Elena Kagan

Justice Kagan, Please Be a Judicial Activist

by Ryan Young on August 6, 2010

in Legal, Personal Liberty

Over at the Daily Caller, I explain why newly-minted Justice Kagan should be a judicial activist — but not in the way most people use the term. True judicial activism doesn’t mean legislating from the bench. It means standing up to the executive and legislature and striking down unconstitutional laws. Unfortunately, Justice Kagan seems like she would rather defer to the branches that gave her her new job:

There is a reason why the Supreme Court is filled with Justices eager to defer to the political branches. It’s because the political branches get to pick who sits on the bench. No president would nominate a judge who might nullify his administration’s signature achievements. No Senator would vote to confirm a judge who might strike down an important bill that she wrote. There is a selection bias favoring judicial passivists.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel:

Justice Kagan was nominated and confirmed because of her judicial passivism. But now that she’s in, she’s in for life. She can stand up for the judicial branch if she wants to. If a case comes before her involving a law that is clearly unconstitutional, her rightful duty is to strike it down.

In many cases, it’s as easy as just saying no.

Elena Kagan Confirmed, 63-37, for Supreme Court; Divided Senate Approves Nomination in Partisan Vote

by Hans Bader on August 5, 2010

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

The Senate has voted 63-to-37 to confirm Elena Kagan as the next Supreme Court justice. Click here for details. The vote was largely along party lines, with one Democrat (Ben Nelson of Nebraska) voting against her, and five Republicans voting for her.  (Swing votes like Scott Brown and George Voinovich voted against Kagan.) I give my personal perspective on the vote here.  Kagan’s confirmation margin was the third-smallest margin in the last 50 years.  In other news, a trial judge in California struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage, in a ruling that may reach the Supreme Court in the next few years.

In defending Kagan, Media Matters embraces Bush Justice Department

by John Berlau on July 31, 2010

in Culture, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Legal, Mobility, Nanny State, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Well, who woulda thunk it?! George W. Bush’s Justice Department is now considered a citadel of wisdom by the legal eagles at the liberal Media Matters for America.

