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This week's passage and enactment of the FISA amendments (H.R. 6304) was not without controversy (obviously), but I was particularly struck by an aspect of the story that's received remarkably little attention:  Sen. Arlen Specter sponsored an amendment (S.Amdt.5059) to the particularly controversial grant of immunity to telecoms that ...

As Dahlia noted a couple of weeks ago, Chief Justice Roberts used his dissent in Sprint v. APCC [pdf] as an occasion to quote (or, perhaps, misquote) Bob Dylan.  As Alex Long previously explained, however, quoting Bob Dylan in a judicial opinion is hardly novel:  Dylan's lyrics have been invoked in dozens of legal opinions ...

But if you really do want to go hunting, Rosa, I hope your first kill is the deer that ran out in front of my truck in the Northern Virginia suburbs on Sunday!

Now, Rosa, before we get all indignant or sarcastic (and I certainly hope you were being sarcastic), let's not allow ourselves to fall prey to exaggerated readings of today's gun decision. For example, let's not overlook Pages 54-55 of the court's opinion: Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From ...

I simply cannot allow the opening lines of this morning's D.C. Circuit decision in Johnson v. D.C. go without comment: Juan Johnson is a police officer whose off-duty act of kindness to a stranger in distress landed him in the middle of a drug bust in which he was repeatedly kicked in the groin by a police officer who mistook him for a ...

Dahlia, you ask with reference to the new FISA agreement: ''Someone help me understand why it’s a good deal when one side gets everything it wants and the other side gets what it thought it had in the first place?'' Looking at this agreement, it seems to me that both sides got something, and both sides gave up something. Indeed, it looks like an ...

According to David, the Bush administration's past defense of surveillance outside of the FISA process involved ''Rube Goldberg-esque theories of statutory interpretation.'' Really? Looking back at the DoJ's January 2006 White Paper (pdf) on the subject, the arguments look pretty straightforward: 1. The president's inherent authority ...

In a new Slate ''Jurisprudence'' essay, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias criticizes the White House's invocation of the executive privilege to protect certain communications among the president's advisers. He argues that the Bush administration has stretched privilege beyond the limits of the law. His argument, however, is squarely at ...

I've not much to say about yesterday's Boumediene decision that hasn't been said elsewhere. But let me add one small point: Critics of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror often argue that the president's interpretation of the law (either on his own, or with Congress) cannot be left unreviewed by the federal ...

In an interesting new article in the Green Bag, Stephen Vladeck offers a creative solution to what he (and Justice Scalia, in INS v. St. Cyr) refer to as the ''one-way ratchet'' of habeas corpus. To summarize Vladeck's point in the briefest of terms: He observes that the fight over congressional tightening of statutory habeas relief is ...