“Testilying” is a term that police officers use to describe false testimony they give in court so that an otherwise illegal search or arrest can be justified.  It’s hard to tell how common the practice is, but it’s much more common than most people want to believe.

This New York Times report is telling.  First, we don’t know how many illegal searches and arrests take place because, as Federal Judge John Martin observes, “We don’t have statistics for all the people who are hassled, no gun is found, and they never get into the system.”  These are low-visibility state offenses that we might call state misdemeanors.  They happen all over but more often in the poorer neighborhoods.  Who would go to the trouble of consulting a lawyer for an illegal 10 minute police stop and pat-down?  How many lawyers would bother to take such a case if someone did walk in off the street with such a complaint?

Next come the cases where the police find contraband and go to court with a fabricated story in order to try and get a conviction.  In a system where such conduct goes unpunished, it’s safe to say we’re going to get more of it.  And the cops who skirt the rules are likely to rise through the ranks faster.  After all, they have many more arrests to their credit than their peers.

Note the utter indifference of the police and prosecutors to reports of testilying.

Kudos to the New York Times for this “revealing glimpse” of our troubled system.  For some related Cato work, go here and here. 

The Style section of today’s Washington Post features a terrific article about the National Security Archive, the nonprofit group dedicated to unearthing goverment secrets. The privately funded group, about 35 strong, uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect about 75,000 documents a year, which staffers analyze and then post on the website. The Archive’s greatest hits (see, e.g., here and here) demonstrate that as Patrick Henry put it, one should “never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.” Don’t trust: verify.

One of my favorite documents on the site is the Operation Northwoods Memo, prepared by the Pentagon in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster:

titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” [the memo] was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but thanks to FOIA and the National Security Archive, you can check for yourself [.pdf]. But if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had had their way, you couldn’t. As top aides to Gerald Ford 34 years ago, they urged the president to veto amendments strengthening FOIA (he did, and Congress overrode his veto). The Archive has the documents on that too.

(cross-posted on genehealy.com)

Much as I hate to rain on my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s understandable happiness at the decriminalization of personal consumption/possession of small amounts of drugs, this doesn’t exactly represent a ray of hope in Argentina’s otherwise gloomy policy mix.  Not because I believe in the War on Drugs – I can’t imagine anybody at Cato does – but because it was a court that reached this decision instead of a policymaking body.

Imagine the outcry if the U.S. Supreme Court simply decreed a policy it didn’t like to be unconstitutional – I know, with Justices Stevens and Kennedy at the apogee of their powers, it’s not a far stretch.  Better yet, recall the poison the Court injected into our legal and political systems when it short-circuited the political process by inventing a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (again, I’m not saying anything about the underlying policy arguments).

So it is here: Instead of having the Argentine Congress change the law, the nation’s Supreme Court (by a vote of 4-3) simply decreed that criminalizing drug use is unconstitutional.  Reports are still sketchy, but this sounds like precisely the kind of judicial fiat developing (or any) countries need to avoid if they want to strengthen the rule of law.

The Virginia Supreme Court “reined in police searches yesterday, overturning convictions in two 2005 drug cases in which the court said police had conducted searches based on vague suspicions.” L. Steven Emmert, a Virginia lawyer-blogger, told the Washington Post he wasn’t surprised: “While Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

I think “while” is the wrong conjunction in that sentence. Maybe it should be “Because Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

“Law and order” is a phrase often used to imply “tough on crime” policies, perhaps suggesting harsh legal penalties harshly applied. Wikipedia notes, “The expression also sometimes carries the implication of arbitrary or unnecessary law enforcement, or excessive use of police powers.”

But law and order are necessary for the flourishing of human life. Advocates of liberty and limited government should not concede the concept of “law and order” to those who engage in “excessive use of police powers.” Those who actually believe in law and order would hold police and prosecutors, as well as criminal suspects, to the rule of law; and that seems to be what the Virginia Supreme Court did. So here’s to justices who understand that “law and order” and “the Bill of Rights” are allies, not enemies.