On Thursday, I outlined in National Review how Elena Kagan’s position as solicitor general that “regulated firms” must “exhaust” the administrative review process at a regulatory agency before judicial review – if adopted by a future Supreme Court — would likely mean that small businesses challenging Obamacare and other laws would never see their day in court. Hours later, Media Matters blasted my piece as “the latest bogus attack on Kagan.” My criticism was “bogus,” according to the site, because “the Bush administration Justice Department made the same argument in lower court proceedings.”
Putting aside the issue of whether these arguments were in fact “the same” – and they differed in many respects – it is striking that authors of the Media Matters response did not seem to be bothered by the rejection of these arguments by two federal judges appointed by Bill Clinton, a fact that one would think would hold interest for the site’s readers. Both James Robertson at the D.C. district court and Judith Rogers, who wrote the majority opinion for the appeals court, ruled that plaintiffs had standing to challenge the constitutionality of Sarbanes-Oxley in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Board, although they would rule against the merits of this challenge. Rogers wrote that the doctrine of regulatory “exhaustion doctrine does not apply” because the “constitutional challenges to the Act are collateral to the Act’s administrative review scheme.”
It is true that when the case was filed in 2006, officials of the Bush DOJ did submit an opposition brief arguing, among other things, that plaintiffs lacked standing. The Competitive Enterprise Institute protested the administration’s position vigorously through the participation of our attorneys in the case and in public statements as well articles, op-eds and postings on Open Market. Should any of the DOJ employees whose names are on these briefs ever become the judicial nominees of a future GOP president, they too should face serious scrutiny for their advocacy of this position.
That being said, Kagan’s briefs in the case ventured beyond those of the Bush DOJ and phrased the arguments in terms of general principles that seem to bar virtually all legal challenges to laws and rules by “regulated firms” unless a regulatory agency’s review process is “exhausted.” Further, she brought back the arguments on standing after both the district and appeals courts had rejected them. And Kagan’s briefs in which she abandoned arguments in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act because they were contrary to the views of the Obama administration shows that she is not hesitant to discard a legal argument in a case if it goes against her principles.
First, it should be pointed out that the Bush DOJ did not have the opportunity to file briefs once the case was taken by the Supreme Court in May 2009, a few months after the Obama administration took office. Comparing DOJ briefs offered in cases before the lower courts to those filed before the Supreme Court – even in the same case-is to some extent an apples-and-oranges exercise. Except for politically-charged cases such as the challenge to Arizona’s immigration law, higher-level DOJ officials often have minimal involvement in lower court cases. Bush’s solicitor general’s name is not on any of the DOJ lower briefs in the case, while Kagan is listed as “counsel of record” on the Supreme Court briefs.
This distinction is important in discerning her constitutional views because at the Supreme Court level, an administration is much more conscious about the arguments it makes, knowing that it can influence the Court not just with regard to the case at hand, but other important cases as well.
This makes it all the more striking that in comparing the briefs, the Bush DOJ argued against standing mostly based on the facts and circumstances of this specific case, while Kagan’s brief phrased the arguments in terms of general principles about judicial review and the regulatory state. The Bush briefs, for instance, never praised the exhaustion doctrine in such effusive terms as the Kagan brief, which called it one of the “bedrock principles of judicial review of administrative action.”
The Bush DOJ briefs made a more limited argument –still wrong and still rejected by the lower courts –that the plaintiffs in this case lacked standing because of specific provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley and the Exchange Act and because the injuries the small accounting firm Beckstead & Watts suffered due to the law weren’t severe enough to bypass review at the agency. But those DOJ officials also conceded that the agency exhaustion doctrine should not apply to some cases. A DOJ brief in 2006 conceded that legal challenges in which the plaintiff would suffer “immediate and irreparable harm” without prompt access to the courts “could justify extra-statutory review.” It argued, however (and again wrongly), that this plaintiff was in no such danger.
But Kagan never made allowance for “irreparable harm” or other extenuating circumstances to her argument of the need for “regulated firms” to exhaust all procedures at the regulatory agency. In the brief‘s words, “even when an agency cannot itself rule on the merits of a constitutional challenge, a regulated firm cannot bypass exclusive administrative review procedures established by Congress if the constitutional claims can be meaningfully addressed in the Court of Appeals after the administrative review.” Note the phrase “after the administrative review.” What good would judicial review, however “meaningful”, if a plaintiff such as a small business had its livelihood harmed for years before a regulatory agency before it even got access to the courts?
Also, the Bush DOJ never suggested, as Kagan’s brief does, that Beckstead & Watts seek judicial review by refusing to comply with a Sarbanes-Oxley inspection or investigation. That argument drew a serious rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts in the Supreme Court decision last month. Noting that the firm would face “severe punishment should its challenge fail,” Roberts wrote dryly in the opinion, “We normally do not require plaintiffs to bet the farm by taking the violative action before testing the validity of the law, . . . and we do not consider this a meaningful avenue of relief.” The dissent did not express disagreement with Roberts on this point.
Media Matters also fell back on the argument that “Kagan’s personal legal views can’t be inferred from her actions as solicitor general,” and that “Kagan’s duty as SG is to make every reasonable argument to defend federal laws and actions.” But in previously defending Kagan’s dropping of what many would deem “reasonable” arguments from a brief supporting the Defense of Marriage Act (a law and an issue that the Competitive Enterprise Institute takes no position on), Media Matters argued, “It’s not unprecedented for DOJ to abandon arguments.” The site quoted approvingly former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s statement that “justice is best achieved, not by making any available argument that might win a case, but by vigorously enforcing federal law in a manner that heeds the commands of the Constitution.”
Kagan did not have to argue that this small business lacked legal standing in order to make her case. In fact, since it was rejected by both the district and appeals court and by Clinton-appointed judges, pragmatism would seem to suggest dropping the argument. But Kagan instead expanded the argument to further close the courthouse door on virtually all “regulated firms” challenging government agencies. The facts suggest that her arguments in this brief represent her deeply help legal views, and small businesses have reason to fear a Solicitor General-turned-Justice Kagan.

