Law

So you got into law school. Now what?

By Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder

So you’re going to law school this fall. Congratulations! Getting in wasn’t easy. Last year 155,000 people took the LSAT. The 201 ABA accredited law schools across the country received about 88,000 applications. Only 49,700 students matriculated.

Obviously you’re a hard worker (or you wouldn’t be coming to law school and you wouldn’t have read past the first paragraph), so you may be wondering what you can do the summer before to prepare yourself for law school.

Six Iraqis in Strasbourg

By Marko Milanovic
Last week the European Court of Human Rights produced a landmark decision in Al-Skeini v. UK, a case dealing with the extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). What a mouthful of legalese this is, you might think – so let me try to clarify things a bit. The main purpose of human rights treaties like the ECHR is to require the states that sign up to them, say the UK, France or Turkey, to respect such things as the right to life and legal due process, and prohibit the torture, of people living within the UK, France or Turkey.

Proud to be AARP. Kinda.

By Edward Zelinsky
Receiving my AARP membership card was one of the truly traumatic events of my life. I had marched for civil rights. I had protested the war in Vietnam. I walked the streets for Gene McCarthy. I was a legitimate Baby Boomer. How could this have happened to me?

My wiser and more self-confident spouse took it in better stride. Doris quickly became adept at pulling out her AARP card and demanding old-age discounts, as I stood sheepishly aside.

Will the real John Quincy Adams please stand up?

By R. B. Bernstein

Historians these days regularly have to brace themselves for some new, hallucinatory version of the American past. The latest example is Representative Michele Bachmann’s claim that the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery.

Really?

Same-sex marriage, state by state

By Elvin Lim

New York has just become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage, together with Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Iowa, and the District of Columbia. New Jersey, Maryland, and Rhode Island have not legalized same-sex marriage, but they do recognize those performed in other states. State by state, the dominoes against same-sex marriage are falling away as surely as reason must conquer unreason. President Barack Obama has been accused of allowing a state governor

But the dictionary says…

By Dennis Baron
The Supreme Court is using dictionaries to interpret the Constitution. Both conservative justices, who believe the Constitution means today exactly what the Framers meant in the 18th century, and liberal ones, who see the Constitution as a living, breathing document changing with the times, are turning to dictionaries more than ever to interpret our laws: a new report shows that the justices have looked up almost 300 words

Privacy law: a 10 minute tutorial

By Mark Warby
My mum told me the other day that she found all this publicity about privacy, super-injunctions, and Twitter most confusing. So do I, because the way it is reported seems to bear little resemblance to the world I thought I worked in and knew.

The pro-business court and class action security

By Andrew Trask
The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down another class-action decision, Erica John Fund v. Halliburton. On one side was Halliburton, the multi-national energy company, that has assumed the status of a pop-culture villain for many. On the other was the class action trial bar, for whom securities class actions are a billion-dollar business.

Last refuge or no hiding place? The last scene of all.

By David Jolley
As young fit people, few of us have ambition to spend our last days with others in a Home shared with others who have become impaired, disabled and dependent on care from others. Older and nearer this reality we may find that it has its attractions.

Superinjunctions, privacy, and social media

By David Banks
When I began training as a journalist in 1987 and bought the requisite copy of McNae it was a slim volume that could be folded into your pocket on visits to court. The last edition, the 20th came in a shade under 700 pages, despite the best efforts of Mark Hanna and myself to slim it down. As well as successive governments’ enthusiasm for legislation that impinges on the media, one of the other reasons for its growth in size has been the emergence of new legal threats like privacy.

NY’s Irrational Income Taxation of Nonresidents: The Barker Decision

By Edward Zelinsky
I may be losing my status as the poster boy for New York’s irrational income taxation of nonresidents. The recent decision of New York’s Tax Appeals Tribunal threatens to bestow this dubious honor upon Mr. John J. Barker.

Courage to Dissent

Much scholarship about the legal aspects behind the Civil Rights Movement centers around the work of Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court. In a discussion on this topic, Tomiko Brown-Nagin asks what this history would look like if the Supreme Court wasn’t the main focus, and examines the unsung heroes of desegregation.

The Scottish Election 2011

By Michael Keating
The Scottish Election of 2011 represents a watershed in Scottish politics. For the first time the Scottish National Party has come convincingly in first place, securing the absolute majority that was supposed to be impossible under proportional representation. Labour, having dominated Scottish politics for over fifty years, suffered a crushing defeat, losing seats even in its industrial heartland of Clydeside. Both of the parties of the ruling coalition of Westminster are reduced to minor players at Holyrood, without even the leverage that small parties enjoyed in the last parliament.

Former Senator John Ensign in hot water

By Peter J. Henning
A report filed by the Special Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics accuses former Nevada Senator John Ensign of a number of violations related to the end of an affair he had with the wife of a top aide who was also a long-time friend of his family.

Was Iraq a just war?

By David Fisher
There has been much recent debate about whether the 2003 Iraq War was legal, with both Tony Blair and his Attorney General summoned before the Chilcot enquiry to give evidence on this. But a more fundamental question is whether the war was moral?

Assassinating terrorist leaders: A matter of international law

By Louis René Beres

Osama bin Laden was assassinated by U.S. special forces on May 1, 2011. Although media emphasis thus far has been focused almost entirely on the pertinent operational and political issues surrounding this “high value” killing, there are also important jurisprudential aspects to the case. These aspects require similar attention. Whether or not killing Osama was a genuinely purposeful assassination from a strategic perspective, a question that will be debated for years to come, we should now also inquire: Was it legal?