Reva Siegel and Mary Ziegler  We have just posted a revised draft of Comstockery, the first legal history of the Comstock Act since antiabortion lawyers have attempted to transform it into a de facto national ban on mailing abortion-related items. Our draft challenges the claim that the obscenity law is a plain-meaning, no-exceptions, national...

I've been doing some research on the history of the draft and came across something interesting. On November 9, 1863, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a 3-2 decision (Kneedler v. Lane) holding the federal military draft unconstitutional. Ten days later, Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.Reading the Address with this sequence of events in mind,...

For the Balkinization symposium on David Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024).Paul Butler Like most users of illegal drugs, I have never been caught.  I have lots of company, David Pozen reminds me, in The Constitution of the War on Drugs, his prodigiously researched take down of said war but not said constitution. ...

For the Balkinization symposium on David Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024). Kate Shaw   I admit that I was surprised when I learned that David Pozen was hard at work on a book project about the war on drugs. Pozen is a brilliant scholar of constitutional law and constitutional theory; he’s written more...

Crisis can be clarifying. Recent events on campuses across the country have forced many of us to look more closely at how our own universities work. I have no special insight into most aspects of the Columbia protests or the administration’s response. But as someone who studies public law and nonprofit law, I have been struck by a number of legal-institutional...

For the Balkinization symposium on David Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024). Shaun Ossei-Owusu Ten years ago, Frank Zimring chastised legal academia for being insufficiently relevant in their teaching and scholarship. “Over a thousand of the best and the brightest criminal minds in America have been missing...