Cato scholars have increasingly been evaluating the respective policies of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The trade shop understandably prefers McCain (see my colleague Sallie James’s new paper), as does, cautiously, our director of health and welfare studies, Michael Tanner. The foreign policy shop, meanwhile, doesn’t like McCain because he is ”wedded to perpetual war” and generally given to neoconservative tendencies.

On judges, I’ll go with the trade and health care folks: While John McCain’s views on  the First Amendment are unacceptable to freedom-lovers of any stripe, he has at least promised to nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts and Sam Alito (who have ruled against campaign finance restrictions). Obama and Clinton, meanwhile, are in the John Paul Stevens camp of relying on empathy, international opinion, and “my own experience” as a basis for constitutional interpretation.

Indeed, while defending his vote against Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation, Obama explained that his standard for a justice must be “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

As Jonah Goldberg says in a devastating column, “Now that is a pure expression of the principle of judicial fiat.”

Supreme Court justices take an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States, so help me God.” Any contention that justices must tilt toward any particular type of party — the downtrodden (or privileged), the politically unpopular (or popular), the ethnic minority (or majority) — is an argument for judicial dictatorship instead of the rule of law.

As Roberts said when Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) asked him whether he would be “for the little guy,” if the law says the little guy wins, then the little guy should win — and if the law says the big guy wins, then it would be a miscarriage of justice to rule for the little guy. And those who don’t like that result should complain to their elected officials and get the law changed.

In a fit of either highly coincidental timing or good humor, the Supreme Court today released opinions in two tax cases. In MeadWestvaco Corp. v. Illinois Department of Revenue, the Court limited the power of states to tax the money that a company based in another state earns when it sells off an investment in a division involved in a separate line of business. In U.S. v. Clintwood Elkhorn Mining Co., the Court decided that a taxpayer seeking a refund for an invalid tax under the Constitution’s Export Clause must seek a refund from the government before bringing a lawsuit.

So the taxpayers went 1-1 today, but the cases were both technical and not worth getting into. Perhaps the only interesting thing about them — aside from this whole Tax Day thing — is that they were both unanimous. This technicality and unanimity could be further evidence of Chief Justice Roberts trying to steer the Court to take on less high-profile (typically business) cases, with narrow issues that prevent the fractured 5-4 decision-making that make the Court seem more political than it really is (or should be).

Some wrap-up notes from the ASIL conference that concluded on Saturday:

1. The second panel I attended Thursday covered the very timely “Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis.” Air Force Colonel Morris Davis — who resigned as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo — opened with a criticism of the military tribunals as unworkable; he agreed that terrorism detainees held in Gitmo (let alone Iraq) don’t have constitutional rights, but the politicization of the process has delegitimized what should be an open, transparent, and efficient processing of enemy combatants. Covington & Burling partner David Remes, who has represented many of the detainees, called for simply applying the criminal justice paradigm to international terrorists (as with the blind sheik after the first WTC bombing and with Timothy McVeigh). Hofstra’s Julian Ku continued that line by supporting the extension of constitutional rights to foreigners and applying international law domestically. Human Rights First’s Elisa Massimino called for the U.S. to be a shining city upon a hill (my characterization, certainly not her words) in terms of being an example on human rights — and linked American political power to its respect for international law.

Then came Q & A, which as it happened centered mostly on a very short question that I asked: Is there a difference between national security and law enforcement, and if there is what are the consequences for the handling of detainees suspected of being terrorists? Col. Davis said that national security is the correct paradigm but that the military commissions have been poorly executed by political appointees. David Remes, to his credit, explained that the real difference between national security and criminal justice is one of policy, and it is not up to the courts to make those kinds of decisions.

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This morning I attended two panels at the ongoing American Society of International Law Conference. The first was “The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals,” which refreshingly did not simply rehash the formation of the International Criminal Court but dealt with the meatier issues of how to decide whom to prosecute, what kind of justice to pursue, etc. The panelists, all academics who had played various roles associated with, for example, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, discussed precisely the issue that most interests me: how to draw the line between law and politics. If you overshoot and try to prosecute thousands of perpetrators of unspeakable crimes, spread across multiple countries, your political support will collapse. If you amnesty everyone, there is no justice. Tough decisions have to be made such that there is some justice, which is better than no justice.

