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President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden are supposedly very different pieces of the Democratic puzzle. Obama is the relative newcomer to Washington, the change agent. Biden is the senior "man of Washington," the old hand who can make change a reality. But Obama and Biden have one thing in common: They've both done stints as constitutional law professors. Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School -- along with brilliant former jurist and liberal Congressman Abner Mikva -- while Biden has for many years taught at Widener Law School in Delaware. This unique pairing intrigues New York...

Gary Charles Leedes had dropped out of college and was working in his parents' retail business in his native Philadelphia when he decided he'd made the wrong career choice. "He was an intellectual man. His passion was reading and books and learning. He just wasn't cut out for a fabric shop," said his wife of 46 years, Carol Brooks Leedes. He put himself through the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1962, and then took aim at a law career in academia. He earned a law degree at Temple University, followed by a master's in...

This week, Barack Obama's challenge is to select a running mate who's young, hip, and whose accomplishments in life don't overshadow Obama's. Allow me to suggest Kevin Federline. The only thing we can be sure of is that Obama will choose someone who is the polar opposite of all his advisers until now. In other words, it will be a very, very white male who was probably proud of his country even before being chosen as Obama's running mate. Obama's got a lot of ground to make up following that performance last weekend at the Saddleback presidential forum with pastor...

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Barack Obama, while doing a fundraiser in 2007 claimed, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution..." Yet this constitutional law professor establishes the following as his criteria for selecting judges: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom," Obama told a Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, D.C., in 2007 "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting...

It took a grandiose gesture on the part of Senator Barack Obama to admit that the US Constitution included a 2nd Amendment. This makes the Junior Senator from The Land of Lincoln more historically well-versed than Michael G. Bellisiles, but still doesn’t make him the man we want as America’s next President. Barack Obama’s execrable views on the regulation of gun ownership are bad for individual liberty without any additional context provided. The Senator seems to believe that the State’s necessary coercive monopoly extends so far that individuals should not own firearms for the purpose of self-protection. His website offers...

When are Supreme Court justices interpreting the Constitution, and when are they simply amending it? The judicial-restraint crowd prefers a more denotative analysis relying on the actual words employed by the framers. Those opting for the living-document philosophy, or judicial activism, want the court to interpret our founding document in a way that accommodates their positions on laws that might not otherwise pass literal muster. Since their advocates cannot meet the written standard, they want the standard to meet them.

If you have any doubts government-mandated minimum-wage laws kill jobs for the poor rather than lift them out of poverty, just take a look at what is happening right now in American Samoa. The latest minimum-wage law passed by Congress calls specifically for hikes in the U.S. territory – 50 cents a year annually until the continental rate of $7.25 is reached. This Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all approach is killing jobs in Samoa already – just days after it was signed into law by President Bush last Friday. StarKist had planned to expand its tuna production next month by hiring some 200-300...

'China-level' Christian persecution coming: Pastors say court's ruling in Houston Bible case 'breath-taking' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: August 17, 2006 5:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com Houston's Bible monument A few more court decisions like this week's over a display of a Bible in Houston and the United States will be approaching the "China-level" for Christian persecution, according to a leader in the midst of that battle. The ruling from the Fifth Court of Appeals said the display of a Bible on public ground in Houston to honor the founder of a mission has to go, not because it was unconstitutional itself,...

Judge: AIPAC charges may be based on unconstitutional law WASHINGTON - A federal judge on Friday questioned the constitutionality of a law under which two former lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have been charged with receiving and disclosing national defense information to reporters and foreign diplomats. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said at the pretrial hearing for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman that the law, enacted in 1917, may be unconstitutionally broad and vague. The law's defects are exacerbated because they infringe on the defendants' constitutional rights to lobby the government and because prosecutors are seeking to...

Jobs in human-rights litigation in the U.S. aren't plentiful, and anyone seeing Tina Monshipour Foster in 2004 might have said she was a long shot to get one - or take one. She was a fourth-year associate in the midtown Manhattan office of Clifford Chance LLP, one of the world's largest law firms, with annual pay of more than $200,000. She had a secretary, word processing staff and a car and driver at her disposal when she worked late. At night, she went home to a loft apartment overlooking the East River. But at age 29, Ms. Foster gave it...

