Author Archives: Colin Starger

This week I start teaching First Amendment law for the very first time.  It should be great fun. For the class textbook, I have adopted Kathleen Sullivan & Noah Feldman, First Amendment Law (5th Ed). (This textbook is basically just the … Continue reading →

Winter Break is over and it’s time to fire up the SCOTUS doctrinal mapping machine! I’ll start 2015 by looking back at my last post. No, this is not early-onset nostalgia for 2014. I first need to correct an error in that post.  My interest, … Continue reading →

This is the fifth and final installment in a series mapping Confrontation Clause doctrine since Crawford v. Washington (2004). In previous posts, I identified the 2-degree network connecting Williams v. Illinois (2012) to Crawford, calibrated the network to correct over- … Continue reading →

This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts charting out Confrontation Clause doctrine since 2004’s Crawford v. Washington. Last time, I deployed a Spaeth visualization to illustrate how the early doctrinal consensus around Crawford has collapsed. Today we introduce … Continue reading →

After a brief “True Threats” interruption, we return today to Confrontation Clause doctrine since Crawford v. Washington. In my last post in this series, I argued that 2008’s Indiana v. Edwards does not really belong in the Crawford network (even … Continue reading →

Today the Supreme Court will hear argument in Elonis v. United States, the Facebook “true threats” case. Given the buzz over this case, I’m going to interrupt my current series on the Confrontation Clause in order to briefly consider the doctrinal network … Continue reading →

In celebration of Crawford v. Washington‘s 10-year anniversary, we’re looking at Supreme Court Confrontation Clause doctrine. In my last post, I generated a 2-degree citation network connecting the Williams v. Illinois (2012) back to Crawford. The 2-degree algorithm produced a network that included seven … Continue reading →

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court revolutionized Confrontation Clause jurisprudence in Crawford v. Washington. To celebrate Crawford‘s 10-year birthday, the Michigan Law Review has just published an online retrospective featuring fantastic debate and analysis about the doctrine’s path over the past decade.  As I … Continue reading →

Two weeks ago, I launched this blog with what I called an “immigration problem.” The problem involved transforming an automatically generated network of Supreme Court immigration cases into a more accurate and useful map of immigration doctrine. In subsequent posts, I chipped away … Continue reading →

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a summary reversal of the Fifth Circuit in Johnson v. City of Shelby. The short per curiam opinion represents the latest chapter in the Court’s recently-controversial doctrine interpreting the requirements for federal pleadings under FRCP 8(a)(2). Working … Continue reading →