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…
Year: 2017
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from other intellectual disciplines in that legal scholarship is published mainly in student-edited law reviews, not peer-reviewed journals.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…
Whining About Article III
The latest tract by Erwin Chemerinsky, liberal law professor and dean of the University of California at Irvine School of Law, is depressingly familiar. Like his Enhancing Government: Federalism for the 21st Century (2008), The Conservative Assault on the Constitution (2011), and The Case Against…
Republican Complacence in the Face of Public University Radicalization
Herein lies a cautionary tale. If publicly funded higher education can be hijacked in America’s most conservative state, under the noses of a legislature with lopsided Republican majorities in both houses, and with a Republican governor and Republican lieutenant governor, it can (and likely wil…
Blue Texas?
Liberal enclaves threaten conservative hegemony in the Lone Star State. The general perception of Texas as reliably conservative is accurate: its rural and suburban areas are overwhelmingly red, and currently ensure a conservative policy direction at the statewide level. But enclaves within the L…
The ADA Litigation Monster
A landmark law to protect the disabled has spawned senseless mandates, abusive lawsuits, and stratospheric costs. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which President George H. W. Bush signed into law in 1990, was noble in intention. “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling dow…
Implementing Obergefell: An Addendum
The March 1 oral argument was an astounding anti-climax to a manufactured drama In a prior post, I discussed the Pidgeon v. Turner case, now pending before the Texas Supreme Court, involving a taxpayer challenge to same-sex spousal benefits. Oral argument was held on March 1. The taxpayers chal…
Judicial Tyranny’s Final Frontier
Daniel Horowitz’s Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America (2016), published before the presidential election, is proving to be prescient—even prophetic. Horowitz is a columnist for Mark Levin’s Conservative Reviewwho writes frequently about constitutional …
Can Activist Judges Be Controlled?
The disquieting spectacle of three unelected judges (all appointed by President Barack Obama) enjoining the signature initiative of the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, without even citing the statute—8 U.S.C. section 1182(f)—that expressly authorizes the action they just stopped, ha…