Douglas Berman :"When the Supreme Court declared in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), that the Eighth Amendment prohibited the execution of mentally retarded offenders, the Court punted a number of tough administrative...

Stephen Bainbridge :"I'm increasingly opposed to the death penalty on both pragmatic and moral grounds, but I nevertheless found much to agree with in Justice Antonin Scalia's scathing dissent from the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision striking down the...

Richard Posner, University of Chicago Law School:"I approach the issue of immigration reform (theoretical reform - neither Becker nor I are considering the political obstacles to radical changes in immigration law) somewhat differently. I begin by asking: why restrict immigration...

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School:"Today, in Johnson v. California, the Supreme Court held that California's practice of segregating newly arrived prisoners by race for up to 60 days was subject to strict scrutiny. Justice O'Connor wrote the majority opinion. Justices...

Jim Maule, Villanova Law School:"...ost, if not all, of the discussion presupposes continuation of the social security system, with changes in the way revenues are gathered to fund it. A few proposals discuss changing benefits, either...

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law, American University:I want to go back to something that everyone has already talked to death - the UN report from a week or two back concluding that although Darfur involves mass murder, it does...

Peter Friedman , Case Law School:"Robert Novak outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, and yet Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller have to go to jail because they won't disclose their sources for the information that Novak published? In his...

Peter Friedman, Case Law School:"I'm disappointed in Diane Feinstein's and Barak Obama's support of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, which the Senate approved yesterday (with House approval and presidential signature anticipated) and which provides that large multistate class...

Richard Posner, University of Chicago Law School:"One of the commonest objections to President Bush's proposal for reform of social security is that there is no need to act now because there is no "crisis." Yet the same people who say...

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School:"In Hernandez v. Robles a New York State trial court judge held that the New York State constitution prohibited restricting marriage to opposite sex couples.The court held that prohibition on same sex couples violated the Due...