Justice John Paul Stevens

August 15, 2016|Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, Judge Edith Jones, Justice John Paul Stevens, Veasey v. Abbott, Voter ID

Judicial Rebellion Against Voter ID

by Mark Pulliam|

ALLENSTOWN, NH - FEBRUARY 9: (Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Like unruly schoolchildren using the presence of a substitute teacher as an opportunity to misbehave, in Veasey v. Abbott, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, has sent the jurisprudential equivalent of a spitball at the U.S. Supreme Court knowing that the deadlocked Court would probably take no corrective action.

On July 20, the Fifth Circuit, by a vote of 9 to 6, declared Texas’s voter-identification law unlawful even though the Supreme Court upheld a similar law eight years ago. The ruling was quite remarkable, coming as it does from a court of appeals generally regarded as the nation’s most conservative.

February 12, 2016|

An Administrative Fairy Tale

by Jonathan H. Adler|

In response to: A Modest Proposal for Reforming the Administrative State

Most everyone is familiar with the Hans Christian Andersen tale in which only a child is willing to pronounce what everyone knows: The emperor’s clothes are no clothes at all. As the emperor marches through town, he is as naked as the day he was born. His magnificent new outfit is a fiction, but a fiction that all the adults accept lest they be condemned as traitors or fools. From the mouth of an innocent child comes the honest truth. Ilan Wurman believes an equivalent unspoken truth about the administrative state must be laid bare. Although the Supreme Court long ago…

(Incrementally) Toward a More Libertarian Bureaucracy

by Christopher J. Walker

The ambitious proposal reconsidering the foundations of the modern regulatory state that Ilan Wurman outlines in his thoughtful Liberty Forum essay is not an outlier. There seems to be a growing call—primarily among conservatives and libertarians—to return to first principles and rein in the administrative state. And I’m not just referring to Philip Hamburger’s condemnation…

Congress-ification of Agency Rulemaking

by Andy Grewal

In his provocative Liberty Forum essay, Ilan Wurman proposes a novel solution to the explosive growth of the administrative state. Constitutional conservatives, rather than pursuing their dream remedy (that is, the Supreme Court overturning or severely limiting its prior holdings on the non-delegation doctrine), should accept that agencies will inevitably exercise a blend of executive,…

Ilan Wurman Replies to His Critics

by Ilan Wurman

I would very much like to thank professors Chris Walker, Jonathan Adler, and Andy Grewal for their thoughtful and incisive responses to my “modest” (or perhaps not so modest) proposal for reforming the administrative state. Much of their criticisms, I think, will be addressed in the forthcoming, fuller accounts of this idea, but much of…

July 31, 2014|14th Amendment, 2nd Amendment, Black Codes, Dred Scott, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice John Paul Stevens

Arms and the Several States

by Nicholas J. Johnson|

A Bureau agent stands between armed groups of Southern whites and Freedmen in this 1868 picture from Harper's Weekly.

My last post discussed how John Paul Stevens, late of the Supreme Court, and author Michael Waldman advance a stingy, substantively empty view of the Second Amendment by ignoring the Constitution’s framework of limited, enumerated powers. That critique, of course, only goes to federal authority. The right to arms enforceable against the states rests on the Fourteenth Amendment.

September 24, 2012|Justice John Paul Stevens, Sandy Levinson

Justice Stevens Reviews Sandy Levinson’s Framed

by Mike Rappaport|

Over at the New York Review of Books, Justice Stevens writes an interesting review of Sandy Levinson’s new book Framed. Stevens writes a balanced review, but he disagrees with Sandy’s recommendation in favor of a constitutional convention.

Interestingly, Stevens also disagrees with Sandy’s attack on the compromises that produced the Constitution — compromises that allowed slavery to continue and permitted an equality of state power in the Senate.

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.