Law & Society Blog

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld came down today. In a five-four decision the court found that the Geneva Convention applies to the Al-Quaeda conflict. I haven’t read the whole opinion yet, but here his Marty Lederman on SCOTUSblog:
More importantly [than the Court’s holding that all commissions comply with the laws of war], […]

There is an article in the NY Times today (subscription required), describing the way Wal-Mart has been using bloggers in their PR efforts. Here is a taste:
Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across […]

If you are like me, you are a bit tired of the originalism debate in American constitutional law. I can never quite shake the feeling that, if the authors of the Federalist Papers had championed universal health care and equal funding for public schools, many present-day originalists wouldn’t be so orginalist. The second reason why […]

The discussion whether law reviews deserve cheers or raspberries continues. Dan Solove thinks that student-edited law reviews aren’t that bad after all, and even have their virtues. What I am particularly interested in is the relationship between the law-review piece and legal scholarship. There are two aspects to this.
The first aspect is whether overall, law-review […]

Rosa Brooks, over on the new and enjoyable LawCulture blog, has started—perhaps I should say, rekindled—a discussion on the sense and nonsense of law-review articles. There are responses on PrawfsBlawg by Ethan Leib and Paul Horwitz, and another one back at LawCulture by Jessica Silbey. (I am sure the debate will go on, […]

We have pointed out before the parochial flavor of the current debate over intelligent design in the USA. Further proof comes from the Vatican of all places, reported today by the New York Times:
“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of […]

I am reading Gonzales v. Oregon today, like everyone else, and I am reading what people have to say about the decision. I came across a post by Robert Tsai on Concurring Opinions, in which Tsai is counting justices:
But I have to think that Oregon is very, very lucky regarding the timing of the case.
Justice […]

Frumkes Lecture at NYU, in which Hanno argued that international law may have been the argument the Melians lacked to convince the Athenians not to attack Melos, Simon Blackburn posted the following interesting comment:I would classify the habit of deference to law (and law extended to cover international relations) as a good result of what I called a sentimental education - an education here into a certain pattern of respect…. …For the full comment, and the further interesting comments by Paul Gowder and George Ehrhardt (don’t miss this one, Ehrhardt writes about the invadee’s prior obligation of sympathy for the invader), see the comments to Hanno’s posts (scroll down).

How did I miss Scott Horton’s excellent post on the connection between John Yoo’s torture memorandum and the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, over at Balkinization? Horton makes a very important point about the kinship between Schmitt’s Begriff des Politischen, current U.S. political thought, and the rise of friend/foe rhetoric. It is important to remember […]

It is well understood today that the legal enterprise is marked by indeterminacy. This indeterminacy exists in several respects. No lawgiver in history has managed to create rules that were comprehensive: there is a limit to how helpful abstract language is in answering unforeseen questions. Conversely, courts have never managed to completely satisfy their audiences […]