“What a wild story: a prisoner serving 39 years to life started making drawings of golf courses. The drawings made their way to Golf Digest, which wrote about him, then realized his conviction was sketchy, then investigated, and now he’s free.” [Tom Gara on Max Adler, Golf Digest]
The article quotes one of Valentino Dixon’s pro bono lawyers: “It’s embarrassing for the legal system that for a long time the best presentation of the investigation was from a golf magazine.”
How much risk did that recent “no level of alcohol drinking is safe” study find? For the one-drink-per-day group, “a total of 400,000 bottles of gin [was] associated with one extra health problem.” [David Spiegelhalter via Flowing Data] If one of those bottles should happen to fall, 399,999 bottles of gin on the wall…
On Monday the Cato Institute published its annual Cato Supreme Court Review for the 2017-18 Supreme Court term. Included is my 7,000-word article on the Supreme Court’s cases last term on partisan gerrymandering, Gill v. Whitford (Wisconsin) and Benisek v. Lamone (Maryland). Several people have told me that I managed to make a dry and complicated subject understandable and even entertaining, which I take as the highest compliment.
The entire CSCR is online, and here are its contents. I assisted in the editing of the pieces by Joseph Bishop-Henchman on the Internet sales tax case South Dakota v. Wayfair, and by Jennifer Mascott on the government-structure case Lucia v. SEC.
FOREWORD AND INTRODUCTION
The Battle for the Court: Politics vs. Principles by Roger Pilon
Introduction By Ilya Shapiro
ANNUAL KENNETH B. SIMON LECTURE
The Administrative Threat to Civil Liberties by Philip Hamburger
IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL SECURITY
The Travel Bans by Josh Blackman
POLITICAL GERRYMANDERING
The Ghost Ship of Gerrymandering Law by Walter Olson
THE CRIMINAL LAW
Katz Nipped and Katz Cradled: Carpenter and the Evolving Fourth Amendment by Trevor Burrus and James Knight
Class v. United States: Bargained Justice and a System of Efficiencies by Lucian E. Dervan
THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE CULTURE WARS
Masterpiece Cakeshop: A Romer for Religious Objectors? by Thomas C. Berg
To Speak or Not to Speak, That Is Your Right: Janus v. AFSCME by David Forte
NIFLA v. Becerra: A Seismic Decision Protecting Occupational Speech by Robert McNamara and Paul Sherman
Regulation of Political Apparel in Polling Places: Why the Supreme Court’s Mansky Opinion Did Not Go Far Enough by Rodney A. Smolla
FEDERALISM AND GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE
Betting on Federalism: Murphy v. NCAA and the Future of Sports Gambling by Mark Brnovich
Internet Sales Taxes from 1789 to the Present Day: South Dakota v. Wayfair by Joseph Bishop-Henchman
“Officers” in the Supreme Court: Lucia v. SEC by Jennifer Mascott
NEXT YEAR
Looking Ahead: October Term 2018 by Erin E. Murphy
Following a lawsuit for trademark infringement by the San Diego Comic Con against the Salt Lake Comic Con that resulted in a jury award of $20,000 — accompanied by a $4 million attorneys’ fee award and broad injunction — other comics conventions around the country are scrambling to change their names. [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt, more]
“Andrew Cuomo, who illegally collected an eagle feather, shouldn’t be punished for accidentally breaking the law, and neither should anyone else.” [Jacob Sullum, Reason; earlier on the legal pitfalls of found or traded eagle feathers here, here, etc.]
The Section 8 federal housing voucher program was conceived as one in which owners of rental properties participate voluntarily, but that may be changing. One straw in the wind: the push for “source of income discrimination” laws prohibiting landlords from turning away Section 8 tenants. Another: a new Third Circuit decision declaring that the owner of a unit converted to market-rate could not refuse to renew a lease even after the original tenant died. I look at Hayes v. Harvey in my new post at Cato.
“It was quite something to hear Republicans sounding like Elizabeth Warren on a trust-busting bender, but it is difficult to take seriously the proposition that what’s at work here is concern about monopoly power, Supreme Court precedents, or anything of the sort: This is about friends and enemies, and Republicans have decided that Silicon Valley is the enemy.” [Kevin Williamson, National Review] “Trump allies propose nationalizing Facebook, Google data” [Jason Tashea, ABA Journal] And see John Hinderaker, PowerLine, on a tape showing Google employees disappointed by the results of the last election (“Break them up under the Sherman Act? Turn them into regulated public utilities, with public employee-level salaries and no stock options? Those are all possibilities.”) Related: Thomas Hazlett, “Making the Fairness Doctrine Great Again,” Reason, March.