Today in the News, 3.17.09
- “[S]ome liberal lawyers and law professors sense an opportunity, and they have urged courts to incorporate the Second Amendment in a novel way, one that might help liberal arguments for protecting rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.” Adam Liptak at the NY Times discusses CAC’s argument that courts should apply the Constitution’s guarantee of fundamental rights against abridgment by the states through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than through the more common doctrine of “substantive due process.”
- “The administration official said part of the reason for making the Hamilton nomination the administration’s first public entry into the often contentious field of judicial selection was to serve ‘as a kind of signal’ about the kind of nominees Mr. Obama will select.” The Times reports that President Obama intends to nominate Judge David Hamilton, a federal district court judge from Indiana, to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, as his first judicial nominee.
More from
December 11, 2025
Not Above the Law Coalition Demands Accountability: Trump’s Illegal National Guard Deployments Threaten Democracy
WASHINGTON - As the Senate Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on the Trump administration’s deployment...
December 14, 2025
The Framers Warned Us About the Dangers of Corruption
December 11, 2025We Seem to Have the Supreme Court’s Originalism Fail of the Term
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard argument in a case that could upend how the...
December 9, 2025
CAC Release: Major Campaign Finance Case Tests Court’s Willingness to Respect Congress’s Policy Judgments Aimed at Curbing Harmful Corruption
WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in National Republican...
December 8, 2025
CAC Release: Conservative Justices Neglect History at Oral Argument in Monumental Case about Independent Agencies
WASHINGTON, DC – Following oral argument at the Supreme Court this morning in Trump v....
U.S. Supreme Court
Pung v. Isabella County
In Pung v. Isabella County, the Supreme Court is considering whether the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is implicated when a local government seizes real property to satisfy a tax debt and then...