I add the same disclaimer to this blog post that I did for the article in National Review: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of counsel for the plaintiff in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Liberal Senators Make False Claims About Supreme Court’s Ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, During Kagan Confirmation Hearings

by Hans Bader on June 30, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Legal, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Liberal Senators like Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) are peddling fables about a Supreme Court ruling, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007).

In its Ledbetter ruling, the Supreme Court said that employees who choose to sue under the federal discrimination law with the shortest deadline (Title VII) should generally sue within 180 days, at least where they could have discovered the discrimination in time to do so.  It rejected as untimely a discrimination claim by Lilly Ledbetter, who had known for years of the pay disparity she later sued over.

That’s a far cry from how Senator Cardin describes the case.  Today, in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan, Cardin made false claims, both about what the Supreme Court said in the Ledbetter case, and about plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter and her lawsuit.  In claims echoed by Senator Feinstein, Cardin alleged that:

“The Court said Mrs. Ledbetter had to file her case within 180 days after the beginning of the discrimination, and since she did not do that, her claim was barred by the statute of limitations. This defies logic. How can a person bring a claim when they don’t know they are being discriminated against? It makes no sense.”

The Supreme Court said no such thing, as National Review’s Ed Whelan, a lawyer, notes, pointing out that Ms. Ledbetter knew for years of the alleged discrimination before she chose to sue over it.  The claims made by Senator Cardin were long ago debunked by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, legal scholars like David Copus, legal commentators like Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, and lawyers like Paul Mirengoff.

Plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter lost her pay discrimination case because she filed her complaint too late. The Court said that in most cases, employees should file an EEOC complaint within 180 days of their first discriminatory paycheck, if they want to sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

But the Court also specifically left open the possibility that employees could sue later simply because they didn’t know of the discrimination at the time — a situation it said did not apply to Ledbetter’s case (she testified in her deposition that she knew of the pay disparity in 1992, but only filed her complaint with the EEOC in 1998, around the time she retired). The Court pointedly noted that plaintiff could have pressed her claim instead under the Equal Pay Act, which has a longer deadline for suing. (Moreover, as lawyer Paul Mirengoff notes, the Supreme Court has long allowed hoodwinked employees to rely on equitable tolling, waiver, and estoppel to sue beyond the deadline, when employer deception keeps them from suing within 180 days, as it made clear in its Zipes decision.)

As Stuart Taylor, a legal commentator for the National Journal, has noted,

“Ledbetter admitted in her sworn deposition that ‘different people that I worked for along the way had always told me that my pay was extremely low’ compared to her peers. She testified specifically that a superior had told her in 1992 that her pay was lower than that of other area managers, and that she had learned the amount of the difference by 1994 or 1995. She added that she had told her supervisor in 1995 that ‘I needed to earn an increase in pay’ because ‘I wanted to get in line with where my peers were, because… at that time I knew definitely that they were all making a thousand [dollars] at least more per month than I was.’”

The Supreme Court did not create a rigid deadline that applies regardless of whether an employee could have discovered the discrimination.  Instead, it expressly left open the possibility that plaintiffs can wait to sue until after learning of discrimination, under the so-called “discovery rule.” It noted in footnote 10 of its opinion, “we have previously declined to address whether Title VII suits are amenable to a discovery rule. . . .Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case, we have no occasion to address this issue.” In short, since Ledbetter didn’t even claim that a lack of knowledge had prevented her from suing in time, relaxing the deadline for her would have done her no good. (Moreover, if she had lacked knowledge as a result of being hoodwinked by her employer, she could have had the deadline extended under the Supreme Court’s longstanding doctrine of equitable tolling, which applies somewhat more narrowly than the discovery rule.)

After she lost her case, Ledbetter claimed to Congress that she had not learned of the discrimination until the end of her career — a claim parroted by gullible politicians and journalists before it was debunked.

