Now You Can Be the 10th Justice: OT 2010

Now you can be the 10th Justice! From the independent D.C.-based organization, the Harlan Institute, FantasySCOTUS.net combines the current litigation of Supreme Court Law, with the Constitution, and the excitement of a Fantasy game for everybody from political activists to constitutional law experts!

Featured by numerous news sources, from the New York Times, to Reason Magazine (with Reason calling it the "toast of the legal world"), FantasySCOTUS brings involvement in the most mysterious branch to you. Justice Breyer was once asked about the game and said that, "I’m glad the public is interested. The more the public knows about the court, the better."

YAL Members Visit Cato For Constitution Day!

On Thursday, I traveled from Somerset, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. with a fellow YAL-er from our high school chapter to visit the Cato Institute for their Constitution Day Symposium and for their Supreme Court Review. The trip, though long, was well worth it. Great lawyers, academics, and others spoke on everything from the incorporation of the 2nd Amendment to cases which pose a threat to or an expansion of liberty in the 2010-2011 Supreme Court Term.

It was a wonderful experience and I would recommend it to any devoted advocate of liberty.

Video: Elena Kagan Thinks The Government Can Do Anything It Wants

During her confirmation hearings, Senator Coburn asked Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan if the government has the constitutional power under the Commerce Clause, to require all Americans to eat three vegetables and three fruits a day.

She sidestepped the question by saying it would be a "dumb law," then added that the question of whether it's a dumb law is different from the question of whether or not it's constitutional, implying that she thinks it is.

If Congress passed such a law, we could count on Justice Kagan not to strike it down. That is her kind of judicial philosophy -- the kind that says the Commerce Clause essentially permits the government to do anything it wants.

Watch the video yourself:

The Proper Role of the Judiciary

In a recent article at Reason Magazine, Damon W. Root chronicles the debate between "majoritarian conservatives" and "libertarians" over the proper nature and role of the judiciary in a civil society.

While I would tend to side with the libertarians in the debate as it's framed, I think some important clarifications to Root's article are necessary in order to better understand the judiciary's role.

Perhaps the framework in this article is not Root's, but simply his description of the debate as it has been framed over the decades. I'll admit that I am not a scholar of jurisprudence, so I wouldn't know. In any case, it seems to me that the framework is flawed, or at best, unclear.

The flaw lies in the definition of judicial activism. On the one side, Root has the conservatives opposing what they consider "judicial activism" which they define as a court which is very active in overturning previous rulings and laws passed by our country's elected representatives, a view that Root argues is inherently "pro-government."