Author Archive for howard-wasserman

Goodbye and thank you

posted by Howard Wasserman

My extended guest stint here at CoOp is now at an end. My deepest thanks to Danielle for inviting me (and for offering the extra month, which I was glad to accept), the rest of the CoOp crew for having me, and everyone for reading and commenting. My posts on the infield fly rule are going to form my next scholarly project, so I should be able to put a lot of these comments and ideas to good use.

My apologies for relatively light blogging during my final week. I have been (and still am) in scramble mode, trying to do the final read and review on the manuscript for a student treatise on civil rights litigation. The book is intended both as a student supplement and as a primary assigned book in support of a raw/unedited-case approach to the class (which is how I’ve been teaching the course for a few years now). I welcome any comments and suggestions on the book as it moves through publication (it’s due at the publisher in about a week), so if you teach civil rights (or its parent, Fed Courts) and are interested in having a look at the manuscript, I am happy to share.

I also have been getting ready to teach for the first time since last April, as my first-ever research leave winds down. I have not blogged about being on leave, but probably will when it’s done and I’ve had some time to reflecf. I honestly don’t believe I could have gotten this book done if I were teaching an ordinary load the past three months. At the same time, I have missed being in the classroom and the way that teaching time helps organize and break-up the week.

Anyway, thanks again for reading. I hope to be back here again soon—maybe even sooner than for the final month of the 2016 Elizabeth Warren-Marco Rubio presidential showdown.

  December 3, 2012 at 7:15 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Jurisprudential Trivia

posted by Howard Wasserman

Take a break from grading/writing exams for the following (posted by Aaron Caplan (Loyola-LA) to the ConLawProf listserv and reposted here with permission):

What do the three cases below have in common, then suggest additions:

1. M’Culloch v. Maryland
2. Scott v. Sandford
3. Minersville School District v. Gobitis

 

 

  November 29, 2012 at 1:55 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

TV and evolving culture

posted by Howard Wasserman

On the show Parenthood (which I previously wrote about for portraying some legal issues (badly), one story arc this season has a character undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer (and doing a great job showing how harrowing that is). In last week’s episode (which we just watched last night), she smokes pot to get some relief–and they show her laying in bed surrounded by the haze of marijuana smoke, clearly feeling better, holding the joint in her hand, and even taking a hit. They also show her husband getting the pot from his younger brother, who has a hidden stash in his bedroom (in the house he shares with his wife and son); the brother admits to having left-over from a trip they took and he talks about the high quality of this pot compared with what they smoked as teenagers. And all of this is happening on network television, not on AMC or HBO. This says something about where we are as a culture with respect to pot. True, it was showing medical rather than recreational use, which is easier to sell to the public. But it clearly showed her feeling better while smoking and saying she wanted more. More importantly, there is a casualness to the way pot is discussed here–the brother is not evil and does not need to be punished for having pot in the house (and since he is not undergoing chemo, presumably he and his wife smoke recreationally) and the seven-year-old son does not find it by mistake, get high, and jump off the roof.

Of course, one could say this is all about the liberal producers of the show. Parenthood‘s show-runner is Jason Katims, who was head writer and executive producer of Friday Night Lights, whose former members (although not Katims) had several shouting matches with the Romney Campaign and the show’s politics. Parenthood has never been explicitly political, although the family is just sort of casually liberal (they live in Berkeley, after all). Even so, all of this had to get through NBC’s standards and practices, which is not known for being progressive on matters such as drugs (and I missed whether the show ran a warning at the top of the episode).

Once again, it all feels like progress. And I highly recommend this show–as long as it stays away from law.

