"The Framers ... conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men." – Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) While we were all consumed by impeachment, a pernicious...
When witnesses testify in a courtroom and offer varying, contradictory or even unlawful explanations of the events under scrutiny, juries tend not to believe them. The same is now happening with the Trump administration's defense of its killing Iranian Maj. Gen....
"America ... goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." ~ President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to invade a then-friendly country without the knowledge or consent of its government and...
Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 in response to the unlawful surveillance of Americans by the FBI and the CIA during the Watergate era. President Richard Nixon – who famously quipped after leaving office that "when the president...
A trial in Great Britain has just concluded with potentially dangerous implications for personal freedom here. Great Britain is currently the most watched country in the Western world – watched, that is, by its own police forces. In London alone, the police have...
While most of us have been thinking about the end of summer and while the political class frets over the Democratic presidential debates and the aborted visit of two members of Congress to Israel, the Trump administration has quietly moved to extend and make permanent...
As a trial judge in New Jersey during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush years, I spent much of my time trying to settle cases. This process involved bringing into my chambers the lawyers for the disputants and asking them in the absence of their adversaries to...
A popular way to begin the first day of class in constitutional law in many American law schools is to ask the students what sets the U.S. Constitution apart from all others. Usually, they answer that it's the clauses that guarantee the freedom of speech, privacy and...
Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to probe the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation began in October 2016 under President Barack Obama when...
For the past few days, the nation's media and political class have been fixated on the firing of the No. 2 person in the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe became embroiled in the investigation of President Donald Trump because of his alleged approval of the...
