A year ago, almost to the day, my (co-authored) Verdict column focused on the lessons to be learned from a high-profile and boisterous protest by Stanford Law School students at a Federalist Society Speaker Event featuring Judge Kyle Duncan, a conservative Trump-appointed judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. According to most accounts (including some video) of the event (and although there is room for different characterizations of what happened, the basic contours described by SLS’s own dean, Jenny Martinez, seem pretty clear), SLS students who opposed s ..read more

Wilton Cardinal Gregory, who is the Archbishop of Washington, D.C., recently called President Joe Biden a “cafeteria Catholic.” That means he follows some elements of his Catholic faith, but chooses to ignore others. “There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ you choose that which is attractive, and dismiss that which is challenging.” Bishops, who lead the Catholic Church, would prefer that all Catholics follow all elements of the Catholic religion. Biden is usually criticized for supporting abortion rights. He also supports LGBTQ+ equality, trans ..read more

The Rand Corporation recently published a lengthy report on bias in the Intelligence Community. The report summarizes the enormous literature on this subject and reviews the many ways bias has bedeviled intelligence gathering and dissemination for decades. The authors also interviewed eleven former intelligence officials and sprinkle their reflections throughout the report, though these interviews do not add anything we did not already know. Though the kind and quality of bias tends to vary from one administration to the next, its presence is inevitable. The most important source of ..read more

Earlier this month, in Trump v. Anderson, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court denying former President Donald Trump access to the state’s primary election ballot on grounds of ineligibility under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Section 3 bars from holding office any past government officeholder who swore an oath to support the Constitution and who, in violation of that oath, later engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Ratified in 1868, this provision was certainly intended to prevent forme ..read more

Georgia plans to put Willie James Pye to death on March 20, in the state’s first execution since January 2020. The state wants to hide as much of that event as possible and, in so doing, to push the limits of execution secrecy in this country. Its plan is a bold departure from the history of American executions. In that history, the public and the press traditionally have been welcomed as spectators. Secrecy of the kind that Georgia law now allows rightly invites suspicion. What is it that Georgia doesn’t want the press to witness and the public to know, and why does it want to re ..read more

The March 4 United States Supreme Court decision that Donald Trump could not be disqualified under the terms of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was a win for Trump but a loss for the Court itself. In a case of monumental importance, the Court failed to provide the kind of well-reasoned opinion that will stand the test of time, and it failed to marshal a genuine consensus among the Justices. This result suggests that Chief Justice John Roberts was unable to do what he supposedly most cares about, namely protect the prestige of the Court he leads and produce minimalist decisions. He c ..read more

Another lethal injection gone awry. The story is as troubling as it is familiar. Wednesday’s execution of Thomas Eugene Creech added the latest chapter to lethal injection’s gruesome history. Once touted as America’s most humane execution method, lethal injection has turned out to be its least reliable one. Once touted as a model of efficiency in the grim business of state killing, lethal injection is now marked by mayhem. This time the story of lethal injection’s failure played out in Idaho, a state which has only put three people to death in the last fifty years. The last of the ..read more

In the space below, we raise and begin to analyze several interesting legal issues raised by the recent decision by a federal district court judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the Disney Corporation against Florida officials for alleged retaliation (against Disney’s outspoken opposition to certain Florida laws and policies) by altering the structure of the board that regulates the land in which Disney World is located. Since many of the constitutional issues raised are complex (and somewhat unresolved by the U.S. Supreme Court), our thoughts today are in the nature of issue-spottin ..read more

Last week’s decision by the Alabama Supreme Court in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., is most notable for its use of the extreme rhetoric of the fetal personhood movement—calling frozen embryos “extrauterine children,” for example. Joanna L. Grossman and Sarah F. Corning quite rightly called much of the reasoning of the opinion “nonsense.” To be sure, the particular result in LePage could be justified. Creating embryos via in vitro fertilization (IVF) requires substantial economic and bodily sacrifice. Hormone stimulation carries risks, and egg retrieval can be pain ..read more

David Phillip Wilson is on Alabama’s death row having been convicted and sentenced for killing Dewey Walker during a 2004 burglary at Walker’s home. The prosecution argued that Walker was attacked when he resisted the attempt by Wilson and three others to take his customized van and collection of rare coins. On February 15, Wilson filed suit in the United States District Court for The Middle District of Alabama claiming that the state’s plan to execute him by nitrogen gas violates the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. His suit leans heavily on an account of ..read more