  November 29, 2012 at 9:04 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Majoring in college sports

posted by Howard Wasserman

Last year, I wrote about a proposal by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post to allow college athletes to major in their sport, building a (hopefully) rigorous curriculum around participation on the team. Now here is David Pargman, an emeritus professor of educational psychology (and a self-described sports fan) making a similar proposal in Monday’s Chronicle of Higher Education (H/T: Deadspin). Like Jenkins, Pargman uses performing arts majors as the analogue. He goes one step further and lays out what the last two years of the program would look like, with the first two years spent in basic studies. The advantage of this, Pargman argues, is honesty–students, coaches, family members, and universities all can openly acknowledge exactly why these young men and women (mostly men) are on campus.

As I wrote last time, this is an interesting idea with some potential, but the devil is in the details. Ultimately, my deepest question is whether this solution addresses the real problem facing college athletics. Pargman argues that not forcing student-athletes to pick a major in which they are not interested–when they really want to study their sport and become a professional athlete–is “integral” to a good portion of the other travesties that surround college sports. But is forcing a football player to major in, say, “Leisure Studies” really integral to all the other problems? Or are the real problems that 1) many of these people have no interest in being in college or studying at all, regardless of what classes they can take or what they can declare as a major, and 2) universities and coaches are making boatloads of money because of the skills of these students and the students are not seeing a dime. Honesty in their major does not change that.

Which is not to reject the proposal out of hand. It is just to emphasize that the problems inherent in college sport go much deeper than this.

  November 26, 2012 at 8:06 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

Whither Elmo?

posted by Howard Wasserman

My daughter is well past Sesame Street age, although she spent a year (from 20 months to 32 months) carrying a stuffed Elmo everywhere. But given the news that the man who created Elmo, Kevin Clash, has resigned from the show in the wake of two separate allegations of child sexual abuse, a question:

Can Elmo survive as a character? Sesame Street producers insist he can, that other puppeteers are trained to do the character and that “Elmo is bigger than any one person.” But can parents separate Elmo the character from the person who played him, given how much attention Clash himself has received? And there are two aspects to this question. First, will parents allow their kids to like, watch, and play with Elmo? Second, what do the show and parents do with the fact that most of the 2013-14 season (the show’s 44th) has been taped, meaning Clash will be playing Elmo well into 2014?

  November 20, 2012 at 8:37 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Outing racist speech, shaming racist speakers

posted by Howard Wasserman

Following on my discussion last week about the piece at Jezebel outing racist tweets by random high-schoolers after President Obama’s reelection: Hello There, Racists is a Tumblr that collects and publicizes racist tweets, Facebook posts, blogs, etc., along with identifying information such as name, school (a cursory look at the site suggests that most of those shown are minors), and photograph. (H/T: My colleague Tracy Pearl). The identifying information is put out by the posters themselves on their own social media sites, which makes this slightly different than the Jezebel post, which went digging to find the kids’ schools. The goal of both is to prompt social consequences–professional, athletic, academic–for posting obnoxious ideas. Emily Bazelon at Slate criticizes this sort of crowd-sourced “outing,” arguing 1) public shaming is unlikely to cause them to rethink their ideas or statements and more likely to just make them indignant and 2) teenagers don’t fully understand how exposed they are on social media and the consequences of that. Much depends on whether we believe teenagers understand (or should understand) what ideas are morally wrong and socially unacceptable and thus should bear the consequences, however long-term, of espousing (seemingly proudly, to read some of the posts) such ideas.

Two things to watch going forward:

1) Are some public schools going to find their students on this site and punish them for their posts? And if so, how will those cases play out in court? As I wrote previously, assuming these posts were not written on school time, no coherent conception of student speech would authorize school punishment for this expression.

2) Can the creator of the Tumblr keep the readership on a leash? As this post describes, one of the blogs captured on the Tumblr had to be taken down because threats were made to the subject of the blog. The creator of the Tumblr admonished his readers: “[I]f I get credible reports of threats, I will have to take down this blog. So if you want racists to be exposed, do not be threatening or intimidating.They deserve to lose their jobs and scholarships, but not threats of any kind.” Is this the editor preemptively protecting himself on the off-chance that one of his readers does something stupid (no way he would be legally liable, but what ethically responsible is another story)? Is it possible to engage in this sort of crowd-sourced public shaming without things getting out of hand? Are the shamers likely to be as irresponsible as those they are trying to shame?

