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:
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha (law, St. John’s) writes:
A few months ago I found myself in a fix over a book review I had committed to. When the Editor asked me to do the review, I readily agreed because I have known the author (in a collegial way) for many years, and I admire his work. I expected that the book, which I had not yet seen, would be excellent. Unfortunately, after reading the book, I had very serious reservations about the argument. . . .
From now on, to avoid being in these situations, I have resolved to only write reviews for books that I truly like (which I have done with pleasure a number of times). I feel like a coward, shirking my responsibility as an academic.
I haven’t always been reluctant to offer pointed criticisms of academic work, and I still do so—as I recently did in a post about the “judicial politics” field—if I think that a useful point would come of it. But I am becoming increasingly gun shy about the whole “honest academic debate” enterprise.
One reason for my reluctance is that I know I have offended people in the past—people I like and admire—by giving my honest critical opinion on an academic matter, an opinion which I meant as a part of an intellectual exchange but which they took personally. Although I was careful to not articulate my objections in personal terms, we all take our own ideas seriously, and thus it is easy to be put off personally by criticisms of the ideas. . . .
It’s not as much fun as it used to be to have a frank exchange of ideas, at least for me. More importantly, if we all start censoring our critical thoughts out of a desire not to offend others, or to avoid provoking a backlash, academic discourse will suffer. For this reason, I hope others do not share in my cowardice.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr mulls the question of why judges are citing fewer law review articles these days than in the past. He refers to an article in the New York Times about the topic: