Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Christine O’Donnell’s politics are hilarious: she thinks we should go around telling people masturbation is wrong. Thing is, there’s a Supreme Court justice who’s very angry that we can no longer make it illegal.
Archive for the ‘Supreme Court’ Category
September 14th, 2010
July 30th, 2010
Brad Plumer in The New Republic rightfully celebrates the emergence of the Western Climate Initiative, which establishes a cap-and-trade system among several US states and three of the most important Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. “Cap-and-trade is coming to the United States,” he notes, “and there is nothing that the Senate can do [...]
May 9th, 2010
Category: Supreme Court, Torture
She was against them, when Lindsey Graham wanted to shred the Constitution to permit them.
October 7th, 2009
I rarely find myself at a loss for words, but Antonin Scalia has made me so. What is the most apposite term to describe this argument? The question of the meaning of a cross in the context of a war memorial did give rise to one heated exchange, between Justice Scalia and Peter J. Eliasberg, [...]
June 16th, 2009
Category: Alito
Arianna Huffington, speaking at the UCLA Public Affairs commencement, had three pieces of advice for our graduates: 1. Follow your own drummer. 2. Put “changing the world” on your to-do list. 3. Get enough sleep. Good advice, especially the last bit.
June 5th, 2009
Category: Sotomayor
A reader summarizes Sonia Sotomayor’s answers to her confirmation questionnaire: She is a member of BJ Warehouse Club. Her dentist has been doing very well recently. In the 1970s, she ran a copying machine at the Yale GP student center, then at Yale Law School. She owns real estate, but no stocks. The responses are [...]
June 4th, 2009
Category: Sotomayor
Excerpts from Judicial Questionnaire filled out by Judge Sotomayor and released today to the public: * * * Q. The American Bar Association’s Commentary to its Code of Judicial Conduct states that it is inappropriate for a judge to hold membership in any organization that invidiously discriminates on the basis of race, sex, religion, or [...]
June 2nd, 2009
Category: Sotomayor
Jonah Goldberg on Sotomayor: just when you thought the debate could sink no further.
June 2nd, 2009
Category: Sotomayor
Upon review of Judge Sotomayor’s so-called reversal rate, it appears she’s doing better than her peers on average. According to the New York Law Journal, which runs a monthly column called “2d Circuit Roundup,” since 2002 the High Court has taken up 35 cases from the Second Circuit; of those, it has reversed, vacated or [...]
May 30th, 2009
Brad DeLong raps my knuckles for being cavalier about the sentence talking heads have been endlessly parsing from Sotomayor’s Berkeley speech. Here’s the full paragraph: Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and [...]