  November 20, 2012 at 7:25 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Final sports/election link

posted by Howard Wasserman

One final sports “predictor” of the presidential election: The winner of The Game–a Harvard win means a Democratic president, a Yale win means a Republican president. This held form this year, as Harvard won 34-24.

More broadly, since they have been playing since 1875, we actually have some data to work with.

• Since the origins of the rivalry, there have been 35 presidential elections and 32 games (no games in 1888, 1894, or 1940), this has held 20 times (62 %–not that impressive). That includes the Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 tie in 1968. Maybe that election should have gone to the House of Representatives.

• Over the last 18 elections and 17 games going back to 1940 (again, no game in 1944 because of World War II), it has held 14 times (82 %–much better).

• In my lifetime, going back 12 elections and 12 games to 1968, it has held 9 times (75 %).

• Over the last 9 elections going back to 1980 (call it my political lifetime), it has held 8 times (89 %); the only miss was W’s reelection in 2004.

Of course, since The Game usually is played in mid-to-late November, this is less a predictor than an ex post correlation. Except in 2000, that is, when they played while the Florida debacle was playing out. Maybe we should not have been so surprised when Bush v. Gore came out as it did.

  November 19, 2012 at 10:31 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Infield flies and taking a knee

posted by Howard Wasserman

I have written recently about baseball’s Infield Fly Rule, including a general defense of, and rationale for, the rule itself. I plan to come back to it more fully in the spring, after I get through some current and future projects. I want to write a fuller piece on the cost/benefit analysis underlying the IFR and why that cost/benefit balancing both justifies IFR and why, given that balance of costs and benefits, the infield fly situation is unique not only in baseball but in all sports. There simply is no other situation like it.

This will expand on The Atlantic piece. In that essay, I identified four features of the infield fly situation that justify a special rule: 1) The fielding team has a strong incentive to intentionally not do what they are ordinarily expected to do in the game (catch the ball); 2) the fielding team gains a substantial benefit or advantage by intentionally not doing what is ordinarily expected (this is the prong I want to flesh out in economic terms of optimal outcomes, costs incurred, and benefits gained for each team); 3) the play is slow-developing and not fast-moving, so the player has time to think and control what he does; and 4) even doing what is ordinarily expected of them, the opposing players are powerless to stop the play from developing or to prevent the team from gaining this overwhelming advantage.

As I said, I believe the infield fly is the only situation in all of sport that possesses all four features. But in conversations with friends and readers, one situation keeps getting brought up: The kneel down (or “Victory Formation”) at the end of football games. Read the rest of this post »

  November 16, 2012 at 11:56 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Steven Lubet on “John Brown’s Spy”

posted by Howard Wasserman

One more new book: Steven Lubet, a regular reader and commenter here and my former trial advocacy professor and , has published John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook. From the Yale University Press website:

John Brown’s Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper’s Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer—as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought border ruffians in Kansas, served as an abolitionist mole in Virginia, took white hostages during the Harper’s Ferry raid, and almost escaped to freedom. For ten days after the infamous raid, he was the most hunted man in America with a staggering $1,000 bounty on his head.

Tracking down the unexplored circumstances of John Cook’s life and disastrous end, Steven Lubet is the first to uncover the full extent of Cook’s contributions to Brown’s scheme. Without Cook’s participation, Brown might never have been able to launch the insurrection that sparked the Civil War. Had Cook remained true to the cause, history would have remembered him as a hero. Instead, when Cook was captured and brought to trial, he betrayed John Brown and named  fellow abolitionists in a full confession that earned him a place in history’s tragic pantheon of disgraced turncoats.

