John Locke Updates: Legal Update

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case that will determine whether Colorado and other states…

These days, if Karl Popper is remembered at all, he is usually remembered for The Open Society and Its Enemies—his blistering two-volume attack on the philosophical foundations of Fascism…

Since President Trump was elected, Democratic state attorneys general have filed an unprecedented number of showy—but ultimately frivolous—legal challenges to his executive orders. Josh Stein hasn’t initiated any of those…

Back in July, I wrote about the chorus of criticism that greeted Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to revive a civil asset forfeiture program that had been suspended by…

The traditional common law torts of alienation of affection (depriving a married person of a spouse’s “love, society, companionship and comfort”) and criminal conversation (engaging in sexual relations with a…

The case of United States v. Chamberlain gave the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit an opportunity to reconsider what it described as, “[O]ur anomalous rule permitting…

Two and a half years ago, in my very first Legal Update, I discussed then Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to curtail his agency’s controversial “adoptions” program. Under the…

Janice Rogers Brown—one of my favorite federal judges—will retire next month from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Damon Root has called her, “The most…

In this installment in my series dealing with problems arising out of the interplay between the new social media and the law, I want to discuss a case that involves…

In a previous Legal Update, I discussed four cases in which the North Carolina appellate courts had struggled with “the problem of how to prevent people from abusing the…