Whether a limitation is jurisdictional or not is an important but often obscure question. In an article published in Northwestern University Law Review, I proposed a framework for courts to resolve the issue in a principled way, but I left open the next logical question: what does it mean if a rule is characterized as…
It is not surprising that virtually all analyses of the Supreme Court stress the crucial role played by the swing, pivotal, or median Justice: in theory, the median should be quite powerful. In practice, however, some are far stronger than others. Just as there are “super precedents” and “super statutes”—those that are weightier or more…
How fragile a thing, law. Not long ago, the notion that Americans could be seized off the streets, arrested, and jailed without probable cause might have seemed laughable. The power to incarcerate on mere suspicion or executive say-so belonged to dictatorships. "We allow our police to make arrests only on 'probable cause,'" we used to…
It seems odd that despite the torrent of writing on emergencies and the law after 9/11, no one has systematically examined the view of emergencies held by our greatest judge. Perhaps the problem is that Justice Holmes has so often been subdivided along doctrinal lines. There is the Holmes of free speech law, represented by…
