State laws targeting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement have required various lower courts to consider the constitutional status of boycotts.  Several states now limit the availability of government contracts for those who refuse to deal with Israeli businesses, prompting legal challenges claiming that certain types of boycotts are constitutionally protected speech.  Whether the government may restrict contracts for those who participate in BDS-type boycotts depends on whether refusals to deal, when part of a larger social boycott movement, are protected expressive conduct under the First Amendment.

Continue reading “Federal Courts Examining BDS Movement Boycott Restrictions” →

Respond fully in essay form to the question below.  Make sure to save time for organization and polish. 

An anonymous tipster called the Goldbergia Police Department (GPD) and told detectives the following:  “There is a white Subaru Hatchback driving down Highway 45 that is filled with glow-cocaine, a new kind of street drug that glows in the dark and sets off a black light detector.  I don’t want to disclose my identity, but I have given reliable tips in the past – including a tip that lead to the capture and arrest of Martin Mondale, a mid-level drug dealer in Goldbergia.  The owner of the Hatchback lives at 20 Green Lane, and her house is filled with guns and money.”

The GPD decided to walk up to 20 Green Lane and knock on the door.  No one answered.  As police were about to walk away, they saw a large vase sitting in an open window filled with stacks of cash, estimated at $5,000.

The police then found the Hatchback further down Highway 45 and shone a BlackLight3000 on the vehicle.  The inside of the vehicle illuminated with many white spots, leading the police to believe that glow-cocaine was inside the vehicle.  The police pulled over the vehicle and searched the entire vehicle, trunk, and backpacks inside the car.  Inside, the police found glow-cocaine and $100,000 in cash.

Ultimately, the driver and owner of the home at 20 Green Lane, Ferica, was arrested for distributing glow-cocaine.  At her trial, she seeks to exclude the evidence found in the car.  Will her motion to suppress be successful?

Continue reading “Criminal Procedure Midterm” →

Test your knowledge of the doctrine, your ability to organize information, and your reasoning skills with my Fall 2018 exam essay.

Part II. Essay

Respond fully in essay form to the question below. 

Dennis Defendant took his sister Beth’s car without her permission to go joyriding for an hour.  During the joyride, Paul Plaintiff, a neighbor, saw Dennis take Beth’s car and wanted to put a stop to it.  Paul jumped, quickly, into the middle of the street, and Dennis, who was driving at a reasonable speed, couldn’t swerve away in time.  Paul was lightly hit, and on his ride to the hospital, the ambulance driver, who was extremely tired that day, crashed into a telephone poll.  Paul’s initial injury cost him $100,000, and the ambulance driver’s telephone poll crash added another $500,000 to Paul’s damages.

Continue reading “Torts Final Essay (and Answer Key)” →

Here is my letter to the editor in The Chronicle of Higher Education about social justice and intellectual pluralism at law schools.  The letter responds to a published piece about the mission of the law school.

President Trump’s prolific and sometimes irresponsible use of Twitter has intersected with several significant free speech issues.  Earlier this year, a federal district court ruled that President Trump cannot block Twitter users based on their viewpoints.  Twitter itself is a private forum, not subject to First Amendment protections.  However, @realDonaldTrump’s “interactive space” was deemed a designated public forum incompatible with viewpoint discrimination based on the expressive nature of the medium and President Trump’s use of the account to deliver official pronouncements.

President Trump’s tweets about Muslims who are foreign nationals entering the United States were scrutinized closely by litigants and appellate court judges.  However, the tweets were ultimately not considered relevant to a majority of the Supreme Court in upholding President Trump’s third executive order, which placed entry restrictions on citizens of eight countries.  (Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Trump v. Hawaii did note his tweets about the entry ban.)  According to Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion, the facially neutral executive order, which implicated national security concerns, passed rational basis review and was therefore constitutionally justified “quite apart from any religious hostility.”

Currently, Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be investigating President Trump’s tweets for obstruction of justice offenses.  Specifically, President Trump may have tweeted threats to government officials, like Jeff Sessions, James Comey, and Roger Stone, to attempt to induce them not to offer evidence to Robert Mueller in his investigation of potential Russian interference in the Presidential election.  The relevance of President Trump’s tweets depends upon their constitutional status and whether they provide evidence of the elements of obstruction of justice.

Continue reading “Presidential Tweets, Obstruction of Justice, and the First Amendment” →

The battle over the revocation of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s “hard pass,” which permitted Acosta regular access to White House press briefings, has been resolved practically, but not legally.  A federal district judge issued an order temporarily restoring Acosta’s pass during his lawsuit against Donald Trump and other members of the Trump Administration.  The White House then essentially settled the case by promulgating new rules of decorum, requiring journalists to ask only one question.  For now, the Acosta case appears resolved.  The legal issues, however, remain significant, interesting, and relevant.  Below is some preliminary analysis of Acosta’s lawsuit and the White House’s authority to issue and revoke hard passes and control its press briefings.

Continue reading “Jim Acosta’s Press Pass is Restored, but the Legal Issues Remain Unresolved” →

Here is a link to a recent opinion piece I wrote about restoring legitimacy to the Supreme Court.

https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20181031/column-we-must-restore-legitimacy-to-us-supreme-court

Halloween is my second favorite holiday (after April Fools’ Day).  In prior years, I have dressed as the standard of review “abuse of discretion” and the exception to but-for causation for “multiple sufficient causes.”  Can you guess my costume this year?

Continue reading “Happy Tortsoween (Costume and Hypo)” →

Crim Pro Midterm 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received an anonymous letter that a judge currently serving on the federal court of appeals in Cincinnati took a large bribe from the writer of the letter.  According to the letter, the judge, Karl Kaspian, used to live in a small home and now lives in a mansion and wears fancy jewelry.  FBI agents checked housing records and noticed that Judge Kaspian had recently moved from a modest neighborhood to a wealthy gated community.  An undercover agent sat in the Judge’s courtroom and noticed his wearing a fancy watch and ring.  After the day’s court proceedings were over, the FBI agent observed, and seized, a diamond ring that Judge Kaspian had dropped on the floor on his way out of the courthouse.

Four FBI agents then surrounded Judge Kaspian inside the parking garage of the federal courthouse in Cincinnati.  The agents’ guns were visible in their holsters, but they kept enough distance so Judge Kaspian could get to his car.  The agents asked Judge Kaspian if they could search his car, and the Judge said yes.  Inside the car, the agents found records of many bribes Judge Kaspian had taken.  At his trial for corruption, Judge Kaspian seeks to exclude (1) the diamond ring and (2) the evidence from his car.  What is the likely result?

Continue reading “Criminal Procedure Midterm (and answer key)” →

Three academics looking to emulate scholars in the fields they describe as “grievance studies” (gender studies, critical race studies, fat studies) pulled off a stunning hoax.  These academics managed to publish several papers in serious academic journals even though the papers made absurd claims based on unsound methodologies.  One published article, for example, was about rape culture in dog parks, and another – which was ultimately not published but received favorable reviews – suggested chaining up and silencing white students in order for the white students to “experience reparations.”   What the papers had in common was that they confirmed the worldviews and aims of the journals – in particular, the papers sought to elevate the voices of those with less power in order to dismantle power structures.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Sokal Squared Academic Hoax” →