One interesting anecdote from this first panel involved the quixotic attempt by Col. Luke Lea and a motley band of doughboys to capture Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of World War One. The panelist who told this story — which was relevant because the plan was to prosecute the Kaiser as a war criminal — misnamed Col. Lea as having been a Texan, when anyone worth his salt knows that it’s “Luke Lea of Tennessee.”

(Ok, ok, the only reason I knew this factoid was because when I interned for former Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) over a decade ago, I was charged with writing an essay on Lea as part of a project to document the lives of all Tennessee senators. Lea was a one-termer who, upon losing the Democratic nomination after the passage of the Seventeeth Amendment — direct election of senators — volunteered for the Great War.)

Wednesday afternoon marked the beginning of the 102nd meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL).  ASIL is a venerable organization that takes international law seriously, inviting vigorous discussion and rigorous study of a panoply of issues.  Which is not to say that its members don’t skew in a particular way on many issues of the day.  Generally speaking, cosmopolitans and those who study and promote international law — especially in academia – are toward the left side of the political spectrum.  A left-wing bias in this field means a favorable disposition toward universal norms, global jurisdiction by a world court, and otherwise the imposition of elite consensus on domestic courts and polities.  Still, the ASIL membership is not nearly as bad in those tendencies as, say, the ABA’s international law practice group — and, as I said, it invites speakers and writers from a variety of perspectives.  Moreover, a fair bit of ASIL’s activities relate to private and commercial international law, with which libertarians should have little beef.

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I’ve read through most of the John Yoo torture memo released last week (Part 1, Part 2 [.pdfs]). As I’d gathered from the news reports, there’s not much new here: the core of the argument has been known since at least 2004, with the release of the infamous August 1, 2002 torture memo, also drafted by Yoo. At the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo was the key figure in advising the executive branch as to the limits–if any–to its powers. As Georgetown’s David Cole has put it, Yoo “was the right person in the right place at the right time…. Here was someone who had made his career developing arguments for unchecked power, who could cut-and-paste from his law review articles into memos that essentially told the president, ‘You can do what you want.’”

In the memo released last week, once again we see a breathtakingly narrow interpretation of what constitutes torture under US law. To rise to the level of torture, the abuse must, Yoo argues, inflict pain equivalent to that associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” Presumably, the rack qualifies under that definition, but hey, what about the thumbscrew?

Such questions ultimately don’t matter much under Yoo’s analysis, because, in his view, Congress lacks the constitutional power to prevent the president from ordering torture: “Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President.” As Yoo sees it, telling the executive branch not to abuse prisoners is like telling the CINC what weapons can be used to take a hill occupied by the enemy: “Congress can no more interfere with the President’s conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.”

One of the problems Tim Lynch and I experienced talking about our 2006 paper on the administration’s constitutional theories is that when you describe the implications of those theories in calm, sober tones, people tend to think you’re being strident and hysterical. Luckily John Yoo is willing to serve as his own reductio ad absurdum. If you don’t have the time for an 81-page memo, try this short, cringe-inducing YouTube clip:

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Federal prosecutor wants a federal judge to order citizens to stop talking to the media about a case.  In extraordinary circumstances, a judge can order the attorneys in a particular case to stop talking to the media … but a censorship order to other people?!  Even if the judge promptly rejects this request, we should all be troubled that this was even attempted.  This prosecutor should be shown the door right away.

More here, here, and here.   

I just finished Steven Teles’s important new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.  As far as legal nonfiction goes, this is not going to be the bestseller that Jeffrey Toobin’s or Jan Crawford Greenburg’s recent tomes on the Supreme Court have  become, let alone Clarence Thomas’s memoirs.  In part this is because more people are interested in the intense Kremlinology of the least public branch of government – the nine black-robed magistrates in their marble palace at One First Street — than in the nuts and bolts of the reaction to the left-wing excesses of the legal academy.

