The Supreme Court's erroneous decision in Trump v. Anderson is more obvious after Donald Trump's first criminal conviction. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment established that the appropriate sanction for engaging in insurrection against the Constitution was civil disqualification from office, not criminal punishment. Trump v. Anderson reached...

Here are the collected posts on our Balkinization symposium on David Pozen's new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024). 1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium2. Rachel E. Barkow, Constitutional Withdrawal3. Louis Michael Seidman, Pozen and the Puzzle of Counterfactuals4. Kimani Paul-Emile, Looking Inside...

The Controlled Substances Act authorizes the attorney general to schedule drugs. Schedule I of the CSA imposes a complete criminal ban; schedules II through V allow drugs to be prescribed under certain conditions. For decades, the attorney general has delegated this authority to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has consistently opposed...

For the Balkinization symposium on David Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024). I am indebted to Jack Balkin for organizing a symposium on my book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs, and to all of the commentators for offering such rich reflections. The book recovers a lost history of constitutional...

Reva Siegel and Mary Ziegler  We have just posted a revised draft of Comstockery, the first legal history of the Comstock Act since antiabortion lawyers have attempted to transform it into a de facto national ban on mailing abortion-related items. Our draft challenges the claim that the obscenity law is a plain-meaning, no-exceptions, national...

I've been doing some research on the history of the draft and came across something interesting. On November 9, 1863, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a 3-2 decision (Kneedler v. Lane) holding the federal military draft unconstitutional. Ten days later, Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.Reading the Address with this sequence of events in mind,...