  November 13, 2012 at 6:19 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

What about the First Amendment?

posted by Howard Wasserman

Tracie Egan Morrissey was extremely upset (rightfully so, I guess) about a rash of racist and hate-filled tweets that followed Barack Obama’s re-election last Tuesday, some of them from high school students. In a follow-up post on Friday, Morrissey displayed a number of the tweets from high-schoolers (identified by name and school), reported on her efforts to urge administrators at their high schools to punish the students for violating the student code of conduct or some such, and reported on the responses (or non-responses) of school officials. Katy Waldman at Slate wrote a take-down of  these efforts, pointing out that teenagers think, say, and do stupid things all the time; while calling attention to the tweets is fair game, trying to have them punished for them seemed “petty and vindictive.”

Worse, Morrissey’s stunt ignores the First Amendment. Most of the tweeters she identifies attend public school, so I am not sure on what basis a school should be able to punish these students or why she believes urging them to do so is a good idea. The scope of student speech is ever-narrowing, particularly on-line speech, which neither courts nor school administrators seem to understand. But none of the tweets that Morrissey describes should fall within the ambit of school regulation. There is no indication they were sent during school hours or that they were directed to the school; the students were talking to the public at large, engaging (however stupidly) in the broader public dialogue. Schools should be encouraging that engagement. And while we hope schools educate their students about the need for civil discourse, it is not and should not be their role to police students outside the school walls. Similarly, school “codes of conduct” are not intended to control student conduct 24/7. I would be quite troubled if any of the schools tried to do so or if a court allowed them to.

This also makes Morrissey’s piece troublingly demogogic. She is attempting to shame school officials to drastically expand their authority in a way that should raise First Amendment alarms, to shame school administrators for not violating the First Amendment rights of their students, and to set the students up to have their rights violated by over-officious school officials.

Finally, a word to the student authors (as well as everyone else saying stupid things on Twitter or anyplace else on the interwebs): Your account was not hacked, so just stop. I will defend to the death your right to air your insipid thoughts in a visible public forum 140 characters at a time. But if you go there, own what you say and let the chips fall where they may.

  November 12, 2012 at 12:24 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   8 Comments

Marriage equality in the Supreme Court

posted by Howard Wasserman

With the success of marriage equality at the ballot box on Tuesday, nine states and the District of Columbia, now allow marriages between same-sex partners. And the failure of the ballot initiative in Minnesota, which would have preemptively halted any judicial or legislative allowance of marriage equality, could be taken as a reflection of new societal views.

The question is how that affects the SCOTUS’s decision as to whether to take any of the marriage-equality cases currently pending before it and, if it does, how to resolve them. One view has been that SCOTUS would not take the lead on this; instead, (as it did with anti-miscegination laws), it would await some critical mass of states getting to equality on their own, then step in to yank the remaining states into line. Of course, we do not know what that critical mass would be.

Before Tuesday, I would have said this would mean the Court denying cert in Perry (the Prop. 8 case), especially in light of the narrowness of the Ninth Circuit decision. But is 9 states, and some momentum on ths issue, enough? And is it enough for the Court to take the leap and say that barring same-sex marriage violates the Fourteenth Amendment (assuming there are five votes for that position)?

The DOMA cases present a much trickier issue on this point, because the Court is virtually obligated to take one of these cases. It cannot leave a situation in which a federal statute is unconstitutional, and thus inappicable, in just the Second Circuit (where two of the nine equality states are and a third recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere). No we’re back to the question of whether nine states is sufficient to give the Court popular cover (again, assuming five votes for marriage equality).

  November 8, 2012 at 8:33 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Athletes and politics

posted by Howard Wasserman

One area of interest for me is the connection among sports, politics and free expression. I have written previously (and sort-of currently) about fan expression and I hope to someday do a book examining fan and athlete expression together. The latter has received a lot of attention in the last few weeks in the run-up to the election, with stories about which candidate sports figures supported and a bit of Twitter blowback against Obama supporter LeBron James, who urged people to go out and vote for the President.

Interestingly, athlete expression played out prominently over marriage equality and ballot initiatives in Minnesota and Maryland, both of which were resolved in favor of equality (the Minnesota initiative would have defined marriage as between one man and one woman and failed the Maryland initiative would establish marriage equality and passed). As I discussed here, Brendan Ayanbadejo of the Baltimore Ravens was an outspoken supporter of the Maryland initiative–outspoken enough to draw the ire of a Maryland state representative, who wrote a letter to the team insisting that they gag him. More prominent was Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who was uniquely outspoken in making one of the best defenses of marriage equality. Kluwe recently stopped blogging for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in protest of an op-ed that, while not endorsing either conclusion over the initiative, is far more critical of the anti-equality arguments.

A disturbing under-current to athlete expression is the repeated suggestion that the athlete ought not be doing this. Sometimes this is explicit, as with the Maryland legislator who labeled Ayanbadejo’s attempt to influence discussion on a controversial issue as “injurious behavior” or the Twitter trolls who told LeBron to “stick to basketball.” Sometimes it is implicit, as in this passive-aggressive ESPN column that, while not telling Kluwe he should stop speaking out, reminded him that he was lucky to be an NFL employee and would be wise not to do anything to undermine that position by distracting from his punting. The irony, of course, is that athletes are regularly criticized for not being politically engaged or activist enough. Of course, it always has been this way, probably worse, as the middle feature on this Slate podcast shows: The NFL no longer has activist players surveilled–as far as we know.

 

 

  November 7, 2012 at 3:59 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

Some thoughts on the election

posted by Howard Wasserman

My political views have been made obvious in this forum in the past, so I’m pretty happy this morning. A couple of random thoughts.

1) My confidence level picked up around 5 p.m. yesterday afternoon when I picked my daughter up from school; that’s when I heard the results of the “election” at her school, which went 125-75 for Obama. As we all know, as Temple Beth Am Day School goes, so goes the country.

2) We had a split decision on sports predictors. A National League team won the World Series, which means a Democratic President; this is now 17/27 (62.9%). On the other hand, the Redskins lost at home on Sunday, their final home game before the Election, but the incumbent party retained the White House; this is now 17/19 (89 %). I have to admit, my anxiety level actually rose after that game.

3) Does this result suggest that independent expenditures by outside groups are not all there is to elections? And that Citizens United is not the death knell of democracy and otherwise the root of all that is wrong with the country? Republican Super PACS threw big money at six races–five Senate races and the presidency–and lost all six. Perhaps running non-stop ads for two months is not the way to appeal to voters, so simply throwing lots of money into the mix does not ensure electoral success. Or is Obama uniquely successful in organizing on the ground and at gathering large numbers of small donations? So while that organization could overcome unlimited individual and corporate PAC money, perhaps massive spending will make all the difference in four years, when Obama leaves the scene. [Update: To the list of "money can't buy all," I should add Linda McMahon, who spent $40-$ 50 million of WWE money in an unsuccessful Senate bid (which follows another $ 40-$50 million spent on a previous unsuccessful Senate bid].

Read the rest of this post »

  November 7, 2012 at 1:51 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Stealing signs

posted by Howard Wasserman

This sign is on a house in my neighborhood in Miami-Dade County. The owners had been displaying an Obama sign for a couple of weeks, which was no longer there on Saturday (Jen and I noticed it and actually discussed whether the owner had taken it down or it had been stolen). This new sign, with the added message, was back this afternoon. This is not the sole example of alleged sign theft I have seen. Another house, displaying a number of Romney signs, included a homemade one reading “Obama Vandals, stealing only stiffens our resolve,” which I infer means they also had signs stolen or destroyed.

I do not know what it means for something to be Un-American or American; I certainly do not want anyone defining for me (nor do I have any interest in defining) what is or is not “American.” I am reading the sign to say something like “stealing signs is inconsistent with the freedom of speech, which so many think of as a core American value.” If so, I want to push back on that.