But in Ledbetter’s deposition, she admitted she knew by 1992 – years earlier — that she was paid less than her male peers, notes David Copus in page 8 of the online version of his October 2008 law journal article “Pay Discrimination Claims After Ledbetter.”

Similarly, Washington lawyer Paul Mirengoff notes that “Ledbetter testified that she knew by 1992 that her pay was out of line with her peers. In 1995, she spoke to her supervisor about the problem, telling him that ‘I knew definitely that they were all making a thousand at least more per month than I was and that I would like to get in line.’ Yet Ledbetter waited until 1998 to file her EEOC complaint.”

Moreover, although the Supreme Court dismissed Ledbetter’s claim under Title VII, the discrimination law with the shortest deadline, it pointed out that the plaintiff could easily have pressed her claim instead under the Equal Pay Act, which has a much longer deadline for suing. As it noted, “Petitioner, having abandoned her claim under the Equal Pay Act, asks us to deviate from our prior decisions in order to permit her to assert her claim under Title VII.” She might have won her case had she simply appealed based on the Equal Pay Act, something she inexplicably failed to do.

Supreme Court Dooms Chicago Gun Ban; Obama Judicial Nominees Oppose Gun Rights; Religious Clubs Lose First Amendment Case; Removal of High-Ranking Bureaucrats Made Easier

by Hans Bader on June 30, 2010

in Intellectual Property, International, Labor, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

The Supreme Court doomed Chicago’s handgun ban Monday by ruling 5-to-4 that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments like Chicago, not merely the federal government.  (Most guarantees in the Bill of Rights are deemed so fundamental that they apply to both state and federal governments, but a few rights deemed trivial, like the right to a jury trial in lawsuits seeking over $20, only are applied by the Courts to the federal government, not the states.)  In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to possess a handgun in a federal enclave, in striking down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., in District of Columbia v. Heller.  Chicago’s ban is quite similar to the one found unconstitutional in Washington, D.C., so the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday in McDonald v. City of Chicago dooms Chicago’s gun ban.

In 2009, President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, claimed before her confirmation to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller as binding precedent.  But on Monday, she joined a dissent by the Supreme Court’s four liberal justices calling for the Heller decision to be overruled.  Second Amendment scholar David Kopel says that Sotomayor was not candid, noting that her opinion “contradicted” what she told the Senate before the Senate confirmed her to the Supreme Court.  It is likely that future liberal Supreme Court nominees will pretend to support gun rights until they are confirmed, then vote against such rights once on the Court.

Obama’s current Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, lumped the NRA together with the KKK as “bad guy orgs” while serving in the Clinton administration, suggesting that she will consistently rule against gun owners if her nomination is approved by the Senate.  Kagan failed to defend federal laws protecting crime victims while serving as Solicitor General.

As a Harvard dean, Kagan blocked the military from recruiting, in defiance of a federal law requiring access for military recruiters.  Kagan claimed her opposition was based on the military’s exclusion of openly-gay soldiers, not hostility to the military in general, but this is hard to square with the fact that she had no problem letting the Saudis sponsor an Islamic studies program at Harvard Law School, even though the Saudis flog and execute gay people, and she had no problem serving in the Clinton administration, even though Clinton signed into law both the restrictions on gays in the military she claimed to object to (the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy), and the ban on federal recognition of gay marriages contained in DOMA.

The Supreme Court Monday also ruled that religious clubs can be forced by colleges to admit atheists and others who disagree with the club’s religious perspective as members, as long as the college requires this as part of a general policy of banning clubs from discriminating based on any characteristic.  The Supreme Court’s four “conservative” justices dissented against this ruling limiting the First Amendment’s freedom of association, while moderate Anthony Kennedy joined the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc in ruling against the religious clubs in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

In Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 ruling, cut back on restrictions on the ability to remove high-ranking bureaucrats, ruling that provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law that kept anyone from removing members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board except for willful misconduct unconstitutionally infringed on the constitutional separation of powers, which requires that important government employees be subject to some degree of accountability to higher-ups in the executive branch.  However, the Supreme Court left intact the bulk of the Sarbanes-Oxley law.  The red tape adopted by bureaucrats under Sarbanes-Oxley has driven many IPOs and American jobs overseas.  The red tape costs the economy $35 billion a year, according to the American Electronics Association, and it did nothing to prevent the mortgage meltdown, Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion fraud, or the faulty valuation of sub-prime mortgage-backed securities that helped spawn the financial crisis.

