Constitutional Law

In 63 B.C., Julius Caesar delivered a speech to the Roman Senate in which he conveyed a crucial point, one highly relevant to many of our current cont...

Only small segments of the public pay substantial, sustained attention even to high-profile cases like this one, never mind the particulars of the full reach of the interstate commerce clause, or whether requiring health insurance is akin to mandating consumption of broccoli.

A Court decision to overturn the individual mandate would be inconsistent with precedent dating all the way back to 1824, and would represent an effort by the Justices to inject themselves into the political and policy debates surrounding our health care problems.

The Supreme Court argument over the constitutionality of the Obama health care law has been more like a legislative argument between liberal and conservatives than a constitutional one.

If ever there was a get-out-of-town case, this one is it: Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, the case that challenges the constituti...

The conservative constitutional narrative is deeply unprincipled and patently wrong, both in its defense of conservative judicial ideology and in its attack on what conservatives deride as a result-oriented "liberal" jurisprudence.

To those locked in the power struggles between right and left, adverse court decisions are frequently lambasted as "judicial activism." When the Supre...

In an effort to update and upgrade our national anthem, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten has penned his own replacement, with music set to th...

Like a failure to shovel after a winter storm, a failure to pay for my own health insurance is simply a way to shift risk onto my neighbors to avoid personal responsibility.

Congress can't criminalize things arbitrarily, and it certainly can't turn people into felons on the basis of a simple factual mistake, like treating bone marrow as if it were a solid organ.

Monday's federal court decision striking down the landmark Affordable Care Act shows how much the political right has embraced judicial activism.

WASHINGTON -- The Federalist Society is one of the most powerful and unique organizations in the conservative orbit, describing itself as "a group of ...

The Supreme Court building is the Yankee Stadium of constitutional interpretation, and Tea Party members have been waving our founding document for a while now.

The dispute over the mosque is a lot like a hypothetical German-American march. Just as it would be wrong to treat all German-Americans as if they are Nazis, so too is it wrong to treat all Muslims as if they support terrorism.

Professor G. Calvin McKenzie of Colby College was the last witness in the trial to impeach District Judge G. Thomas Porteous of New Orleans. But the episode demonstrated how impeachment trials are so very different from regular trials, and just how dim Judge Porteous' prospects are.

Yesterday, New York Governor David Paterson injected himself into the strange debate over the Cordoba House community center (a.k.a. the "Ground Zero mosque") with a novel proposal. If the people behind the community center agree to move their facility somewhere else in New York City, the state would be happy to pay for it. My first reaction to this plan -- besides how deeply cowardly it is -- was basically: "Wow! That sure sounds like it would be crazy unconstitutional!"

As anyone who has studied the history of immigration or basic constitutional laws knows, the very idea of granting citizenship to those born on U.S. soil came from a Supreme Court decision in 1898, Wong Kim Ark.

A federal judge in Boston has ruled unconstitutional the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that limits federal benefits to straight couples even in states that recognize gay marriage.

An announcement: the University of Nebraska College of Law's American Constitution Society is introducing a law-interviews podcast series. The target audience is law students, lawyers, and legal academics. Tell your friends. Tell your lawyer.