Thomas Jefferson Archives

Dis the Constitution

April 17, 2016

I’m about to dis the U.S. Constitution. It’s a Constitution I swore to support on October 17, 1981 and implicitly, on each and every one of the following 12,602 days. To be clear, given that I live in Arizona, a state which seems hell bent on challenging Kansas for Most Effed Up State trophy, I support the U. S. Constitution so long as it remains in place.

Many years ago I got involved in a case in which my client took over a business in bankruptcy. The operator spent too much time explaining the company’s very advanced totally inadequate accounting system. A few years later a small law firm tried to hire me and, in the process, bragged on its

constitution, John Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson

Law, The Rest of Everything

2 Comments

Jefferson Wins … and We’re Effed!

February 12, 2016

Mark Rubin

Reverent references to the Founding Fathers drive me nutso. Yes, they established a more perfect union, but they rarely agreed about anything. Disagreements are what what we ought to expect from bright, ambitious, contentious men, so when modern day references turn the Founding Fathers into a monolith, it should not go unnoticed.

How bad is it? Almost half-term Governor and full-time nitwit Sarah Palin said her favorite Founding Father is “all of them.” Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski liked Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) best. And these references are just silly. Certain Supreme Court justices believe in originalism, a principle which claims for itself the obligation and ability to determine what the words in the Constitution meant

Clean Power Act, Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Supreme Court

Law

1 Comment

The Supreme Court: Secrecy and Extrajudicial Activities

December 15, 2014

Mark Rubin

Two weeks ago I read The Great Paper Caper, written for The New Yorker by Jill Lepore. Professor Lepore teaches history at Harvard, and is also a staff writer for the magazine.

The piece tells a great story about missing papers from the files of Justice Felix Frankfurter. Seemingly, through poor record-keeping and controls, someone walked the papers out the doors of the Library of Congress. (The article includes a “who’s who” of prominent men from the 1930s through the 1970s, and the story proves yet again that clerking at the U.S. Supreme Court advances careers.)

An over-arching theme of the story relates to document secrecy. The Presidential Papers Act of 1978 and the Federal Records Act of 1950

Code of Judicial Ethics, Federal Records Act of 1950, Felix Frankfurter, Geneva Conventions, Ginsburg, jeffrey rosen, Jill Lepore, Presidential Papers Act of 1978, Scalia, supreme court, The New Yorker, Thomas Jefferson

Law