John Yoo quoted by TheSpectrum, Aug. 22, 2017
“A basic tenet of constitutional law is that no president can bind future presidents in the use of their constitutional authorities,” Yoo said.
Judge clears way for extradition of ex-Salvadoran colonel
Patty Blum quoted by ABC News, Aug. 21, 2017
“The U.S. government has a great interest in cooperating with Spain on an accusation of terrorist murder,” said Patty Blum, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is all about international cooperation.”
Can police prevent the next Charlottesville?
Erwin Chemerinsky quoted by ProPublica in BoiseWeekly, Aug. 20, 2017
Erwin Chemerinsky … said the Supreme Court has upheld the right to have guns at home, but not necessarily in public. “Think of curfews. The government has the ability to take steps to protect public safety,” Chemerinsky said. “The more evidence there is that it’s a threat to public safety, the more sympathetic the courts would be.”
Can President Trump unify the country despite a reluctance to denounce hate groups?
john a. powell interviewed by The Washington Post, Can He Do That? podcast, Aug. 18, 2017
“Trump is not engaging in dog-whistle politics. Trump is no longer subtle. … Trump doesn’t seem to be concerned about moderate whites. He’s going full steam ahead. One of the things a lot of research has shown is that a lot of whites, including some moderate whites, are increasingly concerned about the country not being majority white. So there’s this anxiety that Trump is playing into, as well.”
No one wants an arms race, but high-tech weapons are America’s best shot at containing North Korea
John Yoo writes for Los Angeles Times, Aug. 18, 2017
What the United States and its allies must now do is find options between conventional war, or even nuclear holocaust, on the one hand, and appeasement on the other. The answer could be robotic, cyber, and space weapons — if we have the will to deploy them.
State to appeal rather than give judges back pay
Catherine Fisk quoted by Daily Journal (registration required), Aug. 18, 2017
“It does not surprise me that government employees, including judges, would object to a failure to pay them,” she said.
Nevada plan to use untried execution drugs draws criticism
Jen Moreno quoted by U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 18, 2017
“What we saw in those executions was a prolonged struggle to breathe, and movement,” Moreno said. “The paralytic would mask the struggle and the movement, but wouldn’t mean it wasn’t going on.”
White nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Constitutional limits on free speech
Jesse H. Choper quoted by Snopes, Aug. 18, 2017
“Free speech is not absolute; that has been true from the very beginning,” … Jesse H. Choper told us. But where one draws that line is something that does not have a clear answer. He told us that there is a real lack of definition about “what is hate speech and under what circumstances does it lose First Amendment protection.”
Time to end injustice in juvenile justice system
Jeffrey Selbin and Abbye Atkinson write for The Orange County Register, Aug. 18, 2017
Our research mirrors studies of criminal justice debt in both the adult and juvenile systems, where sociologists and criminologists have found that such debt compounds disadvantage by reducing income, limiting opportunities and increasing recidivism.
When the law meets the party
Rachel E. Stern cited by The New York Review of Books, Aug. 17, 2017
One of the best answers I found was in “Activist Lawyers in Post-Tiananmen China,” an essay by the legal scholar Rachel E. Stern, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law School. Stern takes a usefully long view. She writes that the Communist Party is in the middle of a vast experiment: trying to harness the power of the law without giving up political control.