So far behind we're ahead

Or.. maybe, in this case, Louisiana is just ahead at being behind.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman has ruled that Louisiana’s ban on same-sex marriage is constitutional. His decision makes Feldman the first federal judge to uphold a state’s ban amid a wave of similar legal challenges across the country.

Hope everyone had a good time at Decadence this weekend. 

Gilded Age

Not quite there yet, but this is interesting.

I graduated a top law school in '02. If you had written something like this on your 1L Con Law exam you would have gotten an F, because it's not just a wrong view, it's a view that ignores 60 years of precedent.

Due process is so outdated

According to the Indiana State Supreme Court your 4th Amendment protections are no longer necessary* because, you know, prison isn't all that inconvenient anymore anyway.**

In his appeal, defense attorneys suggested that his first jury had not been instructed of the defendant's right to resist unlawful entry by police -- a cornerstone of the modern legal system that goes all the way back to the Magna Carta. The defense insisted everything following the reputed unlawful entry by police was the result of an illegal search and that officers had neither a warrant nor probable cause to enter.

The case ultimately reached the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled last week that current "public policy" is not conducive to resisting entry because civil protections have arisen to mitigate the threats of pre-industrial prison life -- threats like indefinite detention, violence or disease from unclean, overcrowded facilities.

Does Mark St. Pierre know about these threat-scrubbed post-industrial prisons we all enjoy these days? Seems like he's spending a lot of money on lawyers to avoid one.

*Link via Hurricane Radio

**Offer not valid in California.

A case of the President not sucking so much

I like this:

Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives.

“The University of Chicago was and is full of eminent theorizers who wrap up huge areas of the law by applying some magic key,” said David Franklin, a former student. “He didn’t do any of that; he wasn’t interested in high theory at all.”

Though Mr. Obama rarely spoke of his own views, students say they sensed his disdain for formalism, the idea — often espoused by Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but sometimes by liberals as well — that law can be decided independent of the political and social context in which it is applied. To make his point, Mr. Obama, then a state senator, took students with him to Springfield, Ill., the capital, to watch hearings and see him hash out legislation.

And he asked constant questions about consequences of laws: What would happen if a mother’s welfare grant did not increase with the birth of additional children? As a state legislator, how much could he be influenced by a donor’s contribution?

In other words, the law exists within the context of the society it serves for the purpose of establishing real world justice instead of just in the mind of some judge or professor for the purpose of his or her own intellectual masturbation. What a novel idea.