The other day, I blogged about the TB patient who flew to Europe and back with the knowledge that he had a rare form of TB. The media had been reporting on the case for a while, and the man’s name was not identified until a day or two ago, when a number of stories began including his full name and photograph, as well as the name and photographs of the woman he married (including photos from his wedding).
Professor Anuj Desai (U. Wisconsin Law School) has posted his forthcoming article, The Transformation of Statutes into Constitutional Law: How Early Post Office Policy Shaped Modern First Amendment Doctrine, on SSRN. Anuj’s paper is a fascinating history of the early Post Office and how statutory protection of letters influenced constitutional law. From the abstract:
I’ve been pondering whether the TB patient with the rare hard-to-treat form of the disease who flew on so many flights can be sued by those other passengers whom he may have exposed to the illness. From the New York Times:
Over at SCOTUS Blog, Tom Goldstein wonders what would happen to the Supreme Court if a Republican were to win the presidency in 2008:
I’ve long been unhappy with the typical law school exam format. The entire grade for the class is based on one 3-hour in-class essay exam. The problem with this format is that many students aren’t particularly adept at writing very quickly under immense time pressure. So the exam tests, in part, the ability to write quickly — a skill that is only of limited usefulness in the practice of law. In real life, lawyers don’t write briefs in 3-hour timed sessions. Law firms would be very unhappy if they did — first because the brief probably wouldn’t be that good and second because it would amount to a meager 3 billable hours!
Typically, when we think of the constitutional criminal procedure that regulates government information gathering, we think of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But many government investigations involve collecting information about speech, association, religion, and the consumption of ideas. The NSA surveillance of telephone calls, for example, involves speech. National Security Letters can be used to obtain information about association and the consumption of ideas. And so on.
At Balkinization, Mark Graber posts an email from Princeton Professor Walter Murphy, who writes about his ordeal over being on an airline screening list:
Too bad I’m not teaching criminal law this semester, as this case would surely be a topic of discussion. From the Associated Press:
Anybody familiar with Fourth Amendment law knows that it is utterly incoherent. In his new paper, Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protection, my colleague, Orin Kerr (GW Law School) argues that this incoherence is actually a good thing. He attempts to sort out the muddle that currently exists in Fourth Amendment law into four models. From the abstract:
Kudos to my friend Chris Hoofnagle (Samuelson Clinic at Berkeley Law School) who had his paper on SSRN written about by the New York Times: