Going back to the tumultuous reign of Abraham Lincoln, political scientists have long been fascinated with the “Imperial Presidency,” and this interest was heightened further by the executive overreachthat characterized the administration of Barack Obama. Some scholars contend that the modern…
Month: May 2017
Fake Law by Fake Judges
Brazen judges openly legislating from the bench are confirming the widely-held public perception that activist courts are out of control. As a lawyer practicing for three decades in the plaintiff-friendly stronghold of California, within the jurisdiction of the notorious Ninth Circuit, I witnesse…
Darrow’s Dereliction
The reputation of Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) as one of the greatest of American lawyers rests largely on two courtroom performances: in the murder trial of Leopold and Loeb in Chicago in 1924, and the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” which took place in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. Both were extensively…
Complacent Texas taxpayers have become captives of their rent-seeking civil servants.
In Jonathan Swift’s classic fable, Gulliver’s Travels, a shipwreck maroons Lemuel Gulliver, the ill-fated crew’s sole survivor, on a remote island (Lilliput) inhabited by people only six inches tall. Upon reaching shore, the exhausted Gulliver falls asleep, unaware of the island’s tiny oc…
Those Ever-Moving Goalposts
Since the unexpected—and, in certain circles, inconceivable—election of Donald Trump as President, federal courts have aggressively obstructed his executive orders on immigration, leading to complaints that activist judges are staging an insurrection or even a coup d’état against a Preside…
Plain Talk about Law School Rot
The legal academy is a strange place. It differs from other intellectual disciplines in that legal scholarship is published mainly in student-edited law reviews, not peer-reviewed journals. Most faculty members at elite law schools have never practiced law, or have done so only briefly and usuall…