pad their endowments. As for concerns that diversity at these schools is about to plummet because of the end of race-conscious affirmative action, Chetty has some ideas to promote both racial and socioeconomic diversity that may survive judicial scrutiny. It would be an admission process that would take into account "kids who come from neighborhoods that have particularly low levels of upward mobility and use that as a measure of adversity," Chetty says. This would not be explicitly focused on race itself, but it would pick up "the adversity in childhood environments that is correlated with race." Call it zip code-based affirmative action. After all, if you grow up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and manage to score a 1500 on the SATs, you've jumped over a much higher hurdle than your silver-spoon-fed competition.
You and many others did. That's (raw #) not what this working paper suggests. The suggestion is for Ivy League colleges to eliminate admission preferences for legacies, athletes, and non-academic factors (factors that heavily favor the top 1% for various reasons detailed in the paper) and instead focus on both objective (raw) and subjective evaluations of academic aspects of students' college applications. Subjective evaluations include rigor of high school curriculum based on courses taken, quality of written essays, teacher and counselor recommendations on work ethic, intellectual curiosity, etc., leadership in academics such as captain of a quiz team, grades in relation to school and peer context rather than just GPA averages, and trajectory in grades over time rather than just averaging all 4 years. The working paper further realize it's not likely that Ivy League colleges would eliminate the existing perferences. So, another recommendation is for a "need-affirmative" admissions, which provide explicit preference in admission for outstanding students from lower-income backgrounds to offset existing preferences.
the Dersh https://dersh.substack.com/p/the-liberal-warren-court-could-have The Liberal Warren Court Could Have Written the Supreme Court’s Recent ‘Conservative’ Opinions ALAN DERSHOWITZ JUL 25, 2023 Today, most justices tend to elevate their political and ideological views over enduring constitutional values. The three contentious decisions announced near the end of the Supreme Court’s recent term regarding Blacks and affirmative action, gays and the First Amendment, and student loan forgiveness — all could have been rendered by the liberal Warren court of the 1960s. President Biden criticized the current Supreme Court as not being “normal” — by which apparently meant not like previous High Courts. The historical record does not support that conclusion. I clerked on the Supreme Court during its most liberal term, 1963-1964. I feel sure that at least five of its members, including its liberal chief justice, Earl Warren, and Associate Justices William Douglas, Hugo Black, and Arthur Goldberg (for whom I clerked) would have supported the results, if not all the reasoning, in these three cases. So would some of the moderates, such as Justices Potter Stewart, John Harlan, and Tom Clark. On Black preferences in admission, the liberal view back then was that race as such could not constitutionally be taken into account by a state actor. Douglas, perhaps the court’s most liberal jurist, expressed this view clearly in his separate opinion in the case of DeFunis v. Odegaard written in 1974. Douglas and other liberal jurists believed that economic and other non-racial factors could be taken into account, but not race itself. Stewart, a moderate, explicitly agreed with that position. On the issue of whether the government could compel a web or cake maker to express views with which she disagrees, the liberal view was that the First Amendment generally trumps public accommodation laws. This would have been regarded as a close case by liberal justices but I believe they would have come down, as many civil libertarians today have come down, on the side of the first amendment. This decision too represents the liberal mainstream. Finally on the decision regarding student loans, the liberal view has generally been to prefer that the legislative, rather than the executive, branch make fundamental decisions regarding the expenditure of government funds. Liberal justices would have probably sided with the current court in concluding that Congress must be crystal clear in allocating legislative functions to executive bureaucrats. In all three cases, the liberal justices of the 1960s would have been unhappy with the actual consequences of these three cases on political and ideological grounds. They would personally have favored the admission of more Blacks to universities, the protection of gays, and the forgiveness of student loans. Yet they would have subordinated their political and ideological views to what they regarded as the mandates of the Constitution. Back in the day, both liberal and conservative justices often joined decisions in which their constitutional views clashed with their political ones. In general, they favored the Constitution. This has now changed considerably. Today, most justices tend to elevate their political and ideological views over enduring constitutional values. This is true of both liberals and conservatives, and indeed each side claims they are doing it to offset the partisanship of the other side. The end result of this change has been to weaken the constitution and to delegitimize the court in the minds of many objective observers. The current justices are far more result-oriented than their predecessors. And support and criticism for their decisions are result-oriented as well. Too few today care about neutral principles that favor neither party nor any ideology. They demand results and they demand them now. It doesn’t matter to them whether these good outcomes are the result of legislative, executive or judicial decisions. What seems to matter more are their personal and political views on whether more Blacks are admitted, more gays are protected, and more students are assisted. This may be understandable but it is inconsistent with the role of judges. The reason why unelected, lifetime appointed judges are given power to overrule the decisions made by the elected legislative and executive branches, is that the Supreme Court is supposed to decide issues based on enduring nonpartisan principles that are rooted in the language and meaning of the Constitution. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a super-legislature or executive, authorized to overrule decisions with which they disagree politically or ideologically. The politicization of the Supreme Court undercuts the unique functions of the judiciary. It is not enough to say that each side is reacting to the overreaching of the other side. Two constitutional wrongs make a constitutional fight, not a right. They do not serve larger interests of American citizens in the rule of law. The cause of this politicization of the judiciary lies primarily in the process by which justices (and other judges) are currently nominated and confirmed. There was a time when the main criteria for appointment was the judicial temperament and legal ability they exhibited. Today, anticipated outcomes come first. How will the justice vote on abortion, gun control, and other agenda-driven issues? The quality of their opinions is secondary. The only cure lies in the appointment process. Presidents and the Senate must return to a time reflected by President Hoover’s appointment of Benjamin Cardozo to replace Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hoover asked his attorney general to prepare a list of the 10 most qualified judges in America. The list included Cardozo, but he was at the very bottom. Hoover told the attorney general that it was a great list, but it was upside down. He then appointed Cardozo despite his being a Democrat from a state that already had more than one justice. Cardozo served with distinction, never allowing his partisan or ideological views to prevail over the Constitution. It may be wishful thinking to believe we could ever return to those days, but all Americans would benefit if current presidents and senators followed Hoover’s non-partisan lead in appointing justices. The alternative is an increasingly partisan Court that will continue to be perceived as just another political branch of government, but without the legitimacy of having been elected. A small portion of this column is based on an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on July 11, 2023.
The Founding Fathers were very clear that I have the right to buy components and build an untraceable gun in my home.
Double Cheeseburgers and Spicy Chicken sandwiches circa 2008 checking in...then I'd wake up the next morning and try to beat everyone to the fridge and microwave.
Did you think that when they wrote the Second Amendment they had a registry of all gun sales and all the guns were serialized? All the guns were ghost guns in 1789.
They probably didn't foresee sawed off shotguns, fully automatic machine guns, silencers, and "other destructive devices", all made illegal to own under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and deemed constitutional by the USSC.
