On Friday, June 26, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a Suspension Clause challenge to expedited immigration proceedings. In the widely anticipated judgment, the Court determined that no habeas could be brought as the original habeas petitioner was not in fact asking for the habeas relief of release. In so many words, [...]
No less than Columbus’ namesake founded U.S. legal education. Christopher Columbus Langdell devised the “case method”—the formalistic “science” of “discovering” law from appellate court opinions through the process of “legal reasoning.” As dean of Harvard Law School in the late nineteenth century, Langdell institutionalized the case method during the eras of Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim [...]
With a view to ensure that classes are not scheduled online, this week, the Trump administration is considering a policy targeting nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students. The policy position is that students on these visas attending schools that operate entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. [...]
“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” – Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952) Even in this grievously faltering United States, presidential elections are praised as essential evidence of a law-based democracy. This ritualized practice continues although “We the People” are suffering at [...]
As all of our schools are confronting some version of this, I pass this along that was shared with me. This twitter chain details how another student housing entity called Corvias is putting pressure on the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to have student housing be full. It points out the [...]
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 invalidation, in Department of Homeland Security, et. al. v. Regents of the University of California, et. al. of the Trump Administration’s attempt to rescind the DACA program has obvious practical (if only temporary) significance for millions of Americans. The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provided renewable two-year deferrals from [...]
July 4 is here, and we have an opportunity to adopt a more truthful narrative about the celebration of our nation’s birth and the racism upon which it was formed. This year while we look back on the almost 250 years since Americans freed themselves from England’s oppression, we must acknowledge that our nation has [...]
Author’s Note: During my tenure as the first Supreme Court Archivist-Legal Historian to the Supreme Court of Missouri, I authored an in-house history column. Reproduced below is my July Fourth column from 2013. On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail. “My dear Friend,” , “he Second of July, 1776, [...]
I am a native Tampanian, and in 1992 I graduated from Vanderbilt University Law school. Because I spent my last year of law school studying abroad, a novel idea back then, the law school registrar would not certify my graduation for me to sit for the July bar exam in 1992. This was the first [...]
Susan Sorella is in her last year at Suffolk Law School in Boston. When she began clerking for criminal defense lawyer Bobby Coughlin, Susan had no idea she would become a central figure in a murder case that pitted the mob against corrupt FBI agents. Or that she would be compelled to take the lead [...]
