• legal rhetoric

Listening to heavy metal music can get you the death penalty in Texas. As I always say to my friends outside the state, it really is worse than you imagine. Surely, even if you support the death penalty under certain circumstances, you can recognize a legal travesty when you see one? It's all about feeding the base with blood.

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Scalia just doesn't get it, does he? From Dahlia Lithwick's article on today's oral arguments:

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Not being much of one for celebrity culture, I've been trying not to think about Roman Polanski's arrest, but I keep getting drawn back to it (perhaps because it comes on the heels of the 40th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders). Here's one of the more thoughtful pieces I've read. ThickCulture is a great blog, btw.

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• legal rhetoric

Jonathan Turley gives us his list. I think mine is the same, although I'd put in a word for Robert Jackson. Glad to see my all-time hero Hugo Black made the list. And that the egregious Frankfurter did not.

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• legal rhetoric
• wankery

Watching the Sotomayor hearings this week is painful.

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After the last 8 years I didn't think I could be shocked by anything anymore, but the shooting of Dr. Tiller has upset me more than anything in recent memory. If you read the stories of the women who went to his clinic, Dr. Tiller looks more and more like a saint. Jack Balkin asks the following questions about how to deal with Christian terrorism (he uses the questions as an analogy for the right-wing defense of detention and torture, but I'm inclined to take them seriously--the full blog post is here):

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You get the stupid-ass British libel laws. (But Pringles ARE snacks.)

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A Wichita doctor is murdered as he goes into church this morning. Bill O'Reilly has been targeting him for some time. Under the "imminent lawless conduct" standard of Brandenburg v. Ohio, should O'Reilly/Fox News be liable for damages? How do the mass media complicate the Brandenburg standard? If a Muslim cleric in the US had done the same, would he be in jail right now?

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516 pages of Sotomayor's opinions. You'll be quizzed on them tomorrow.

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The California Supreme Court ruling on Prop. 8 is here. I know my position will make no one happy, but I believe the Court did the right thing by upholding the legality of the existing marriages and then upholding the proposition itself. Rights for GLBT people will be stronger in the long run if established through the legislatures and ballot initiatives than through the courts.

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