Legal Implications of Bush v. Gore, 10 Years Later from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

It was ten years ago this week that the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Bush v. Gore. That decision effectively stopped the Florida recount in its tracks and placed George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, joins us to analyze the legal and political ramifications of that controversial Supreme Court moment.

Download the podcast here. The conservative magazine, the National Review attempts to pick apart Toobin's theses:

Toobin says that the Florida courts “order[ed] a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes.” The Florida courts did no such thing, and the point is significant for the reasons given in Bush v. Gore and in Chief Justice Wells’ dissenting opinion in the Florida Supreme Court. (Toobin doesn’t mention that three of the seven Florida justices, all Democrats, dissented from the decision that the U.S. Supreme Court reversed.)

Nelson Lund is the author of that article, and makes several other points, worth considering, about Toobin's arguments. Check those out, here. See also: Bush V. Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis in American Democracy: Abridged and Updated (Landmark Law Cases and American Society), Bush V. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford History of the United States), Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election

What Was Clarence Thomas's Wife Thinking? from The Atlantic Wire by John Hudson

Picking at a 19-year-old scab, Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wants an apology from Anita Hill, the woman who testified against her husband during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. On Oct. 9, Ms. Thomas called Hill's office at Brandeis University, saying: Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day. Ms. Thomas's voice mail revives a controversy that conservatives and liberals dispute to this day. Before the infamous confirmation hearing, Hill was an aide to Mr. Thomas and accused him of making profane sexual comments, such as discussing his penis size and the placement of a pubic hair on his soft drink. Mr. Thomas denied the allegations, calling attacks by Democrats a "high-tech lynching." When Hill received the voice mail, she notified Brandeis University police.

Read the Atlantic piece, here.

Book Announcement: Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? by Archer from Legal Theory Blog by Lawrence Solum

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about "American exceptionalism" is untenable. "In an intriguing and elegant exposition of comparative history, Archer uses the labour politics of the 1890s in both countries to illustrate the similarities and the differences between the two societies . . . the innovative quality of Archer's approach, together with the clarity of its exposition, will unsettle established opinions and rejuvenate what has been a venerable debate into an altogether fresher controversy."--Michael Foley, Times Higher Education

Read the full blog post here.

Cultural Commons from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, discusses his new book about creative commons and intellectual property in the modern age.

Listen to the podcast here, or download the podcast here.

Technology’s Effect on the Legal Profession from Robert Ambrogi's LawSites: Guest on Law Technology Now Podcast by Robert Ambrogi

In thinking about my presentation next week for the ACLEA annual meeting about “How Technology is Changing the Practice of Law … and CLE,” I suddenly remembered that I had once written a magazine article on this very topic. Way back in 1995, I wrote, Empowered or Enslaved: Technology’s Effect on the Legal Profession (PDF), the cover story for the December 2005/January 2006 issue of the magazine Law Office Computing. On one hand, the article reads like a time capsule. For example, one lawyer I interviewed as an Internet success story was Greg Siskind, who went on to write the popular book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Marketing on the Internet. At the time I wrote the article, his practice was little more than a year old and already proving a success. But some of what lawyers said then about the downside of technology is no less true today. Consider this quote from Philip Dubois, a sole practitioner in Colorado: Technology is a double-edged sword. One result is that we have great new tools with which to do our jobs. But at the same time, the pace of our work — and therefore of our lives — has increased with each new tool. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing in the law. It’s wonderful in science, in engineering, in education and in the media. But law is supposed to be a deliberative practice. When we get to the point where we as lawyers are constantly trying to keep up with the pace, we lose that deliberative part of the law. Wise and prescient words from Dubois.

Read the full post here.