But more than that, this worthy study will fly under the radar more than it otherwise should because it is an academic book, written with the research methodology and citation practices of a social scientist investigating a particular phenomenon.  It is to Teles’s great credit that he avoided (for the most part) the political science jargon in which such a project could have gotten swallowed, but a journalistic narrative this ain’t.  Perhaps to even greater credit, Teles managed to write this book without once resorting to the often confusing and usually superfluous empirical models and regression analyses that are now demanded by practitioners of the “soft” sciences — probably because he already has tenure.

Teles ably takes us through the development of law and economics — the only way to get alternative voices into law schools resistant to anti-New Deal, anti-Warren Court views – and two generations of libertarian/conservative public interest law, as well as cataloguing the wealth of archival materials from what the Clintons considered the heart of the vast right-wing conspiracy, the Federalist Society.  Curiously, the only mentions of Cato are in a footnote describing Charles Koch as one of our founders and a brief reference to my boss, Roger Pilon, “fuming in his Washington office when the [Harriet] Miers [Supreme Court] nomination was announced.”

In any event, I do recommend the book to those interested in the successes, failures, and false starts of a broad movement to save the law — and consequently legal practice and the courts — from the radicalization that beset academia and public interest organizations in the 1960s.  Is it better to set up law & econ outposts in hostile institutions (Yale, Harvard) or takeover law schools wholesale (George Mason)?  Is it better to have businessmen (Mountain States Legal Foundation) or idealists (Institute for Justice) running a public interest litigation shop?  What sorts of cases are best taken up by the likes of IJ so as to have maximum long-term effect on the legal culture?  These are the sorts of questions Teles analyzes, providing some interesting answers and leaving, as one expects from an academic tract, room for further research.

Herbert Alexander was the founder of the study of campaign finance in political science. Long before mandatory disclosure of contributions, Herb published a review of campaign fundraising and spending after each presidential election year. Those volumes remain an invaluable resource for scholars studying American political history. These books were thorough and thoughtful, genuine scholarship on a topic that generates more than a little bluster. I remember reading Herb’s work and thinking what fine work they were, especially considering the law did not mandate disclosure.

I first met Herb in the late 1980s. He had some sympathy in those days for efforts to regulate campaign finance. Later he was much more skeptical, and I like to think it was a skepticism born from experience. I remember a lunch I had with Herb a few years ago. We were discussing some aspect or the other of McCain-Feingold and suddenly Herb said, “You know, John, there’s such a thing as free speech. These people have rights!” Indeed.

Herb was a fine scholar who did his work with integrity and care. He was also a good friend to those who came to know him. I and many others will miss his scholarship and his company.

Quite appropriately, today exposes another facet of the foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy. April 1st is the day each fiscal year when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions with the US Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas. For the second consecutive year, the quota of these visas was reached on this first day of eligibility.

H-1Bs allow employers to hire foreign workers in certain professional occupations. They are good for three years and can be renewed for another three. Though an H-1B cannot lead to a green card, it’s still a pretty good deal.

The problem is that, even in this apparent economic downturn, there aren’t enough visas: Congress limits the number of annual H-1Bs grants, and that magic number has been set at 65,000 for five years now. Before that, and in response to the technology boom of the late ’90s, Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the cap has been reached earlier and earlier each year since.

In 2005, that meant August. In 2006, May 26. Last year, by the afternoon of April 2, 2007 (April 1 was a Sunday), USCIS had received over 150,000 H-1B applications. Officials quickly announced that they would randomly select 65,000 petitions from all those the agency had received in the first two days of eligibility.

Last week, with demand for the prized work permits only increasing, the powers that be decreed that this year’s lottery would accept all entries received in the first five business days. USCIS simultaneously promulgated a rule prohibiting employers from trying to game the lottery by filing multiple petitions for the same employee.

As for the vast majority of employers and employees who will be out of luck, the immigration laws say, like so many “rebuilding” baseball teams this opening week, “wait till next year.” Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold until October 1, 2009—the day people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal year 2010 can start work.

If only this were all a bad April Fools’ joke.

Read more on this in the article I have up on National Review Online today.

