Paging Dr. Weldon
Winning in the little things -- with big effects.
Posted: Thursday, July 13, 2006
Under the Weldon Amendment, all federal funds would be withdrawn from instruments of federal, state, and local governments that discriminate against "health care providers" that refuse to provide abortions, refer patients for the surgery, or cover the surgery in their own medical plans. The political class that forms the regime now in California complains that the Weldon Amendment works to prevent California from enforcing its public policy. Yes; exactly right. And a good day's work that is.  [Full Story]

Playing Well With Others?
The chief justice makes you do a double-take.
Posted: Thursday, May 18, 2006
In the legends of the University of Chicago, the late, irrepressible Jason Aronson etched a memorable place with a dissertation that encompassed Louis Hartz and the Earl of Shaftsbury: Hartz, Shaftsbury, and Marx: An Unsuitable Trio. But just a couple of weeks ago, Aronson's strange grouping was superseded by what could be called an Unsuitable or Implausible Quintet: Roberts, Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg.  [Full Story]

On Privacy
Remarks at a debate on The Right to Privacy and Autonomy in the Supreme Court
Posted: Friday, March 10, 2006
It is curious that we hear so much about privacy at a time when the respect for privacy has so dramatically receded. The people who talk most insistently about privacy have been the people most willing to see the law invade spheres of privacy, in private businesses, private clubs, for the sake of reaching instances of discrimination on the basis of race or sex.   [Full Story]

Servatius Redux
Gonzales and the libertarian mistake.
Posted: Friday, January 27, 2006
A decision about the rightness or wrongness of suicide is not a medical question, nor is it a question to which "science" is a source of answers. Whether people have lives worth living, and whether the reasons for which they are taking their own lives are justified or unjustified, are distinctly moral questions; and yet, the scheme offered to us in the Oregon decision asks us, in the name of federalism, to incorporate the view that assisted suicide is just another, tenable view about the proper ends of doctors and medicine.   [Full Story]

The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz

Posted: Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Alan Dershowitz is an accomplished man of the law, but it would be hard to assemble a thicker compilation of mistakes about natural law than he has brought together in this slim book, in an ongoing diatribe against natural law. Every cliché is here, every sophomoric point of cleverness, without much awareness of the way these arguments have been addressed in the literature, or with no awareness of how thoroughly wrong, or even upside down, these arguments happen to be.  [Full Story]

Reversing the Tables
Still time for Republicans to seize the hearing moment.
Posted: Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Democrats, at John Roberts nomination hearing, have evidently decided to register their aversion to him, and sound their favorite themes, but nothing is being done to expose the emptiness of their arguments -- and lay the groundwork for a Republican counterattack.  [Full Story]

Senator Wile E. Coyote
A terribly troubling letter
Posted: Tuesday, August 30, 2005
In a recent, highly publicized letter to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, Senator Arlen Specter mapped out some questions that Roberts can expect -- questions not entirely friendly, questions that reflect an adversary stance, closer to the stance of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Precisely why questions of this kind should be emanating from the Republican chairman of the committee is a serious question, somehow never raised in the reporting of this letter.  [Full Story]

Decoy Day
Faking out the press on the John Roberts nomination
Posted: Tuesday, July 26, 2005
It was a day no one would have believed. But it happened, and it’s worth recording — as a prime exhibit of the White House’s deftness in announcing the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court.  [Full Story]

A Tale of Two Ediths
Some lessons can best be taught by a woman
Posted: Monday, July 11, 2005
The Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor offers the chance to replace the “swing” vote that would make the most profound difference on issues such as abortion and racial preferences. For conservatives, this is not the moment to take a chance -- their inclination is to go for the candidates with the surest records, marked off in their opinions, their writings, their speeches. My own hunch is that, for very good reasons, the choice for O'Connor's spot may center on the two Ediths: Edith Jones in Texas or Edith Joy Clement in Louisiana.  [Full Story]

A Call for Boldness
The administration has already produced a breakthrough. This is the time to push on.
Posted: Tuesday, May 17, 2005
The president set the pattern here: He will sign any pro-life measure that Congress passes. Yet, he will do nothing himself to lobby for any bill, or even make the case for it in public. The most we can hope is that he will endorse a bill that others have shaped. Those of us who have been pleading that he do more can be grateful that he has just endorsed the bill, passed by the House, to bar the taking of minors into another state for the purpose of evading the laws on parental consent. Still, we know this now as a brute fact: Whatever can be accomplished on the pro-life side, the leadership must come from Congress. It will not come from the president.  [Full Story]