The Supreme Court overturned a ruling that allowed business methods to be treated as exclusive property under the patent laws, but did not definitively rule out the patenting of business methods, in Bilski v. Kappos.

Supreme Court Upholds Controversial Antiterror Law; More Clues About Elena Kagan

by Hans Bader on June 22, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Environment, International, Legal, Nanny State, Nano & Biotech, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was instrumental in getting President Clinton to veto a ban on partial-birth abortion.  She also lumped together the NRA and KKK as “bad guy” organizations while serving in the Clinton White House.

The Supreme Court upheld an anti-terror law that is part of the Patriot Act, banning “material support” for groups designated as terrorists by the President.  It rejected a First Amendment challenge in a 6-to-3 ruling. Jacob Sullum criticizes the provision as being unconstitutionally overbroad.  Eugene Volokh comments here.

In another ruling, the Supreme Court made it harder to block biotech food products through meritless nuisance lawsuits, in Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms.

It also issued several other rulings that are summarized here.

Earlier, Obama’s most recent Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, failed to properly defend federal laws protecting crime victims while serving in the Justice Department as Solicitor General.  Obama nominated a radical law professor to one important appellate judge position, and a judge who made excuses for a sexually-sadistic Roadside Strangler to another important appellate judgeship.

In other news, a Louisiana judge blocked the Obama administration from imposing a blanket ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, citing deceit and false claims by the Obama Administration, and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a vital safeguard against arbitrary government action.  Earlier, Obama had delayed a clean-up of the Gulf by Louisiana and foreign countries, by imposing unnecessary red tape

Judiciary Committee Votes to Promote Judge Who Made Excuses for Roadside Strangler, Claiming His “Sexual Sadism” Was a “Mitigating Factor”

by Hans Bader on June 10, 2010 · 3 comments

in Culture, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

On a party-line vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved President Obama’s promotion of a federal judge who tried to block the execution of a serial killer and rapist known as the Roadside Strangler based on the unbelievable ground that this serial killer’s  “sexual sadism” was a mitigating factor.  The judge did so even though this serial killer admitted his sentence was appropriate and did not seek to challenge it. Obama nominated this judge to serve on a federal appeals court known as the 2nd Circuit.  The newspaper Roll Call reports:

“The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Judge Robert Chatigny to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday on a largely party-line vote despite stiff GOP opposition over his handling of child pornography and rape cases as a district court judge. With Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) abstaining on the vote, the committee’s other 11 Democrats approved the nomination Thursday morning, while the committee’s entire seven-member contingent of Republicans voted ‘no.’ In a series of cases involving defendants found guilty of child pornography, rape and sexual assault cases, Chatigny used the process of downward departure to reduce their sentences. Chatigny also played a central role in the ‘roadside strangler’ case. In that case, Chatigny allegedly threatened to pull the law license of the attorney for a convicted killer — who has been on death row for 15 years — unless he continued his efforts to have the sentence overturned. Chatigny’s nomination has been hotly contested by victims’ rights advocates and the families of several high-profile victims, including the family of Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped in 2002.”

The Judiciary Committee ignored objections from victims-rights advocates like Edward Smart of the Surviving Parents Coalition, who noted that Judge Chatigny had not just opposed the execution of “Roadside Strangler” Michael Ross, but also gone further, to question his very conviction, based on silly reasons: “Judge Chatigny claimed Ross was incompetent to stand trial based on the prison environment and Ross’s sexual sadism.”  This sort of making excuses for dangerous criminals to overturn their convictions (and potentially set them free) is extremely disturbing.