David Simon has done it again. First, he created the best show on television, The Wire.  Then, he and his co-writers wrote a passionate critique of the drug war in Time magazine, urging jurors to vote their conscience in certain cases. That article has, in turn, sparked a debate over at the Defending People blog. A Texas prosecutor started the debate with an anonymous post against jury nullification. The prosecutor went so far as to say that anyone advocating jury nullification could be prosecuted in Texas. David Simon just cheerfully joined the fracas. 

Previous coverage here. Cato co-published the most comprehensive book on this subject, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine by Clay Conrad. For shorter works, go here, here, and here.

In an interesting side-note to the Medellin decision, the case’s convoluted procedural history made for some rather strange political bed fellows.  The Court’s decision, anchored by the “conservative wing” (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito) and joined by the “moderate” Kennedy and (writing separately) the “liberal” Stevens effectively clears the last remaining roadblock to Texas’s imposition of the death penalty on the murderer Jose Erenesto Medellin.  Consequently, Tuesday’s result disappointed death penalty abolitionists, who join on the losing side those who want international law to have direct applicability in the United States.  That’s right, by ruling against President Bush’s executive overreach — which at least three members of the Court’s “liberal” wing implicitly ratified — the Court angered cosmopolitan liberals.  Go figure.

Yesterday, in addition to announcing its decision in the Medellin case (which I blogged about here), the Supreme Court heard argument in two cases relating to the War on Terror. 

First, in Munaf v. Geren, two U.S. citizens (also citizens of Jordan and Iraq, respectively) held captive in Iraq by U.S. forces — as part of Multi-National Force-Iraq, which may but should be a key determinant – challenged their detention and potential transfer to Iraqi authorities for what they fear will be torture as part of criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts.  This seems to be an easier case than Boumediene, a case argued in December wherein Guantanamo detainees challenge their containment and the military commissions by which they are to be tried.  (My colleague Tim Lynch blogged about that case here and here, and also filed an amicus brief.) 

Whatever hope the detainees had was probably dashed by the incoherent presentation made by Northwestern Law School Clinical Professor Joseph Margulies on their behalf.  As Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog put it, “when several Justices of the Supreme Court tell an attorney they do not understand his argument, and they do so because the argument was, indeed, fundamentally confusing, the chances of winning may be significantly reduced.”  Ouch.  Margulies turned what should be relatively straightforward issues into a convoluted maze, and those of us in the audience were not the only ones shaking our heads.

The second argument, and the one relating to the title of this blog post, involved the prosecution of the guy who was caught smuggling explosives into the U.S. from Canada in an attempt to blow up LAX at the turn of the century.  (Is it ok to use that expression for the 1999-2000 period yet?)  In United States v. Ressam, Attorney General Mukasey exercised the AG’s historical (but not much used of late) prerogative to argue before the high court, defending the 10-year additional prison term slapped on the Milennial bomber for “carrying an explosive” while “committing a felony” — the felony being lying to the border guard.  Having learned from Margulies’s example, Mukasey did a workmanlike job and sat down with 14 minutes remaining in his allotted time.  The case will turn on some rather technical statutory analysis which I’ll spare you, but it was refreshing to see an appellate advocate who was clearly not there to hear his own voice.

Tuesday the Supreme Court slipped the Gordian knot of a case that could have come straight from a law school exam, involving federalism, treaty interpretation, the scope of executive power, criminal procedure, and conflicts between international and domestic law.  The issues in Medellin v. Texas boiled down to: 1) Whether a particular decision of the International Court of Justice is automatically binding on Texas courts and, if not, 2) Whether President Bush made it binding by issuing a memorandum to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.  The Court answered in the negative on both counts by a 6-3 margin.

The result of this decision is that neither the ICJ (the so-called “World Court”) nor the president acting alone can force states to review criminal cases involving foreign nationals.  The underlying treaty at issue – which gives foreign nationals accused of a crime the right to meet with consular officials – is not enforceable in the absence of implementing legislation from Congress.  The ICJ ruling is similarly not self-executing, and does not gain legal effect merely because the president tells the states to abide by it.

