Moving again

I'm hanging up the blog pseudonym and continuing the blog under my own name. You can find this year's posts at http://samuelpnelson.wordpress.com/posts/ Thanks for reading.

SPN

Brandenburg v Ohio??

Watch this campaign commercial and apply Brandenburg v Ohio? Thoughts?

Steampunk cupcake cannon

Because you need a study break:

Facebook sucks

So, Facebook is rolling out a new system to obliterate your privacy. It hasn't swept up all users yet (I think fb does these things alphabetically, so it might take a day or two). Anyway, any status update or comment you have posted that includes the phrase "university of x" where x=the name of your university, is now on a PUBLIC page that anyone can read whether or not they are one of your friends and regardless of whether you have set the information to private (or "friends only") or whatever. If you have comments posted like "Professor y sucks" and the post also includes "university of x" then Professor y is going to be able to read that comment. It may also include pictures you have posted with captions like "party at university of x" which, given that Res Life uses social network sites to track down under-age drinkers may turn out to be a problem for some people. I haven't been converted over yet but some of my friends are finding their status updates and comments all over the place about pretty much any interest.

So, I'm not really sure what is going on here, but I have deleted all my info from my profile and suggest you look into this, particularly if you have status updates that might get you in trouble with the university or, you know, anyone else.

update: Here is facebook's info about this but information about how to opt out isn't until the end of the post. There will be a new privacy setting called "Friends, tags, and connections" that will default to "everyone" until you go in and change it. And I think you really really should. That setting won't show up as an option until your account has been converted to the new system. You will know that you have been exposed to the world when you log in and get a pop-up message about sharing contact info. Even if you say no to everything in the pop-up, you will still have to go in and manually set the privacy options.

Christian Legal Society v. Martinez

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez on Monday. Hastings Law School denied funding to CLS, a student group, because it did not allow LGBT students as members. State law in California requires all student groups at public universities to allow any student to participate. So, in this case we see a clear conflict between free exercise (Hastings is a public school following state law so the necessary state action for a free exercise claim is in effect) aspects of religious equality and non-discrimination policy. It is a difficult case in many ways and raises substantial issues related to the things we have been discussing in both classes over the last 4-5 weeks.

Video from Federalist Society and American Constitution Society sponsored panel discussions on the case are here.

Oral arguments may appear at Oyez.

Abortion rights links

A couple of relevant links for the discussion of the abortion rights cases.

Data on abortion rates since 1974 from the Guttmacher Institute.

The new Nebraska law on abortion restrictions raises several issues that have not been addressed by the Supreme Court in any previous case, as well as several that are more similar to restrictions that have already been tested. We will discuss this new law in light of the precedents that we have been reading and see how the Court might decide the cases that are sure to emerge once the law goes into effect. According to the Times account the law bans "most abortions 20 weeks after conception or later on the theory that a fetus, by that stage in pregnancy, has the capacity to feel pain"

Another Nebraska law signed at the same time requires "health care providers to screen women seeking abortions for possible physical or mental risks."

Also see the report from ABC News.

Update: Amanda Marcotte has a good explanation of the new constitutional issues raised by the Nebraska law and some of the implications of these changes. Fetal pain, rather than viability, would be an entirely new consideration and one that fundamentally challenges Roe v Wade while opening up a great deal of space for states to impose new legal limits on abortion.

Supreme Court vacancy

So, per our discussion yesterday, I think this clip gives some sense of why representation on the Court matters regardless of the outcome of the cases. Read the language of the opinion in Gonzalez v Carhart and then watch Pamela Karlan comment on the case and imagine the conferences on the merits of future cases if she were to be nominated to the Court.