The New Republic

Why do judges do what they do? It is easy to identify two different answers. The first emphasizes the law. The second emphasizes politics. READ MORE >>

The conservative justices' questioning about the health care law on Tuesday may or may not have betrayed a political bias. But it most certainly betrayed an ignorance of health economics. Henry Aaron, the Brookings economist who has been filing daily dispatches from the hearings, wrote about some of them: READ MORE >>

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U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth threw embryonic stem cell research into chaos Monday when he ruled that federal funding for the research was illegal. Citizen Cohn talked to Nina Mendelson, a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan Law School. Here’s a condensed and edited version of our interview: READ MORE >>

Tom Goldstein is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and lecturer at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. He is the founder of SCOTUSblog. A version of this piece was originally posted there on April 18, 2010. READ MORE >>

On March 15, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Justice Anthony Kennedy presided over the trial of Hamlet. “All rise!” commanded a bailiff in Elizabethan ruffles. “The Honorable the Eastern High Court for the Kingdom of Denmark is now in session!” As the sold-out house rose to its feet, Kennedy strode onto the bare stage in his black robes, taking a seat behind a judge’s bench framed by an American flag and an enormous portrait of Shakespeare. “Please be seated,” he said graciously. READ MORE >>

One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court by Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard University Press, 290 pp., $29.95) I. READ MORE >>

Since the Progressive era, this magazine has argued for judicial restraint as part of a broader argument for liberal nationalism. Judges should defer to the prerogatives of Congress and the president, the argument goes, so that popular sovereignty can serve as the engine of national unity. READ MORE >>