The Supreme Court has thus protected America’s carefully calibrated system of federalism and checks and balances by preventing an international court from overriding a state’s duly enacted (and constitutionally sound) law.  Just as importantly, the Court correctly rejected the argument that the president has the power to enforce against the states a treaty that is, in the absence of congressional action, enforceable only by diplomatic means.  Telling state courts how to do their jobs is simply not among the powers of the nation’s chief executive.

I just came across this letter I wrote to the editor of the Washington Post.  Sadly, the editor declined to publish it.  Since the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments about the D.C. gun ban and the meaning of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, it remains relevant:

On January 5, we learned that District officials filed a brief with the Supreme Court [”Gun Law Prevents Harm, D.C. Argues,” Jan. 5] defending the city’s gun ban on the grounds that: the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms; the ban “does not deprive the people of reasonable means to defend themselves;” and “less restrictive approaches would not be adequate.”

Fifteen pages later, Colbert I. King [”Outfoxed In the District,” Jan. 5] wrote of the “conditions that threaten the quality of life of all who live in this city: criminals roaming the streets in search of human prey; an apathetic and complacent government workforce; nonproducers ensconced in high places; and elected leaders who fall for snow jobs.”

Draw your own conclusions.

The New York Times Magazine’s most recent issue (March 16, 2008) simultaneously features a shariah apologetic and an accusation that the Supreme Court is in the pocket of big business. 

In the former, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman prescribes the election of Islamist parties and entrenchment of Allah’s law (as interpreted by a council of scholars) as the cure to the Muslim world’s ailments. In the latter, GW law professor Jeffrey Rosen contends that liberal and conservative elites — like NYT readers? — have colluded to do in the common man. There is so much wrong with these analyses, one hardly knows where to begin.  (For a point-by-point takedown of the Rosen piece, see Eric Posner’s post on Slate’s new legal blog.)

Feldman, who “had a small role advising the Iraqi [constitutional] drafters,” sees shariah as both a proto-aspirational document somewhat akin to our Declaration of Independence and a source of law more legitimate than duly constituted (secular) legal codes. But both of these things cannot be: Either shariah is the law of God as strictly interpreted (on what authority?) by man or it is a non-binding sentiment, much like American politicians’ references to America’s Judeo-Christian values. Advocates of shariah would be the first to admit that if you’re going in for God’s law, you can’t summarily ignore its anachronisms.  Let people live under shariah if they so desire, but be wary of its negative externalities.

Rosen, meanwhile, sees a conspiracy involving anyone who has ever studied the “economic analysis of law” (and uses phrases like “negative externalities”) while holding up as a paragon of judicial virtue a jurist who said he was “ready to bend the law … against the corporations.” At the same time, Rosen posits that the Chamber of Commerce destroyed Ralph Nader’s noble crusade to help the consumer and hoodwinked the Court — even, at times, that model of “liberal judicial restraint,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — by hiring a bunch of rich lawyers (presumably not the same rich lawyers who reap all the punitive damages from the state tort claims that Rosen lauds). These sentiments distort legal history and misunderstand the proper role of the judiciary; to paraphrase a salient point then-nominee John Roberts made at his confirmation hearings, the little guy should win when the law is on his side, and the big corporation should win when the law is on its side.

In short, those of us who believe in the rule of law rather than men and in a Constitution that circumscribes the powers of government are heartened by both the outcry against Rowan Williams and the Supreme Court’s near-unanimous view that corporations are people too (indeed, they are, but legal persons composed of human directors, officers, employees, and investors). But then perhaps we are all in on the conspiracy.

Imagine that you do business in California.  Maybe you’re in construction, or health care, or auto repair.  Now imagine some or all of your income comes from state contracts; using the above examples, perhaps you build schools, or take care of patients on Medi-Cal, or fix broken-down LAPD squad cars.  Now imagine that the state comes in and says, aha, because we pay your bills — again, on contracts relating to construction, health care, auto repair, etc. — and we love unions, you can’t talk to your employees about any negative aspects of unionization.  Ridiculous, right?  Who is a customer to tell you what to do with money that’s already in your pocket?

