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Sidewalk chalk on trial: the Jeff Olson jury acquittal
Sidewalk Chalk by thinktk via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)The key reason I think the jury’s acquittal of a San Diego man prosecuted for writing on sidewalks with chalk did not necessarily need to be “jury...
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The irony of liberty of contract: normalizing federal intervention
In 1905, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment — originally intended to overturn decisions like Dred Scott and to restrict so-called “Black Codes” — “the general right to make a contract...
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NSA spying is not clearly unconstitutional
I’ve been noticing a trend to call the activities of the NSA — as revealed by Edward Snowden — “clearly unconstitutional.” I disagree.While I think at least some of the NSA’s activities ought to be...
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Universities UK, sex segregation, and the public-private distinction
The shared legal heritage of the United States and the United Kingdom means that we share many broad legal principles. A distinction between public and private is one of them. Another is our shared...
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The “third-party problem”: one reason telegrams were not constitutionally...
Unlike postal mail or, later, the telephone, telegrams never received constitutional protection. Yet they were the quintessential nineteenth-century technology of communication, used extensively for...
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Sex and Eugenics Sterilization
In looking through Johanna Schoen’s 2005 book, Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare, it appears that, although eugenics-based sterilization...
View ArticlePreserving Jeffersonian ideals through government regulation
In the contentious years of Gilded Age America — 1870-1900 — the general consensus has been than the United States, as a whole, favored industrialists and free-market capitalism (laissez faire), with...
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The National Anti-Monopoly League
Image from page 381 of “American engineer and railroad journal” (1893)There are times when certain conflicts of the 1880s and 1890s seem eerily similar to debates today — we are, it seems, both...
View ArticleThinking about evidence and causation in same-sex marriage arguments
A recurring theme in criticisms of allowing same-sex marriage — or, as Obergefell did, in finding that bans violated the fundamental right to marriage — is some variation of the “slippery slope.”There...
View ArticleCows vs. railroads: the near-death experience of President Grant
A rather incredible 1869 train accident involved President Grant, his family, and the Secretary of the Treasury — and a cow.Running at full speed, the train’s “engineer observed in the dim light ahead,...
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