One of the liveliest exchanges during this morning's oral argument in the challenge to the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which changed the state's Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, came when Justice Antonin Scalia aggressively questioned the challengers' lawyer, Ted Olson,...

For politicians who claim to love the Constitution, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and deposed former state senator Russell Pearce appear to have no problem disregarding it when it suits their purposes. With all of Pearce's pouting and protesting in front of Senator Chuck Schumer and the Senate Judiciary...

When the Supreme Court hears arguments in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act this week, who will be speaking for the states? This isn't a trick question: obviously, Paul Clement, the former Solicitor General for George W. Bush, will be standing before the Justices on behalf of the 26...

Big Business in America loves to use the somewhat obscure legal doctrine of "federal preemption" to thwart state and local efforts to do all sorts of good things, such as protecting public health and safety, ensuring consumers have a remedy when they are harmed by corporate misconduct, and preserving the...

The United States has had a lot of credit issues lately. But there's another "credit" debacle, one that is currently sitting on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court: a state's refusal to give constitutionally-required "full faith and credit" to valid adoptions by gay parents.

In 2006, Oren Adar and...

On Monday, President Obama spoke at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the country. While the President is a master storyteller in his own right, NCLR did not wait for Obama's...

For the first time since Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a Republican-appointed judge has voted to uphold Congress's power to enact the health care reform law, including the minimum coverage provision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the first court of appeals to...

In a blow to group claims of gender discrimination and class actions more generally, the Supreme Court has rejected a class-action lawsuit brought by female employees of Wal-Mart who claim they suffered discriminatory pay and promotion practices resulting from the company's alleged corporate culture of discrimination. The massive...

When a federal appeals court in Atlanta hears arguments tomorrow in the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act brought by 26 states, the only advocate for the states to stand before the judges will argue against the Act. But that doesn't mean that the states are "united" against the...

Not since the Broccoli Incident of the first Bush Administration -- in which President George H.W. Bush declared at a press conference that he did not like broccoli and wasn't going to eat it -- has the cruciferous vegetable been getting the kind of attention from our nation's...

As Americans and our elected leaders engage in debate over immigration and the constitutional guarantee of citizenship at birth, there is something we should all be able to agree on: misleading statements about constitutional history do not help us understand the Constitution better or allow us to tackle immigration reform...

Today's reading of the Constitution on the House floor was surely intended by the GOP leadership as a Tea Party moment. But it looks like it has turned into a progressive moment instead.

Before the House started the reading, two Democratic congressmen stood up to inquire about the language the...

With the start of the 112th Congress, Tea Party activists are brimming with pride over the fact that the new House GOP leadership will kick off the legislative session with a reading of the Constitution on the House floor. As a progressive constitutionalist, I wholeheartedly agree with the Tea Party...

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument Monday in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the challenge brought by gay and lesbian couples to Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that amended the state's constitution to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples only. After...

Serious questions about racial discrimination in our criminal justice system, laws that deny the vote to those who have been convicted in this system, and the reach of the Constitution's guarantee of the right to vote free from racial discrimination may soon be heading for the Supreme Court.

Earlier...

The emergence of the Tea Party movement as an increasingly persistent presence in the media and in politics has focused national attention on the Constitution, as Tea Party members invoke our Nation's Founding in their rhetoric and claim to root their agenda in the Constitution. In the abstract, such an...

Co-authored with Jack Hatch, who represents Central Des Moines in Iowa's Senate and chairs the Health & Human Services Budget Subcommittee. Jack is a member of Progressive States Network's State Legislators for Progressive Health Reform.

The federal government this week asked the U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Florida to...

It seems that Tea Partiers' recent political victories may have gone to their heads faster than bubbles in a glass of champagne. Flush from this electoral success, the Tea Party movement is turning its attention to the Constitution with renewed fervor. The result has been some proposals that are at...

Justice Scalia is famous for his oft-professed commitment to a strict textualist approach to judging, which, he asserts, not only has the benefit of being "easy as pie," but is also more respectful to the democratic processes that created the text of the Constitution or particular statutory language. These claims...

The President, the press, and the public have been rightly outraged by the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC to allow corporations to drown out the voices of We the People in our political system. But Citizens United is just the tip of the iceberg. In less...