Well, that’s precisely what the great state of California is trying to do with a new statute that small businesses are challenging in the case of Chamber of Commerce v. Brown.  It’s a little bit more complicated than I outline above because the case implicates highly technical provisions of the National Labor Relations Act (and previous Supreme Court interpretations thereof), but the gist is that California is attempting to silence employers by tying speech restrictions to unrelated state spending.  For reasons that the petitioners ably present in their briefs and that I summarize in a podcast and in Cato’s own amicus brief, the Supreme Court should strike down this statute.

In any event, that’s the background to my trip to the Court to hear argument in Chamber v. Brown today.  (The plaza in front of the courthouse steps was remarkably free of demonstrators after yesterday’s hoopla surrounding the DC Gun Ban case.)  I’ll save you the detailed summary of the argument, but suffice it to say that the outcome will almost certainly go against California.  It’s always dicey predicting the scorecard, but based on oral argument it will probably be 7-2, 6-3, or maybe 6-1-2.  On one side, Justices Scalia and Alito and Chief Justice Roberts were safely on the side of free speech; Justices Justice Souter surprisingly led the charge against California’s interpretation of labor law; Justice Breyer, though skeptical, will likely write his own opinion agreeing in the Court’s opinion for separate reasons or possibly calling for remand rather than strict reversal; and Justice Thomas was silent but is expected to join the majority.  On the other side, Justices Stevens and Ginsberg seem to have no problem with California’s regulation.  On his own side as usual, Justice Kennedy’s vote seems to be up for grabs, but – based on his decisions in previous labor and regulatory preemption cases – I would bet on him siding with the majority.

In short, California employers will live to speak another day.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve pointed out a few of the misleading arguments being deployed on behalf of expanding executive power in the wiretapping debate. But I think this op-ed in my home state’s largest newspaper, the Star Tribune, may take the cake. It’s written by Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN), and it’s a brazen effort to mislead my fellow Minnesotans about the wiretapping debate without saying anything that’s technically false. Rep. Bachman writes:

One of the critical tools that has allowed us to keep the homeland safe after 9/11 has been the Protect America Act. It updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to deal with new, deadly challenges in this age of terror — enabling intelligence services to immediately listen to phone calls made between foreign terrorists.

Now, it’s true that the Protect America Act was passed “after 9/11.” It’s also true that the Protect America Act was passed after Pearl Harbor. And the Battle of Hastings, for that matter. The key point is that the Protect America Act was passed in August 2007, six years after 9/11.

This matters because, as Kurt Opsahl at EFF points out, Bachman goes on to imply that “attack after attack,” including the liquid explosives plot in the summer of 2006, was stopped by the Protect America Act. Indeed, she writes, “last year, the Heritage Foundation compiled a list of 19 confirmed terror plots against American targets that had been thwarted.”

Here is the report Bachman is presumably referring to. The 19 attacks range from the Richard Reid shoe bomb attack in December 2001 to the JFK Airport plot in June 2007. In other words, all 19 thwarted attacks occurred before the Protect America Act was enacted in August 2007. Bachman never explicitly says otherwise, but she’s obviously doing her best to give her constituents the impression that the PAA was enacted sometime in 2001 or 2002. Reasonable people could disagree about whether this qualifies as a lie. But I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Rep. Bachman has a low opinion of her constituents’ intelligence.

This story from a Florida TV station probably calls for some serious analysis about over-regulation and the need for cost-benefit analysis. But that presupposes a level of maturity that I don’t have. Instead, I’ll just note that it’s about time that politicians address issues where they have genuine expertise:

A proposed law currently making its way through the Florida legislature might help you with what can be an embarrassing problem. Here’s the bottom line, the bill would be a mandate that all eating establishment must have enough toilet paper when you go into the restroom. The only problem is the bill doesn’t dictate how much toilet paper is “enough.” State Senator Victor Crist, a Republican from Tampa, felt the problem was so important, a law must be passed to protect the backsides of anyone in Florida. The measure will also try to regulate the cleanliness of restrooms in eating establishments.

