The New Republic

It’s been a bad week for the president. Between revelations about the IRS’s targeting of the Tea Party and news of the Justice Department’s seizing the phone records from the Associated Press, an administration that promised a new sort of politics seems to have put itself in a position where Obama is being compared to Richard M. READ MORE >>

A year ago this month, Stanford Law School hosted a little-noticed meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. It took place in the faculty lounge, where participants were sustained in their deliberations by bagels and fruit platters. READ MORE >>

The FBI’s decision to interrogate the Boston marathon bombing suspect before reading him the Miranda warnings has been extensively criticized by civil libertarians. Meanwhile, on the other side, conservatives like Lindsey Graham (R-SC) went even further in their disagreement, suggesting that Dzhokhar A. READ MORE >>

At the Supreme Court yesterday, after the oral arguments in U.S. v. Windsor, the immediate reaction was that opponents of the Defense of Marriage Act had done an effective job in persuading the Court to strike it down. “Final update: #scotus 80% likely to strike down #doma. READ MORE >>

Not long into the Supreme Court arguments Tuesday in Hollingsworth v. Perry, Justice Elena Kagan put her finger on the implausibility of the central constitutional argument made by the lawyers defending California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. In reading the briefs, she said, she was struck that the “principal argument” of gay-marriage opponents is that “the State’s principal interest in marriage is in regulating procreation.” She then offered a hypothetical. READ MORE >>

This is perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this Court has heard in decades," Justice Samuel Alito said at yesterday's oral argument in Maryland v. King, which will determine whether the government can seize DNA samples from people at the time they're arrested. READ MORE >>

On Sunday, Robert Gates, the former Pentagon chief for Presidents Obama and Bush, endorsed an idea that has been floated by Democratic lawmakers in the wake of John O. Brennan's confirmation hearings to be CIA Director: a drone court that would review the White House’s targeted killings of American citizens linked to al Qaida. READ MORE >>

The Justice Department white paper released on Monday by NBC News is the public's first direct glimpse at the legal reasoning that the Obama administration relied on in using a drone strike to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen living in Yemen. The memo's arguments are troubling on many levels. READ MORE >>

There has been considerable disagreement about the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s recess appointments, including here at The New Republic: My colleague Jonathan Cohn has defended the appointments, while Timothy Noah grudgingly has not. We’re not alone: Federal courts can’t seem to agree, either. READ MORE >>

In December, Marc Rotenberg received a call from a woman seeking advice on how to become an advocate for e-mail privacy. The call in itself was not surprising—Rotenberg is, after all, the executive director of a public interest group called the Electronic Privacy Information Center—but the identity of the caller was. It was Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite whose complaint to the FBI that she was receiving stalking e-mails from a woman named Paula Broadwell led to the year's biggest sex scandal. READ MORE >>