NSA telephone spying is illegal, useless, and likely unconstitutional

A new report has been released by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that was created by Congress in 2004 to serve as “an independent, bipartisan agency within the executive branch” to “review and analyze actions the executive branch takes to protect the Nation from terrorism, ensuring the need for such actions is balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties” and to “ensure that liberty concerns are appropriately considered in the development and implementation of laws, regulations, and policies related to efforts to protect the Nation against terrorism.” [Read more…]

Tiktaalik had hind legs too

The discovery of the Tiktaalik fossil back in 2006 was a cause of great celebration because it was a 385 million year old fossil that showed the early stages of forelimbs that indicated it was a transitional one from sea to amphibian. Neil Shubin, the leader of the team, wrote a highly engaging book Your Inner Fish that showed how much our human bides were shaped by our fishy ancestors. [Read more…]

A man, a plan, a canal, Nicaragua

What with one thing and another, I had been completely unaware that there are plans to build another canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to compete with the existing Panama Canal. This canal will be built by the Chinese and will go through Nicaragua. The graphic from McClatchy gives a good idea of the huge scale of the project. The engineering challenges are massive. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-7: Why the ‘history and tradition’ argument is faulty

In the 1983 precedent-setting case of Marsh v. Chambers that found ceremonial prayer at the opening of legislative sessions in Nebraska to be constitutional, one of the three dissenting voices was Justice William J. Brennan, himself a practicing Catholic. He argued strongly against the kind of ad hoc reasoning being advanced by chief justice Warren Burger in speaking for the majority, saying that it was clear that the court was trying to make legislative prayer into a special case purely because it did not want to overturn a long-standing practice. [Read more…]

Virginia may approve same-sex marriage

Virginia may become the first southern state to legalize same-sex marriage if a court there decides to overrule a current ban. If so, it would join Utah and Oklahoma in that situation and it illustrates once again how states and individuals have changed their views over time. It is expected that the plaintiffs will likely use the same arguments that were successful in the other two cases, using the US Supreme Court’s reasoning (including justice Scalia’s dissent against the decision) in last year’s Windsor case that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment required the state to treat all marriages equally, irrespective of gender. [Read more…]

Symposium on the Greece v. Galloway case

I will be part of a panel that will discuss the Greece v. Galloway case at an event that is free and open to the public. The actual title of the session is (for some obscure reason) Religion and the Constitution in Modern Life. It is interesting that although the topic is one involving constitutional law and is being held in the Law School under the auspices of American Constitutional Society, they have seen fit to invite a non-lawyer like me to participate. [Read more…]