Free Republic

The Supreme Court term, which begins Monday, will be the culmination of five decades of efforts by conservatives to seize control of the court.... This will be the first full term with five staunch conservatives: Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.... The court’s most watched case — Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to be argued on Dec. 1 — could dismantle principles of abortion rights set in 1973... Another area the court will reopen for consideration is gun rights. From 1791, when the 2nd Amendment was ratified, until 2008,...

No one’s freedom provides the right to endanger others. That is the point of the adage that my right to swing my fist ends at another person’s nose. The government always has the power to impose restrictions on behavior to protect other people from harm, including to stop the spread of a communicable disease. Yet these basic principles are forgotten by those who opposed a mask mandate and who now are trying to prohibit vaccine passports. Indeed, the government can and should require that everyone be vaccinated against COVID. There is no constitutional right to refuse to wear a mask...

In 1987, Robert Bork was denied confirmation to the Supreme Court because his originalist beliefs were deemed a serious threat to constitutional rights. Originalism is no less dangerous for those rights today, yet Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s repeated statements professing her belief in originalism have been met with little objection. Originalists believe that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it was adopted and that it can change only by constitutional amendment. Under this view, the First Amendment means the same thing as when it was adopted in 1791 and the 14th Amendment means the same thing as...

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argued last week that the recent Alabama abortion bill is “unconstitutional.” In an interview with Berkeley News, UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argued that the recent Alabama abortion bill is “unconstitutional.” “The Alabama law is clearly unconstitutional,” Chemerinsky said in the interview. “And it’s what’s next. Whatever federal district court, whatever (U.S.) Court of Appeals, hears it would have to declare it unconstitutional. Now, that doesn’t mean that the court will have to take the case. It could be that the lower courts declare it unconstitutional, and the (Supreme Court) decides...

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2014, a friend tried to nudge Judge Stephen Reinhardt, then an 83-year-old liberal stalwart on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, into stepping aside from full-time duties so President Barack Obama could nominate a successor. The friend, Erwin Chemerinsky, now the dean at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said he had gently suggested to Judge Reinhardt that he and another longtime liberal figure on the San Francisco-based court make way while Democrats still had the power to assure that jurists with a similar philosophy would take their...

In an op-ed published this week regarding a landmark legal case about to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and part-time pundit, gets one important thing right. As Chemerinsky says, the High Court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education — the precedent that is being challenged in the case at hand — is “based” on the “simple . . . premise” that employees who are subject to “exclusive” union bargaining, but choose not to be members, “benefit . . . from the union in...

...The saga of controversial liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky's on-again, off-again deanship at the new UC Irvine law school was highly unusual in two ways. First, the pressure to enforce political orthodoxy at Chemerinsky's expense came from the right, not the left, and second, academic freedom and 1st Amendment values won a resounding victory when Chemerinsky was ultimately rehired ...The regents had invited Summers to be the keynote speaker at a dinner tonight in Sacramento. They then uninvited him last week after some UC faculty protested that "inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice...