In late June, the Supreme Court handed down what may be regarded as one of the most controversial decisions this decade when it ruled that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms was an individual right in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Surprisingly, there is little controversy as to the opinions expressed by BC Law’s two constitutional law groups, the American Constitutional Society (ACS) and the Federalist Society, which often hold diametrically opposite views.

In fact, both of the organization’s leaders offered praise for Justice Scalia’s majority (5-4) opinion.  ACS President Austin Evers ‘09 noted “Justice Scalia’s opinion is a fine, plausible exercise in constitutional interpretation,” while Federalist Society President Guillaume Buell ‘09 was a bit more effusive in his praise, calling the opinion “brilliantly written, brilliantly reasoned.”

Both leaders also expressed a need for gun control, with Buell applauding “the Court’s recognition of the need for reasonable restrictions on gun ownership - such as keeping them out of the hands of felons.” Evers agreed, noting that “it will be a challenge to craft laws that are able to limit gun ownership to its newly minted constitutional bounds, but it is incumbent upon us to find a way.”

To read the Court’s opinion, click here.  To hear the oral arguments, including Justice Scalia’s invocation of Blackstone, click here. 

Justin Pope, an education writer at the Associate Press, wrote an article this week that never ceases to get law students’ attention at Boston College Law School: the legal job market. With the ABA’s recent accreditation of the Charlotte School of Law and Elon University as the 199th and 200th accredited law schools in the United States (technically they have provisional accreditation), Pope reminds readers that only a few law school graduates actually earn those nose-bleed salaries.

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By Jesse Stellato, May 18, 2008

Eagleionline has obtained a draft of Professor Daniel Kanstroom’s upcoming article: “On ‘Waterboarding’: Legal Interpretation and the Continuing Struggle for Human Rights.” The abstract appears below.

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Law school just got a little harder for two students at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock: Professor Richard J. Peltz has sued two of his students, 3L’s Valerie D. Nation and Chrishuana L. Clark, for defamation.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette first reported the lawsuit on April 27.

The Legal Blog Watch’s Robert J. Ambrogi has collected the blog and newpaper coverage of this issue.  Above the Law’s Kashmir Hill cites to multiple primary sources, and also to another Professor v. Student lawsuit (this time via Dartmouth College).

The Boston Globe and Providence Journal report that retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor will be a visting judge on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston beginning next week. The 1st Circuit’s Calendar lists the three-judge panels Justice O’Connor will sit on and the cases to be heard on May 5th and 6th.

Since retiring from the Supreme Court two years ago, O’Connor has been a visting judge for the 2nd, 8th, and 9th Circuits. Scholars have recently called for the renewal of the historic practice of “circuit riding” not only by retired Supreme Court justices, but also sitting ones.

[Hat Tip: Legal Blog Watch] 

An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that several prominent large law firms will be cutting back on their Summer Associate positions and the length of their summer programs.  The article also reports that the effects will also trickle down into entry-level associate positions.  Firms mentioned include Pillsbury Winthrop, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Thelen Reid, and Weil Gotshal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120812870657811461.html?mod=googlenews_wsj 

See also a similar article at ATL: http://abovethelaw.com/2008/04/whats_going_on_at_pillsbury.php 

In a speech in January at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) in New York Dean of Boston College Law School and AALS President John Garvey talked about shifting the axis of the legal academy’s discussion over diversity. Instead of focusing on diversity within law schools, Garvey proposed cultivating differences among them.

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Happy Tuesday once again (and yes I realize that, ironically, we’re all back in school.  That’s more of a boilerplate greeting than anything anyway, so, you know, just go with it).  I know that since I didn’t post last week, you’re all anxious to see me back on Eaglei, and by “all” I mean “nobody,” of course.  I hope everyone had a great break and that your NCAA brackets are doing better than mine, which is falling apart faster than a Michael Bay movie (thanks a lot, Davidson). 

Anyway, in case you haven’t heard, Gibson (the guitar manufacturer, not Katie) is suing a whole lot of people in federal court, alleging copyright infringement stemming from the Guitar Hero series.  Nevermind that Gibson took every opportunity to plaster it’s name to the pop-culture sensation and probably generated mountains of revenue from the move.  The lengthy list of defendants includes developers Harmonix and Activision, and distributors like Wal-Mart, Gamestop, Amazon, and Kmart.  The suit apparently revolves around Gibson’s 1999 patent of a music simulation involving a virtual reality/headphone apparatus which allowed users to participate in a virtual reality concert by playing any one of several instruments.  Activision decided it didn’t need Gibson’s permission anymore with respect to that, and informed Gibson of the same, to which Gibson responded by drumming up a whopper of a lawsuit.  Since you can never read too many legal briefs and/or complaints, here’s a copy of Activision’s March 11 request for a declaratory judgment saying that Guitar Hero does not infringe on Gibson’s copyright over their original simulation model. 

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Attorney General Michael Mukasey will personally argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Associated Press reports.  While most Attorneys General argue cases before the nation’s highest court, Mukasey will be the first leader of the Justice Department to argue a case since 1996, when Janet Reno represented the government before the Court.

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In the most recent issue of Washington Monthly, a litany of scholars, public officials, and lawyers write essays in opposition to the practice of torture by the United States. Many of the essays touch upon the topic of waterboarding specifically. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts (BCLS ‘76) wrote in part:

Just as it scars its victims, the use of techniques like waterboarding—invented in the Spanish Inquisition and prosecuted by the American government as a Japanese war crime after World War II—leaves its scars on a democratic society as well.

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In a roll call vote yesterday, the House of Representatives was unable to defeat President Bush’s veto of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act (H.R. 2082). Section 327 of the Act would have bound intelligence agencies such as the CIA to the same interrogation standards currently in the Army Field Manual. In response to the Abu Gharib scandal and the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, the Army updated the Manual to explicitly prohibit certain interrogation techniques, including waterboarding (§5-75).

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Updated on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 03:12PM by Eagleionline

NEWTON, MA — Twenty-two members of the Boston College Law School faculty broke with the Dean of Boston College Law School, John Garvey, today over the recent invitation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey to speak at the school’s 2008 Commencement Ceremony.

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The question for our readers is what the increasing prison population says about the legal practice and its punishment system.

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In an op-ed in yesterday’s USA Today, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School called on Congress to demand an independent investigation solely focused on the Administration’s use of waterboarding:

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