Tag: commercial speech

When Libertarian Judges Rule

Prominent libertarian jurist Alex Kozinski has been accused of sexual harassment by six women, all of them former clerks or employees. One of the women is Heidi Bond. In a statement, Bond gives a fuller description of Judge Kozinski’s rule, sexual and non-sexual, in the workplace. One day, my judge found out I had been reading romance novels over my dinner break. He called me (he was in San Francisco for hearings; I had stayed in the office in Pasadena) when one of my co-clerks idly mentioned it to him as an amusing aside. Romance novels, he said, were a terrible addiction, like drugs, and something like porn for women, and he didn’t want me to read them any more. […]

Conservatism’s Constitutional Agenda

Since the 1990s, legal conservatives have been engaged in a two-front war against legal liberalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the Commerce Clause was the primary constitutional instrument of American liberalism. It underwrote the New Deal, the right to organize unions, the Civil Rights Act, and anti-discrimination in the workplace. Beginning in the 1990s, conservatives have beaten back the Commerce Clause. Where legal liberals expanded the meaning of commerce to include not only the entirety of the economy but also what affected that economy—whether it be racial segregation, violence against women, or handgun possession near schools—legal conservatives have sought to radically restrict the meaning of commerce to, in some cases, simple trade or “exchange for value.” In taking away this constitutional instrument from American liberalism, […]