Mar 25
Posted 423 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Until this week, it was unclear whether U.S. citizens were able to contest the government’s warrantless wiretapping practices in the nation’s courts. On March 21, 2011, a unanimous panel of the Second Circuit cleared the way for a constitutional challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Mar 10
Posted 438 days ago by Anthony Kammer
McComish v. Bennett, the most important campaign finance case to make it up to the high Court since Citizens United, is scheduled for oral argument on March 28. The case involves a challenge to Arizona’s publicly funded election system. More specifically, conservative and libertarian opponents of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act have challenged the use of matching funds as a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Feb 28
Posted 448 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Frederick Kaufmann spoke last week at Harvard about his Harper’s Magazine article, The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it (pdf here), for an event sponsored by the HLS Food Society. Kaufmann has described, in scrupulous detail, how the creation of the Commodity Index Funds in 1991 opened the door to speculation in commodity food markets and how this speculation is wreaking havoc around the world.
Feb 25
Posted 451 days ago by Anthony Kammer
t’s been months now since the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law. Although the Dow and Wall Street bonuses have returned to 2007 levels, unemployment is still hovering around 9% and housing prices continue to decline. While these numbers tell us something about the health of the economy, it would be an enormous mistake to evaluate the Dodd-Frank Act based on these indicators alone.
Feb 18
Posted 458 days ago by Anthony Kammer
The Bluebook would be a great topic for students of memetics. How did this universally despised, recondite, and laborious system of citation become so deeply embedded in the practices of legal journals? The whole point of citations is to 1) support what’s in the text; and 2) make references easily identifiable and retrievable. But under the Bluebook’s influence, law reviews are awkward at the first and terrible at the second.
Posted 467 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Earlier this week, the WSJ Law Blog ran an interesting post asking whether the federal approach to whistleblower paymentsneeds rethinking. Critics contend that the whistleblower incentives are excessive and that they could be lowered without discouraging people from speaking out.
Following the 1986 Amendments to the False Claims Act, private individuals are encouraged to bring “qui tam” suits against government contractors that are defrauding the government. These whistleblowers are entitled to as much as 25% of damages in cases where the government intervenes. . . .
Posted 472 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Less than two years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in NAMUDNO v. Holder, conservative legal groups are renewing their efforts to invalidate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”). On Wednesday, February 2, Federal District Judge John Bates heard a challenge brought by Alabama’s Shelby County and its conservative backers claiming that Section 5 of the VRA was unconstitutional because it “arbitrarily impose[s] on Shelby County and other covered jurisdictions disfavored treatment.”
Section 5, commonly known as the “preclearance” provision, is one of the primary enforcement mechanisms in the VRA. It requires any covered jurisdiction to obtain approval from either the Attorney General or the DC District Court before changing “any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting.” When Congress passed the VRA in 1965, and again when it extended it for 25 more years in 2006, it specified covered jurisdictions in 16 states with a history of discriminatory practices that would be subject to the Section 5 preclearance requirement.
Jan 29
Posted 478 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Earlier this week, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) issued a report of its inquiry into the causes of the recent financial crisis. Modeled after the bipartisan 9/11 Commission created to examine the background of the 9/11 attacks, the FCIC was established by Congress in 2009 as a bipartisan panel designed to investigate the causes of the country’s recent financial crisis. According to the Commission’s report, critical to avoiding a repeat of the crisis is rejecting “the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done.”
Posted 486 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Rudolf M. Elmer, a former executive of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, announced on Monday, Jan. 17, that he had delivered to Julian Assange of Wikileaks two discs detailing how over 2000 individuals and corporations engaged in tax evasion and other criminal activity. The documents purportedly contain information on at least 40 prominent politicians and “pillars of society” from the US, Asia, and Europe….
Jan 19
Posted 488 days ago by Anthony Kammer
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer was a good book and one that should be getting far more attention. Their thesis is that American inequality is at its base political—that is, inequality is not the result of rational market forces but is the byproduct of legislation lobbied for by organized industry insiders at the expense of an uniformed public. While people on the left have been making this point for some time, Hacker and Pierson have done extensive empirical research and make this argument in a cogent, well-organized way….
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