In a new plan to combat crime on the streets of our fair city, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier are encouraging residents to submit to voluntary searches of their homes in exchange for amnesty if the residents have illegal guns (or drugs).  (”Excuse me, ma’am, mind if I take a look around… “)

Well, this isn’t illegal — consent is, after all, one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement — but it is head-scratchingly poor public policy.  Those who don’t want to give up their contraband won’t consent to searches, those who want to get rid of it will find a way to do that without signaling “check here again next week,” and the police will waste their resources rifling through the homes of people with nothing to hide.

Maybe D.C. should pass a law outlawing gun ownership.  Oh wait, they already did that and are fighting to keep it in the face of, um, the Second Amendment.  (The Supreme Court hears argument in D.C. v. Heller next Tuesday.)

The bottom line is that voluntary home searches, like outright gun prohibitions, only hurt law-abiding citizens.  Those who have already chosen to engage in crime will not be deterred merely because their actions violate gun-related ordinances in addition to the laws against robbery, rape, murder, etc.  The only guns swept up in this “amnesty” will be those kept by people trying to protect their families from the criminals the police fail to catch.

In 2002-2005 I documented in some detail what today’s Wall Street Journal editorial referred to as Eliot Spitzer’s “consistent excesses as Attorney General.”

A January 2003 piece on “Spitzer’s Shakedown” revealed the fatuous nature of his inquisition against Wall Street.

In 2004, there was Spitzer’s ridiculous “Mutual Fund Fee Fantasy.” In 2005, in “Trial by Press Release,” I unraveled Spitzer’s flimsy case against the insurance brokerage arm of Marsh & McClellan.

Shortly after one of these articles appeared I received a phone call at home from an investigative reporter with one of the largest New York newspapers. He prodded me for quite a while to find out if I had been influenced or bribed by one of the companies Spitzer had attacked. Did I know anyone at, say, Merrill Lynch? (Nope). Do I own stock in the company? (Not then, and I’m currently shorting financials.)

I explained that nobody has accused me of any breach of integrity since I began writing in 1971. Besides, it would be very expensive to bribe me, I joked, because I had accumulated more money through investing than I know how to spend. I asked the reporter where he had gotten this very bad tip. He told me he had been contacted by Mr. Spitzer’s office. Hardball was their favorite game.

What follows is an unpublished February 2005 speech I gave to some small group in D.C. (which paid me less than half what Gov. Spitzer apparently spent for far less entertainment). Excerpts later appeared in my “Trial by Press Release.”

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A further development in the cross-border supply of gambling and betting services broke today when the European Union announced they would launch a formal investigation into the selective (and retroactive) prosecution of European gaming interests by US authorities.

This is yet another twist in the saga first brought to light by Antigua’s case against the United States in the WTO. That case (summarized here and updated here, here, here, and here) sparked a slew of indirectly related skirmishes, a plethora of “David vs. Goliath” headlines, and an unprecedented reaction from the United States to pick up their ball and go home. The various twists and turns of the dispute have provided ample fodder for trade junkies in the form of commercial and systemic issues: Does the WTO dispute settlement mechanism provide effective recourse for big as well as small members? How should WTO members respond when one of their cohorts wants to change the nature of the contracts between the parties? How do members balance their rights and obligations in the context of issues of public morals?

The questions look far from answered because if the EUs investigation proceeds, a new WTO case could be on the horizon. Although the EU and the United States came to a settlement in December over the United States’ wish to withdraw its commitment to open its market to the cross-border supply of gambling and betting services, the details of that settlement are sketchy. And the December deal pertains to compensation for the withdrawal of market access going forward: unless and until that deal is ratified by all WTO members (including those who are asking for compensation of their own), the U.S. obligations stand and so does the ruling that found the United States was in breach of those obligations.

In other words, while the United States might eventually be able to get away with changing its obligations to provide WTO members access to the lucrative U.S. gambling market, in the meantime their (discriminatory?) prosecution of offshore interests leaves them vulnerable.