"Court keeps alive inmate's quest for pork feast."

Headline at the National Law Journal makes the "quest" sound more absurd than it is. The prisoner, Derek Kramer, is an Odinist an...

"Will a Mormon president treat constitutional clauses as divine injunctions?"

"If so, what grounds will we non-Mormons have for interpreting with secular arguments what is presented as God’s will? For that matter,...

"If your Big Mac is going to cost about $100 and your Bug Mac is going to cost only $4, people will change to a Bug Mac."

Says Arnold van Huis, the world's biggest expert on entomophagy (the eating of insects). He believes the rising price of meat will help ...

"For justices in the center, I don't think they want to be on the wrong side of history" on same-sex marriage.

Says Stanford lawprof Pamela Karlan. "Unless we see a massive about-face (in public attitudes), 25 years from now people will look back...

Obama administration calls Christmas trees "Christmas trees"... and taxes them.

It sound amusingly Grinch-y , but let's be fair. The 15-cent charge is to support a program to "enhance the image of Christmas tree...

Fashion focuses eyes on women's chests.

Upper chests, that is. It's all about the clavicle , the clavicle that you've etched out through hardcore exercise and stringent die...

"If you protest, your husband will hit you, and if you call the police, he’s going to divorce you, and the whole community will scorn you."

Polygamy in New York City. Don’t-ask-don’t-know policies prevail in many agencies that deal with immigrant families in New York, perhaps bec...

The Supreme Court turns Padilla away.

Gina Holland reports: "In light of the previous changes in his custody status and the fact that nearly four years have passed since he ...

Just[ices] say yes to hallucinogenic tea.

The Supreme Court is back from a long break today, with Samuel Alito on the bench for the first time. There's a new opinion , in the hal...

"The M&Ms float crashed. Oh the humanity! As God is my witness, I thought M&Ms could fly."

That's the reaction in the Pajamas Media live blogging when a Thanksgiving Parade balloon crashes and falls, along with a streetlight i...

Alito and the Free Exercise Clause.

Emily Bazelon has a piece in Slate about what Samuel Alito has written about religious freedom. She starts off by linking to my NYT op-ed n...

Is Alito libertarian and, if so, what should liberals think about that?

Lawprof Ilya Somin identifies a "libertarian streak" in Samuel Alito. What is the evidence? 1. Two Free Exercise cases -- which I...

Audible Althouse, #17.

Here it is , a 55 minute podcast, with a lot about the new Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and the various swirling political doings surr...

Hallucinogenic tea time.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, the hallucinogenic tea case. A ...

"Any First Amendment decision, right or wrong, will reverberate more readily through the law than a decision made in any other area."

That is what lawprof Seth Chandler discovered, in an elaborate computer-based study of Supreme Court cases, reports The Economist . As a Fed...

Stevens admits what happened in Kelo is unwise.

Justice Stevens does the typical judicial thing of saying that he doesn't like the outcomes of the cases he decided. Re Kelo : In ... t...

Justice Sunday II.

I contemplated attending "Justice Sunday II," a rally, held yesterday at a church in Nashville, aimed at educating evangelical Ch...

Stanley Fish's bad analogy about Scalia's constitutional interpretation.

Stanley Fish has a NYT op-ed that's supposed to wise us up to the rhetoric of constitutional interpretation that's about to flow al...

Why Justice O'Connor opposed both Ten Commandments displays.

As described in the previous post , in Van Orden (the Texas Ten Commandments monument case), Justice Breyer purported to adopt the approach...

It's Breyer and not O'Connor determining the outcome in the Ten Commandments monument case.

All eyes turn to Justice Breyer, who voted with the Chief Justice and Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas , to produce a victory for the s...