Footage of the Judiciary Committee hearing makes clear that even some liberal Senators found Chatigny’s record disturbing, but they voted for him anyway out of blind party loyalty to Obama, who nominated him.  Conservative Senator Sessions discusses and criticizes the nomination here.

An even more radical Obama nominee, Goodwin Liu, was previously approved on a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Liu is a Berkeley law professor who believes that the Constitution requires racial quotas and welfare, and is hostile to “free enterprise, private ownership of property, and limited government.”  If confirmed by the full Senate, Liu would sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s largest federal appeals court.

Obama’s recent Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, shirked her duty to defend federal laws protecting crime victims, while in her current position as Solicitor General, to which she was appointed by Obama.

Kagan Shirked Duty to Defend Federal Laws Protecting Crime Victims

by Hans Bader on May 19, 2010

in Culture, International, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Federal law authorizes life sentences without parole for particularly heinous violent crimes committed by 16 and 17-year olds.  But Solicitor General Elena Kagan was nowhere to be found when life imprisonment without parole was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court last fall.  That’s true despite the fact that as solicitor general, “Kagan has an obligation to defend federal laws against constitutional challenges.”

In a 5-to-4 ruling Monday, the Supreme Court struck down such sentences, relying partly on their alleged conflict with international legal norms and “international opinion.”

(Since international norms are hostile both to civil liberties and to life imprisonment even for adult murderers, the Supreme Court’s reliance on them set a dangerous precedent).

Despite Kagan’s dereliction of duty, she was nominated to the serve on the Supreme Court by President Obama.

As Solicitor General, she zealously defended the most censorious aspects of the McCain-Feingold law, which violated the First Amendment, and her office argued that the federal government could even ban books advocating the defeat of a politician using it.

As dean of Harvard Law School, she banned the military from Harvard, challenging a federal law that granted equal access to military recruiters.  She claimed the law, which applied to recipients of federal funds, was unconstitutional — a position unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court.

Too bad she didn’t have similar zeal for protecting crime victims in Monday’s Graham v. Florida case, which may well result in dangerous criminals being released who will go on to commit more acts of violence. (Solicitors General have broad authority to intervene in Supreme Court cases, which they have exercised even in cases not involving the federal government.  But Kagan, who is literally a limousine liberal, could not even be bothered to defend federal laws protecting crime victims).

Curiously, as dean of Harvard Law, Kagan pushed through changes in the curriculum that included dropping constitutional law as a requirement and adding international law as a requirement. (This was a misguided change. I attended Harvard Law before these changes, and not taking an international law class did not in any way hamper my subsequent ability to practice international trade law. My constitutional law class did, however, leave me better equipped to bring lawsuits against government agencies.)

Other Obama judicial nominees have also attracted controversy over their views on the death penalty and criminal sentencing, like the radical law professor Goodwin Liu, and a Connecticut judge who tried to block the execution of the Roadside Strangler, arguing that his “sexual sadism” was a mitigating factor.

Obama Nominates Liberal Lawyer Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court

by Hans Bader on May 10, 2010 · 1 comment

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

President Obama has nominated liberal lawyer Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.   She currently serves as Solicitor General.  Before that she was dean at Harvard Law School.

You can find my take on the nomination at this link, which quotes the reactions to Kagan’s nomination by liberal, conservative, and libertarian  legal commentators.  (The opinions I express there are solely my own.)

Earlier, I wrote about Obama’s controversial nominations of Goodwin Liu to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Robert Chatigny to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

LibertyWeek 42: Hugo Chávez, Robber Baron

by Richard Morrison on May 12, 2009 · 1 comment

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist bring back special guest co-host Jeremy Lott to create the work of art known as Episode 42. We start with the continuing buzz over the Supreme Court’s next member, President Obama’s trillion dollar healthcare plan, and an update on how Hugo Chávez is turning Venezuela’s petroleum reserves into his personal piggybank. We add good news from East Texas for beer drinkers, bad news from Europe for technophiles and sad news from Philly for basketball fans.

Listen to the episode HERE.