Law & Justice: May 2010 Archives
This hardly seems like news, but I'll bite. Mean insurance company bills family for damage caused to car by loose dog.
A car insurer has asked a Canadian family to pay for repairing a broken bumper after their dog was struck by the vehicle and died, local media said Thursday.The traffic accident occurred in March while Jake, a 12-year-old yellow Labrador, was out for his daily stroll around a quiet neighborhood in Aurora, Ontario, north of Toronto.
Kim Flemming had let the dog out when she arrived home from work. Moments later, a man knocked on the door to say a car had run over Jake.
"I got to the road and he was dying," Flemming told the Toronto Star. "He died in my arms."
Two months later, the family received a bill in the mail for 1,732.80 Canadian dollars (1,648.95 US) from State Farm Insurance. ...
"We've lost a member of our family but we're supposed to pay for the damage to her bumper? That's just wrong," daughter Katherine Flemming said.
The Flemmings lost "a member of [their] family" due to their own negligence. In the process, they damaged the vehicle of an innocent passerby. Their grief over their loss does not negate their responsibility towards the victim of their negligence.
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz argues that judicial review should always begin with the question "Who has violated the Constitution?".
Abstract: Two centuries after Marbury v. Madison, there remains a deep confusion about quite what a court is reviewing when it engages in judicial review. Conventional wisdom has it that judicial review is the review of certain legal objects: statutes, regulations. But strictly speaking, this is not quite right. The Constitution prohibits not objects but actions. Judicial review is the review of such actions. And actions require actors: verbs require subjects. So before judicial review focuses on verbs, let alone objects, it should begin at the beginning, with subjects. Every constitutional inquiry should begin with a basic question that has been almost universally overlooked. The fundamental question, from which all else follows, is the who question: who has violated the Constitution?As judicial review is practiced today, courts skip over this bedrock question to get to the more familiar question: how was the Constitution violated? But it makes no sense to ask how, until there is an answer to who. Indeed, in countless muddled lines of doctrine, puzzlement about the predicates of constitutional violation follows directly from more fundamental confusion about the subjects.
This is a brilliant new approach to judicial review. The point is that if a statute is unconstitutional, then Congress violated the Constitution by enacting the statute. You shouldn't have to wait for the statute to be enforced or applied to you in order to challenge it, because an unconstitutional statute is unconstitutional immediately.
(HT: Randy Barnett, Instapundit.)
I love the reaction from this terrorist lawyer to the court ruling that prisoners captured and held on foreign soil do not have a right to a hearing before an American judge.
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight. ...A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.
“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”
Right, I mean, obviously it's fine if Obama imprisons these terrorists, because he is wise and just... but remember folks, an evil Republican might one day win the presidency!
Obviously the Obama Administration is on the side of rationality in this case.
The Environmental Protection Agency channels "1984" while announcing its new "Rulemaking Matters!" video contest.
Almost every aspect of our lives is touched by federal regulations... Even before you leave the house in the morning, government regulations help set the price of the coffee you drink, the voltage of electricity in your alarm clock, and the types of programming allowed on the morning news.
Uh... that's a good thing? It's scary that some government bureaucrats are actually proud of their meddling.
California is in the process of being reconquered by Mexico.
On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal's office.
"They said we could wear it on any other day," Daniel Galli said, "but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it's supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today."
The boys said the administrators called their T-shirts "incendiary" that would lead to fights on campus.
The proper solution to this dilemma is to control the potentially violent students and then prosecute them if they break the law. Unfortunately it's often easier to limit free speech (even patriotic speech) than to keep thugs in check... so the thugs win.
