Latest in Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights
The protests ignited by the police killing of George Floyd have put a spotlight on the legal doctrine of qualified immunity—one of many structural factors that makes it difficult to hold police officers accountable for wrongdoing.
The German Constitutional Court ruled that German espionage activity must conform to the country’s constitution, even if conducted overseas on non-German citizens. What’s in the ruling?
What should courts do when people challenge pandemic containment measures imposed by state governments and the federal government?
A national commission just recommended mandatory draft registration for women. While proponents agree that this is good for the military, few have examined how it might also be good for women.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications under Section 702 does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but raised constitutional questions related to querying databases containing these communications.
Jed Rubenfeld is incorrect; the Good Samaritan provision of Section 230 does not turn internet platforms into First Amendment state actors.
The pivotal question, doctrinally, turns out to be what kind of First Amendment forums Google and Facebook operate.
On Sept. 4, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a decision in Elhady v. Kable—a case that challenges how the federal government manages the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), colloquially known as the “watchlist.” Judge Anthony Trenga’s opinion granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and found that U.S.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the federal government's Terrorist Screening Database program, commonly referred to as the terrorist "watchlist," does not provide "constitutionally adequate" process for Americans included in the database. The Court instructed both sides to submit briefs about what they each view as the appropriate relief. The ruling can be found here.
Conventional wisdom and many lower court cases hold that foreign states are not entitled to constitutionally based personal jurisdiction protections in federal courts because they are not “persons” protected by the Fifth Amendment. That reasoning is incorrect as a matter of constitutional text and history, and it leads to poor results as a matter of policy for reasons explored at length in a forthcoming article and summarized here.