RE: Crime to Call a Juror to Make Her Feel Sorry About Her Vote?
It’s a Phone Call Though
24 Thursday May 2012
24 Thursday May 2012
RE: Crime to Call a Juror to Make Her Feel Sorry About Her Vote?
19 Monday Dec 2011
In United States v. Jones, the government’s argument mostly centers around that there is no reasonably expected privacy when one’s driving on public roads. According to the government, there is nothing a GPS tracking device can do that a surveilence team can’t, so if government doesn’t need a warrant to tail somebody, nor would it need one to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s car.
Let’s forget for a moment hair-splitting arguments like “humans go to sleep but robots won’t!” It would seem to me that there is a small yet logically clear-cut hole in that line of reasoning. It is based on the assumption that as long as the person being monitored is driving, they are driving on public roads, which is obviously not necessarily true. What if they were to decide to get on a private race track and have some fun? What if they were to be invited to some private party where the estate compound is entirely not visible to anyone observing from any public area? Under such circumstances, it would certainly be reasonale to expect some privacy.
Some might argue that those are just corner cases and most of the time when we drive we do drive on public roads. Of course they are, and we do, but that doesn’t mean that they are ignorable. While the idea and scope of constitutionally protected rights are broad, what really needs protection is precisely the “corner cases.” For instance, of all kinds of speeches, the one kind that really could use constitutional protection, the political and controversial kind, only takes up some tiny percentage of all the speeches people ever make, yet we don’t dismiss those as corner cases.
09 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted roll-your-own-inevitability
inRef: http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/11/big-boost-for-health-care/
“Wickard,” the opinion said, “comes very close to authorizing a mandate similar to” the one in the health care law. The effect of the federal law at issue in that case, the opinion said, was to force any farmer into the wheat market — in the same way that the new insurance mandate forces some private individuals into the health coverage market even if they don’t want to be there. Congress, the panel commented, “is merely imposing the [insurance] mandate in reasonable anticipation of virtually inevitable future transactions in interstate commerce.”
Even not considering the absurdity of Wickard itself, I still see some logical gaps here. For Wickard to be a precedent to follow, not to expand upon, it would have had to force all the farmers who didn’t plant wheat to plant wheat and participate in the wheat market, which it didn’t.
“It is enough, for this case,” the panel said, “to recognize…that the health insurance market is a rather unique one, both because virtually everyone will enter or affect it, and because the uninsured inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market as a result of their later consumption of health care services.”
The assertion that participation in the health insurance market is inevitable for everyone is obviously confused between the participation in the health-care market and the participation in the health insurance market. The former is inevitable, while the latter isn’t. Many Americans have chosen not to purchase any medical insurance for one reason or another, and for extended periods in their lives. So clearly that is not inevitable. The only reason that these people could “inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market” (note that the “market” here is actually the health-care market) is the not-so-odd notion that we as human beings cannot sit there and watch another fellow human being die, combined with the odd notion that in order not to sit there and watch another fellow human being die we somehow have the right to force others, regardless of their individual situations or free will, to pay for the rescue effort. So the majority’s reasoning here, to me, sounds almost like running in circles – because it’s virtually inevitable for everyone, we are making it so for everyone.
20 Saturday Aug 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inTags
This should be interesting: Rearguing Texas v. White.
I agree with some of the commenters. It is almost pointless to debate whether secession is constitutional. The right to secede is by nature revolutionary and extra-constitutional.