In February, the Ninth Circuit ruled that police have qualified immunity from civil-rights claims based on a department policy of strip-searching all arrestees (not convicts, just arrestees) who will be put into "general population." Bull v. City and County of…
Oh, paranoid Americans obsessively concerned with security issues. . . . Will your font of genius-level freedom-raping ideas ever run dry? In South Carolina, anyone engaged in "subversive activities" must now register with the Secretary of State. Failure to comply with the Subversive…
Responding to what must be the first and only nuisance complaint ever based on the music of John Denver (based on its volume, anyway), police in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, ticketed a man on January 13 after neighbors complained the Denver…
The term "due process" is hard to define exactly, but one thing it doesn't mean is "we do this all the time," a lesson that a judge in Tennessee learned the hard way. Judge Durwood Moore was censured last year,…
In August, police in Framingham, Massachusetts, responded to a report that a gas station had been robbed. They brought along a tracking dog and released it in the direction in which witnesses said the robber had gone. Just a few…
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, formerly a partner with Vinson & Elkins and now a Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General, has pointed out the uncomfortable fact that a 2005 amendment to the state constitution, which was designed to ban gay marriage, may in fact…
I am very pleased.
"I do hereby resign," began the only sentence anybody was interested in hearing out of Keith Bardwell, who until November 3 had been Justice of the Peace for the Eighth Ward of Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana. Everybody has been calling for…
I am way overdue in suggesting that you buy a copy of Jay Wexler's book, Holy Hullaballoos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. At the outset, given that the FTC is now regulating blog endorsements, I…
Prediction: He will also lose round two.