Takings Clause

'The 5th Circuit’s decision in this case amounts to ‘you pay if you feel like it.'' - Robert McNamara

Hiding behind the elderly grandmother were some mischievous legal theories.

Maybe taxation actually is theft.

* Love the way you lie: Court decides that Musk’s 2018 tweets about buying the country were phony. [CNBC]

* Property professors! New hypo just dropped! One man’s trash is another man’s…you know. [Insanememeshub]

* Not adding up: Math textbooks are now on the CRT ban chopping block. Too many of the numbers are Black or something? [Business Insider]

* Kansas officers are taking liberties with filing reports on seized property. Didn’t expect to see a takings issue in criminal procedure! [LawrenceKSTimes]

* Virginia law classifies the sexual abuse of animals as a felony. I’m definitely going to be clarifying the next time I hear the phrase “heavy petting”. [NBC 12]

WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK ABOUT THE PROPERTY OWNERS!!!

* Habeas Corpus? Discarded body determined to be a thrown-out sex toy. These things are really getting realistic. I hear… [Region News Source]

* COVID made the takings clause relevant again. What’s next, the Third? [Reason]

* During the Judge Jackson confirmation, several Republicans accused Democrats as being the party of pedophiles. Projection, maybe? [Slate]

* Remember that viral video of police officers busting a 75-year-old man’s head open last year? Turns out nothing wrong happened. [CBC.ca]

* Amazon pushes back against unionization, alleging that voters were bribed with marijuana. Is this why the plant isn’t legalized federally? [Business Insider]

* Adam Feldman explores the possible effect on the Supreme Court of replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a staunch conservative — e.g., Judge Amy Coney Barrett. [Empirical SCOTUS]

* Speaking of SCOTUS, here’s Ilya Somin’s read of the tea leaves in Knick v. Township of Scott, an important Takings Clause case.  [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* Stephen Embry disagrees with Joe Patrice’s suggestion that junior lawyers are going extinct, but Embry acknowledges the major effect that technology is having, and will continue to have, on legal practice and employment. [TechLaw Crossroads]

* Charles Glasser looks at what might have caused the political polarization of the modern media and its consumers. [Daily Caller]

* The prospect of Michael Cohen testifying publicly before Congress is making some people giddy — but it’s not without its downsides, as Joel Cohen explains. [The Hill]

* What can we learn from official Washington utterances about the shutdown? Here’s some intel from VoxGov, via Jean O’Grady. [Dewey B Strategic]

* Not all provisions of the Bill of Rights are created equal, according to Gerard Magliocca. [PrawfsBlawg]

* David Berg draws lessons for trial lawyers from the genius of Joe Jamail’s use of hypothetical questions. [YouTube]

This is disturbing.

* The NFLPA is appealing the 4-game suspension Tom Brady received in the wake of the Wells Report. It’s more probable than not that he’ll lose. [CNN]

* Lawyer tackles his own client trying to flee the courtroom. Great, now litigators have to start worrying about the long-term effect of concussions. [Legal Cheek]

* New rankings are out and Thomas M. Cooley Law School (or WMU or whatever) is NUMBER 1! Seriously. For real. Find out why… [Georgetown Law via TaxProf Blog]

* The Wright Brothers: The Original Patent Trolls. [Concurring Opinions]

* Are you into spy thrillers? What about lengthy treatises on standing? Well, then you’re in luck. [Dorf on Law]

* A Washington prosecutorial office rocked by misconduct allegations. Ho hum, prosecutors break the rules. But the source — a whistleblowing veteran prosecutor — is a new twist. [The Open File]

* The jury is deliberating on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s fate in the Boston bombing trial [Law and More]

* The final two items both focus on agricultural regulations. First, a look back at the life of Roscoe Filburn, the wheat farmer at the center of Wickard v. Filburn. Now I’ll never not see Homer Simpson when I think of that case. [Lawyers, Guns & Money]

* Second, if you aren’t following the raisins takings case, basically the government takes a share of the annual raisin crop for its own use… without compensating the growers. Put aside the constitutionality, that’s startlingly inefficient when the government encourages farmers to shift away from a crop the government needs. Here’s a video about the farmers at the center of the case. [YouTube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFbzLPJtYPE

* Overrated: Government surveillance is out of control. Underrated: Government spending massive amounts of money making the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command look like the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation is out of control. [Lowering the Bar] * Helen Wan explains “The 5 Rules Every New Associate Must Know.” Not included: learning all the technical details required to convincingly say your smartphone failed to get that 1 a.m. message. [The Careerist] * Another post in the fascinating series about creating visual maps of Supreme Court doctrine. It’s like a nerdier version of the The Atlas of Middle-Earth(affiliate link). [PrawfsBlawg] * Ilya Somin reviews the Supreme Court’s most recent Takings Clause jurisprudence. It’s a lot harder for the government to take your property away. But don’t worry, it’s still really easy to lose all your property to unregulated markets. [The Volokh Conspiracy] * The Office of the Solicitor General may have inadvertently helped out Frederick Oberlander and Richard Lerner, the two lawyers charged with criminal contempt for talking about a cooperator’s sentence (if you can call a $25,000 fine for admitting to a $40 million fraud a “sentence”) that the feds claim was sealed. [Wise Law NY] * A somewhat sad art show based on requests from prisoners in solitary. Some beautiful stuff here. Though I’d have expected more “Rita Hayworth” photo requests. [Gawker] * The Daily Show takes on biotech patents. Video after the jump…