May
23
Rediscovering the Privileges or Immunities Clause
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | May 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been largely dormant since the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. Courts generally treat the Clause as adding little or nothing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s two better-known provisions, the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. However, Bruce Boyden argues in a new paper on SSRN that the Clause actually does have a [...]
May
21
Lost Potential
Posted by: Bruce E. Boyden | May 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment
(Part 1 of 2) Back when I was a teenager, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends. D&D, for those who have never played it, is essentially a pen-and-paper version of World of Warcraft. Instead of a computer running the game, that role in D&D was served by a person—the [...]
May
21
Health Reform and Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
Posted by: Joel Teitelbaum | May 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment
One of the most troubling aspects of the U.S. health care system is the existence, and extent, of racial and ethnic health disparities. Research has amply documented that members of racial and ethnic minority groups receive fewer health care services and lower quality health care than non-minority patients (see, for example, the rather damning portrait [...]
May
19
Does the Threat of Future Copyright Infringement Amount to Irreparable Harm?
Posted by: Andrew Spillane | May 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Chief among the bundle of rights one obtains in property ownership is the right to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of that property. This “sole and despotic dominion” that an individual commands over their property is placed in danger, of course, when the property becomes subject to the wants and needs of others. [...]
May
18
What Does Citizens United Mean for the Workplace?
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | May 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Few recent Supreme Court decisions have provoked such heated debate as Citizens United v. FEC, which undermined federal restrictions on corporate and union contributions to political campaigns. Despite all of the discussion of Citizens United, little attention has been paid to the decision’s implications for the workplace. In a new paper on SSRN, however, Paul Secunda argues that Citizens United may have [...]
May
17
When a Justice’s Spouse Engages in Political Activity
Posted by: Daniel Suhr | May 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment
When Mrs. Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, launched a new non-profit organization called Liberty Central earlier this spring, the announcement prompted a firestorm of media coverage. The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and numerous other news outlets ran stories discussing the possible ethical issues that may arise. The stories focused on [...]
May
17
John McDill Fox and the Idea of Catholic Legal Education
Posted by: J. Gordon Hylton | May 17, 2010 | 3 Comments
John McDill Fox was the first member of the Marquette Law School faculty to have attended Harvard Law School and the first to be hired as a dean at another law school. With his colleague Carl Zollman, he founded the academic field of aviation law, and unlike his faculty colleagues at Marquette, he believed that [...]
May
17
Limits to Life: SCOTUS Issues Decision in Graham
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | May 17, 2010 | 2 Comments
The Supreme Court finally issued its long-awaited decision in Graham v. Florida this morning. And it turns out that the Eighth Amendment may not be so toothless after all: the Court held that sentencing a juvenile to life without parole for a nonhomicide crime violates the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. Graham received an LWOP [...]
May
17
In Praise of Marquette Law’s People
Posted by: Andrew Spillane | May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment
One common thread running through many student bloggers on here is their writing at least one piece on the life of a law student. And for good reason. After all, law school is our life, from countless hours in the dungeon up on the third floor of the library (read “the cite-check room”) or in [...]
May
15
How Can Software Licensing Help Farmers in the Developing World?
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | May 15, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Answer: By providing a model for licensing agreements that can protect the farmers’ intellectual property rights in the seed that they use. I recently posted on the problem of biopiracy – the appropriation of genetic resources from developing nations by pharmaceutical and other companies. Similar concerns have been raised about agro-companies obtaining exclusive intellectual property rights in plant [...]
May
14
The Constitutionality of Health Reform’s “Individual Mandate”
Posted by: Joel Teitelbaum | May 14, 2010 | Leave a Comment
As noted in my blog post last week (“The Beginning of Health Reform“), pushback against the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was swift. Members of nearly 40 state legislatures have proposed legislation or constitutional amendments limiting or opposing certain provisions of the Act, with most of the proposals targeting the Act’s requirement that [...]
May
13
When Do Police Have Reasonable Suspicion That You Are a Non-Citizen?
Posted by: Jessica E. Slavin | May 13, 2010 | 13 Comments
For the past couple of weeks I have been stewing about how to respond to Rick’s post in which he tried to analogize the outcry against Arizona’s new immigration law to the Tea Party’s blowout bash against the new federal health care legislation. He called the left out for hypocrisy in its condemnation of the [...]
Blog Editors
- Alan Borsuk
- Bruce E. Boyden
- Edward A. Fallone
- Melissa L. Greipp
- Scott C. Idleman
- Lisa Mazzie
- Michael M. O'Hear
- Ryan Scoville
