The Wall Street Journal has this helpful Q&A about the meaning of Judge Richard Leon's ruling that the National Security Agency has probably violated the U.S. Constitution by monitoring most phone calls in the United States.
New York University law professor Burt Neuborne thinks it's a good thing that the U.S. Senate has decided to go nuclear on the filibuster, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's not because Neuborne wants to see more of President Obama's judicial nominees on the bench. It's because he thinks having "the modern filibuster morphed into a de facto super-majority voting rule" made the votes cast by senators mathematically unequal in violation of "'Article V, and the one‐Senator one‐vote principle of the Seventeenth Amendment,"' The Journal further reports.
A lawsuit in Texas is challenging that state's ban on same-sex marriage, according to Lez Get Real. Along with the many other lawsuits in the country challenging state-level Defense of Marriage Acts or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, the couples in this lawsuit also argue that their equal-protection and due-process rights are being violated by being barred from matrimony.
Andrew Cohen, in a blog for The Atlantic, argues that the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision to reject "a claim by a convicted murderer who argued that she was denied her Sixth Amendment right to the 'effective assistance of counsel' because her lawyer counseled her to reject a manslaughter plea deal without first adequately investigating the facts of her case" turns the constitutional right to counsel into a right without a remedy. Cohen expounds: "Your lawyer may have violated ethical rules; he may have failed to timely consult with other attorneys; he may have not adequately investigated your case; he may have given you bad advice that leads you to withdraw a guilty plea. And yet the legal standards imposed by the Supreme Court declare that you still aren't entitled to any meaningful relief by the courts. In law school, they call this 'a right without a remedy.' In real life, it's called injustice."
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