I previously descibed what I call symbolic counter-speech, in which one counter-speaks (in the Brandeisian sense) to a symbol using the symbol itself as the vehicle for the counter-speech. I identified three forms of symbolic counter-speech: 1) disengaging from the symbol (think Barnette); 2) confronting it with a competing, overriding symbol; and 3) attacking, often by destroying or eliminating, the symbol itself. Stealing a yard sign falls within the third category. The homeowner was obviously expressing his support for President Obama by displaying the sign (in a medium that the Supreme Court has recognized as uniquely important). Whoever took the sign was counter-speaking, expressing his opposition to Obama, by attacking and eliminating the supporting symbol. That is an unquestionably expressive act.

This does not mean the expressive act is unconditionally protected by the First Amendment, of course. Were they to find the thief, he could not successfully assert the First Amendment as a defense to a charge of theft, vandalism, or some other neutral, non-speech legal rule. So his expressive interests yield, in this situation, to the homeowner’s interests in his private property. But that does not mean the person who stole the sign was not exercising that core American value of free speech.

One other thing. The new yard sign is two-sided, placed so that both sides can be seen by someone on the street. But the added message only was placed on one side; it was printed out on a sheet of white see-through printer paper. The resulting effect, which you can see after the jump, is obviously unintended, but highly ironic in light of so much of the dislike for President Obama. Read the rest of this post »

  November 4, 2012 at 11:16 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   17 Comments

Defending Nate Silver

posted by Howard Wasserman

Franita Tolson, guesting at Prawfs, wrote about the recent conservative attacks on Nate Silver: Deadsin offers (in the typical language of Deadspin, so be warned) a largely non-political explanation: Silver is being criticized (or at least questioned) by the political class (both activists and the mainstream media) for being a nerd relying on statistics, numbers, and math, rather than the “gut feelings” and “knowhow” and “real-world” experience that they have brought to the table for all these years. In other words, the political world is experiencing the same dynamic that the sports world (especially baseball) has been going through for about 15 years, since the rise of Moneyball and advanced metrics. Silver, of course, got his start writing for Baseball Prospectus. And as with many in baseball, the current guard in the political world either does not get it or does not want to get it. And as the math gets better, this will only intensify.

Thus, Chris Chilliza of WaPo could move Ohio into the “toss-up” category, despite the showing of fourteen polls for the past two weeks, in part because of the “absolute necessity for Romney to win the state if he wants to be president.” So because Romney really wants/needs it, the state must be a toss-up. This does not sound much different from baseball announcers who insist that average-but-”scrappy” players are better than superstars who produce big statistics because they “want it more” and “will do whatever it takes to win.”

By the way, for those of you who can’t get enough of this poll aggregation stuff, check out the Princeton Election Consortium, run by Dr. Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton. He uses a different model than Silver (and actually has criticized Silver’s approach), but with similar accuracy.

  November 2, 2012 at 11:23 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   6 Comments

Whither the Jewish vote?

posted by Howard Wasserman

Has anyone heard or seen much about polls indicating how the Jewish vote is expected to go this time? Jews have historically leaned strongly Democratic, even as they, as group, have gained in socio-economic power (the famous paraprase of Milton Himmelfarb is that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”). In 2008, Obama won around 74 % of the Jewish vote–this despite initial fears over older Jews, which prompted the Great Schlep in which younger Jews were encouraged to go visit their grandparents in Florida to encourage them to vote for Obama. And while the profile and influence of a Jewish conservative movement has risen in the past decade, the numbers have remained fairly stable since 1972. Georgetown’s Program for Jewish Civilization sponsored a symposium on the subject last week (videos included); interesting stuff. One of the speakers at the symposium identified data howing Obama ahead of where he was in the polls four years ago.