Does the Fourteenth Amendment make the entire Bill of Rights a restriction against the States? If so, which amendments or clauses? What did both "due process of the law" and "equal protection" mean to the Congress who produced the Amendment? Does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee State paid education to aliens? [snip] I hope everyone reads this because for me it was the most important reading of the year. One of the most wonderful discoveries you will find from reading is where equal protection of the laws came from and how it was defined to mean by the author of the...

The Carson City, Nevada, school administrators are attempting to fire an award-winning history teacher, Joe Enge. Why should that matter to you? I’ll combine his story with that of my 11th grade history teacher. Maybe you’ll agree this matters to everyone who cares about the future of America. In Carson City schools, administrators insist that history teachers begin teaching American history with the Civil War. Joe Enge, an 11th grade teacher there who’s written two history books and has served on a statewide board on history teaching, disagrees. He begins at the beginning, teaching his students about the American Revolution,...

"The horror, the horror," seems to sum up the reaction of many conservatives to the nomination of Harriet Miers to serve on the Supreme Court. One can almost hear the ominous organ of Doors's keyboardist Ray Manzarek in the background, as Jim Morrison intones, "This is the end." And it is an end, of sorts — the end of conservative hopes that a Republican president known for bold strokes would put forward a forceful intellect who would help shift the drifting Constitution back toward its moorings. Unlike Colonel Kurtz, conservatives have been traumatized not by an "Apocalypse Now," but by...

William Paterson University Tramples Student’s Constitutional Rights Charges Student with Discrimination and Harassment for ‘Demeaning’ Homosexuality July 20, 2005 FIRE Press Release WAYNE, N.J., July 20, 2005—William Paterson University in New Jersey has convicted student employee Jihad Daniel of “discrimination” and “harassment”—without due process—for describing homosexuality as a “perversion” in a private response to a professor’s unsolicited announcement of a university event that promoted a positive view of lesbian relationships. “William Paterson’s punishment of Mr. Daniel is a direct attack on freedom of speech,” remarked David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which intervened on...

President George W. Bush will announce his nomination to replace outgoing Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor at 9pm EDT tonight. Unfortunately, many American children aren't taught in public schools the importance of the Supreme Court or the role they've played in shaping (and sometimes perverting) U.S. law since Marbury v. Madison

The Supreme Court and the Constitution Robert E. Cushman, The Supreme Court and the Constitution (Public Affairs Pamphlet, No. 7, 1936) pp. 1-36. The average citizen has a very wholesome respect for the Constitution of the United States. His respect does not usually come from any clear or accurate knowledge of the document itself, but grows out of the belief that the Constitution sanctions those policies which he approves and forbids those which seem to him dangerous or oppressive. His reaction to the Supreme Court is similarly direct and forthright; its decisions are sound if he likes them and unsound...

Sunday, June 19, 2005 Domestic abuse law is dealt a setback By GREGORY D. KESICH, Portland Press Herald Writer A federal judge in Portland has raised doubts about the U.S. attorney's ability to use gun laws to combat domestic violence in Maine. U.S. District Court Judge D. Brock Hornby dismissed the federal felony indictment last week of a Lewiston man who was facing a prison sentence on the charge of possessing a gun after being convicted of a misdemeanor domestic assault crime. Hornby ruled that John Frechette did not knowingly waive his right to a jury trial in 1996, when...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Deciding one of the few lawsuits arguing the case for gay marriage in federal court, a California judge on Thursday ruled that a 1996 law recognizing only unions between a man and a woman as valid does not violate the U.S. Constitution. But U.S. District Judge Gary Taylor also declined to rule on whether a state ban on same-sex marriage violates the civil rights of a gay Southern California couple while a separate legal challenge to California's laws works its way through the state courts. "The question of the constitutionality of California's statutory prohibition on same-sex...

I WILL RESTORE YOUR JUDGES AS IN DAYS OF OLD, YOUR COUNSELORS AS AT THE BEGINNING. AFTERWARD, YOU WILL BE CALLED THE CITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, THE FAITHFUL CITY." ISAIAH 1:26 As the nation now knows, Terri Schiavo slipped out of this life and into eternity on Thursday, March 31st. 1 This pitiful 41-year-old mentally disabled woman was condemned to death by an immoral Florida court judge named George Greer, who never came to visit her, yet ordered that she be dehydrated and starved to death at the insistence of her "husband," Michael. Mr. Schiavo lives with another woman with whom...