How Kavanaugh Will Change The Supreme Court | FiveThirtyEight

It has been difficult to precisely measure the ideology of federal appeals court judges such as Kavanaugh, mostly because of the large number of courts and the wide variation in issues considered by them, so there is some debate over just how conservative he will be when he reaches the highest court in the land. But every available measure, and the entries on his résumé, indicate that Kavanaugh will be conservative, and perhaps very much so. Judicial Common Space scores, for example — which use the ideology of nominating politicians for measuring the ideology of appeals judges — put him adjacent to the arch-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, as seen below. And Kavanaugh did little during his confirmation hearing to disabuse observers of this possibility — at one point, he called the allegations against him (which he vehemently denied) “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”Since July, when President Trump announced his most recent nomination to the Supreme Court, FiveThirtyEight has been analyzing the effects of a potential Justice Kavanaugh — a potential that is now reality. Kavanaugh was confirmed on Saturday by a 50-48 vote in the Senate. Based on what we know about measuring the ideology of justices…

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State supreme courts and bar associatons are limiting access to legal services

The latest comes from the New Jersey Supreme Court, the governing body for lawyer licensure in the state, which last week blacklisted services from Avvo, LegalZoom and RocketLawyer that match consumers with attorneys because of concerns over fee-sharing and referral fees. […] Lawyers, courts and bar associations talk a good game when it comes to public service and making legal services more accessible. But it’s not happening. When businesses everywhere are seizing technology to reduce prices and improve services, bar associations and courts governing lawyers are sticking their heads in the sand and digging in their heels. This is a real shame — for the public who don’t have access to the law and for lawyers who are increasingly becoming irrelevant to the average person in this country.


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SODNA PRAKSA | ‘They Ask for Equal Dignity in the Eyes of the Law. The Constitution Grants Them that Right’

Longreads

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed. ?

The States have contributed to the fundamental character of the marriage right by placing that institution at the center of so many facets of the legal and social order.

There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle. Yet by virtue of their exclusion from that institution, same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits…

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