So I was surprised to learn of one recent, admittedly non-scientific poll: The first-graders in my daughter’s Reform Jewish day school (n=37) seem to be about equally divided between Obama and Ryan, with one class heavily for Romney. This presumably means their parents are similarly divided–or my daughter is in a preternaturally conservative and independent cohort. Needless to say, I was surprised; I expected something like a 75-25 split, maybe higher. Predictions that the Jewish vote would change have generally focused on the increasing populations of Orthodox Jews (who, like many religiously observant groups, tend to vote Republican) and of more-conservative immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But neither of those population points explains this result (which admittedly will not make it  into the 538 calculations).

  November 2, 2012 at 10:53 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Mrs. Coach speaks

posted by Howard Wasserman

Still more on the dust-up over Mitt Romney using Clear Eyes, Full Hearts in his campaign and speeches: Actress Connie Britton (who played Tami Taylor, a/k/a Mrs. Coach) and Sarah Aubrey (an executive producer on the show) wrote an op-ed in USA Today criticizing Romney for using the slogan, insisting that the women of Dillon, Texas would not approve. The piece particularly focuses on issues of health care and women’s rights–ACA, equal pay, the future viability of Planned Parenthood (they point out that the single mother of star running back “Smash” Williams worked there, a detail I did not know or remember).

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.

  November 1, 2012 at 10:49 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Jurisprudential homonyms

posted by Howard Wasserman

Today I was writing about the Supreme Court’s decision in Hicks v. Miranda, a 1975 Younger abstention case. This, of course, is only the Court’s second most-famous Miranda case. This Miranda, who was the plaintiff in the case, owned and operated a theatre in California trying to show “Deep Throat”.

This got me thinking: What are some examples of pairs or sets of SCOTUS cases featuring parties with the same or similar names, especially where one case is much more famous than the others. Note that I’m thinking of cases involving different parties who happen to have the same names. So this will not include the multiple habeas cases involving Louie L. Wainwright, the long-time Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections. Nor will it include Harry Connick, Sr., the long-serving District of Attorney for New Orleans, who helped give us execrable law in both public-employee speech and municipal liability. Different spellings are ok–for example, Ginsberg and Ginzburg.

Have at it in the comments.

  October 31, 2012 at 11:28 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   5 Comments

Politics, partisanship, and democracy

posted by Howard Wasserman

My thoughts and prayers go out to all the CoOp family (including my own family in NJ, NYC, and Long Island), friends, and readers dealing with the effects of Sandy. I hope you all are safe and that you have your power back soon. I want to consider two things with respect to Sandy’s effects on next week’s election.

First, folks are beginning to talk about how the storm will affect the mechanics of the election and whether state and local governments (who wield exclusive authority to administer the electoral process) hit by the storm will be ready and able to carry out an election, both with early voting ongoing this week and Election Day itself next week. This has lead to discussions of whether the election could or should be delayed, either by congressional action or by unilateral actions of individual states or localities. Here is some good analysis of the constitutional and statutory issues involved. Rick Hasen argues that this again demonstrates the need for Congress to create a uniform national scheme to respond to natural and other disasters that affect voting. Hasen calls this another example of Congress failing to act on what should be non-controversial issues resolvable with non-partisan solutions. He compares congressional inaction here with congressional inaction on ensuring continuity in the House of Representatives in the event of a terrorist or other attack.

Read the rest of this post »

  October 30, 2012 at 11:14 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   7 Comments

It’s not how you blog, it’s how you look

posted by Howard Wasserman

At his blog Noncuratlex, Kyle Graham (Santa Clara) proposes new mottos for other law blogs. Both of my current homes make the list, although with a strange obsession over how we look: My regular home at Prawfs (“Please Don’t Judge Us by Our Website’s Hideously Ugly Color Scheme“) and here (“Check out the Pretty, Pretty Logos of Many Leading Law Reviews“). My favorite was SCOTUSBlog: “The True Winner of the ACA Litigation“. Quite true.

  October 26, 2012 at 10:52 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

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