Free Republic

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court seemed poised on Monday to deliver a severe blow to organized labor. The justices appeared divided along familiar lines during an extended argument over whether government workers who choose not to join unions may nonetheless be required to help pay for collective bargaining. The court's conservative majority appeared ready to say that such compelled financial support violates the First Amendment Collective bargaining, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, is inherently political when the government is the employer, and issues like merit pay, promotions and classroom size are subject to negotiation. The best hope for a victory...

Anyone who thinks the vaccine case now before the Supreme Court is merely a matter of giving injured plaintiffs their day in court has misconceived the stakes for those who reap the benefits of vaccines. The U.S. Supreme Court has just heard oral arguments in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, in which the parents of a severely disabled child wish to sue the manufacturer of a childhood vaccine for causing their child’s disability. At this stage, the dispute is over a purely legal issue: the scope of federal preemption. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act largely removed childhood...

Justice Elena Kagan cast her first recorded vote on the Supreme Court late Tuesday, joining the liberals in dissent when the high court cleared the way for the execution of an Arizona murderer. The 5-4 ruling overturned orders by a federal judge in Phoenix and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that had stopped the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan. A judge had put the execution on hold because she said she was "left to speculate" whether this drug was safe for its intended use. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest...

One wonders how Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center managed to get a hold of a private letter sent to President Obama by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe advising him against nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, but be that as it may, its contents are quite interesting and show just how nakedly political Tribe’s view of a justice really is and also how little he thinks of Sotomayor. In the May 2009 letter (PDF link here), Tribe advises Obama to refrain from choosing Sotomayor because “she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think...

I’ve obtained a copy of an interesting letter that Harvard law professor Larry Tribe wrote to his protégé, President Barack Obama, in the immediate aftermath of Justice Souter’s announcement of his decision to retire from the Court. I will post a PDF of the letter shortly. [Update: Here’s the letter.] In the meantime, I’ll call attention, in this post and two or three others, to some of its highlights. The express purpose of Tribe’s letter is to urge that Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Souter vacancy. But before making his affirmative case for Kagan, Tribe argues strongly against the...

WASHINGTON -- When the Supreme Court goes on recess at the end of this month, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will be off to his summer teaching job in Salzburg, Austria. For the 19th year, he will teach a class called "Fundamental Rights in Europe and the United States" for the McGeorge Law School. He tells his American and European students that the belief in individual freedom and the respect for human dignity transcends national borders. There is, he once said in an interview, "some underlying common shared aspiration" in legal systems that protects the rights and liberties of all. That...

There is an old adage that individually, people can be very smart, but put them in a group, and dumbness reigns supreme. Unfortunately, there are no calculations that correctly specify how many people need to put their heads together to reach the point of group insanity. However, we all know that twelve seems to have been the smallest number necessary. After all, that’s how many it takes to make up a jury. In recent years, juries have awarded multi-million dollar awards to plaintiffs for spilling hot coffee on themselves and getting burned, smoking cigarettes in boxes with warning labels, even...