In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. At this time, Justice O'Connor was the Court's pivotal "swing" Justice. In many of the Court's most important cases, she cast the deciding vote. Moreover, she generally leaned left on such controversial issues as abortion,...

Questions have arisen in recent days about whether Donald Trump, his supporters, and his opponents have acted in ways that either violate the First Amendment or can be punished consistent with the First Amendment. Here are some questions and answers:

Question: Can Donald Trump, consistent with the First Amendment, exclude...

A distinguished group of legal scholars, political scientists and presidential historians (including me) from across the political spectrum has written to President Obama to affirm that if the Senate Republicans carry through on their threat to deny the President's Supreme Court nominee a fair confirmation hearing they will be acting...

In the 1960s, political conservatives accused the justices of the Warren Court of imposing their own liberal values and preferences on the nation in the guise of constitutional interpretation. They charged that the justices of that era consistently exploited the ambiguity of vague constitutional provisions guaranteeing, for example, "the freedom...

On February 24, 2016, I addressed the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee in an Ad Hoc Forum on the Supreme Court Vacancy and the Constitutional Responsibility of the Senate. Among the Senators present were Amy Klobuchar (MN); Chuck Schumer (NY), Richard Blumenthal (CN), Brian Schatz (HA), Mazie Hirono (HA),...

In recent weeks, two of the legal scholars I most admire -- Cass Sunstein and Eric Posner -- have independently called for possible limitations on the scope of First Amendment protection in light of the dangers posed to the United States by online radicalization messages directed...

Ever since the oral argument last week in the Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas, which involves the constitutionality of the University of Texas' affirmative action program, Justice Antonin Scalia has been castigated and excoriated by commentators, mostly on the left, for asking the attorney for the University...

As part of their recent thirty-two hour sit-in outside the office of Princeton University's president Chris Eisgruber, members of one of Princeton's student organizations, the Black Justice League, demanded that Eisgruber remove all images of Woodrow Wilson from all of Princeton's public spaces and erase Wilson's name from Princeton's internationally...

How should we think about the free speech issues in the recent controversies at the University of Missouri and Yale? In my view, universities have a deep obligation to protect and preserve the freedom of expression. That is, most fundamentally, at the very core of what makes a university a...

Ibrahim Parlak is a Kurd who was born in a small farming village in southeast Turkey in 1962. As a minority ethnic and religious group, Kurds have historically been subjected to vicious discrimination, oppression and violence by the Turks. As a high school student, Ibrahim was imprisoned for three months...

The Kim Davis situation raises interesting questions about the meaning and practical effect of the freedom of religion. Although, for reasons that I will explain, the issue today is one of public policy, rather than constitutional law, the evolution of constitutional principles in this realm is illuminating.

The First Amendment...

Sometimes, it takes courage to stand up for academic freedom.

Three months ago I posted an article addressing academic freedom issues that had arisen at Northwestern University. In that piece, I related an incident involving Alice Dreger, William Peace, and an issue of the journal Atrium.

As...

The American news media love Donald Trump. He gets them ratings. If they show him waving his arms and ranting, they get viewers. They therefore pretend that Trump is a serious candidate because putting him on the airwaves making moronic and offensive comments is entertaining. But presidential elections are not...

A central complaint of the four justices who dissented from the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry, was their repeated assertion that the five justices in the majority were unabashedly -- and illegitimately -- distorting the "true" meaning of...

Back in March, on the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, I wrote a piece examining the "intriguing" First Amendment issue posed by the case. See here.

This week, the Court decided Walker in a sharply-divided five-to-four decision. Like many states,...

Six weeks ago, Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro wrote a fine op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he offered a ringing endorsement of academic freedom. As he observed, a university must have "a compelling reason to punish anyone -- student, faculty member, staff member -- for expressing his...

During the five months that I worked on the five-member Review Group that President Obama appointed in August 2013 to review and make recommendations about the nation's various surveillance programs, I came to know General Keith Alexander, who served as Director of the NSA from 2005 to 2014. General Alexander...

The Supreme Court plays a central role in the American legal and political system. In recent years, it has decided profoundly important cases involving such issues as campaign finance regulation, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the death penalty, the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, voting rights,...

In an important decision, a federal court of appeals held yesterday that the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata could not be squared with the legislation that was said to authorize it.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue orders requiring such...

On April 22, I delivered the University of Chicago's annual Nora and Edward L. Ryerson Lecture on the subject of same-sex marriage. Because the Supreme Court will hear arguments on this issue on Tuesday, I thought I would post the core of the lecture here. It quite a bit longer...