Category Archives: Major Print Outlets

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.

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Federal Crackdown on Legalized Pot Would Backfire

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

Real Clear Politics

Recent statements by Attorney General Eric Holder and by drug czar Gil Kerlikowske may signal an impending crackdown on the experiments with partial legalization of recreational marijuana for which solid majorities of the Colorado and Washington State electorates voted last November.

“When it comes to these marijuana initiatives, I think among the kinds of things we will have to consider is the impact on children,” Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee. “We are certainly going to enforce federal law.”

At a National Press Club luncheon, Kerlikowske asserted that “neither a state nor the executive branch can nullify” federal anti-marijuana laws, adding that “using marijuana has public health consequences.”

But the impact on children, and the public health consequences, are likely to be bad if the Obama administration cracks down on the hundreds of marijuana businesses that Colorado and Washington are preparing to license, regulate, and tax.

Such action would likely backfire — warping both federal and state drug policy for years to come — by aggravating the harm to public health, especially to kids, and the leakage of marijuana across state lines that the administration and other opponents of legalization want to prevent.

How would a crackdown backfire? By producing — immediately in Colorado, and eventually in other states — an atomized, anarchic, state-legalized but unregulated marijuana market that federal drug enforcers lack the manpower to contain and the legal power to force the states to contain.

Consider how a federal effort to abort the state experiment would unfold in Colorado, where the voters (unlike those in Washington) chose to create both a state-regulated marijuana industry and another, largely unregulated, one.

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Race-Based Affirmative Action Makes Things Worse, Not Better

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The New Republic

The Supreme Court made clear last month that it would keep affirmative action racial preferences on the front burner of the national conversation for at least the next year. This autumn, the Court will review a federal appeals court’s 8-7 decision striking down a 2006 Michigan voter initiative that banned racial preferences in state university admissions. Meanwhile, the justices are drafting their opinions in a reverse-discrimination lawsuit by a disappointed white applicant to the University of Texas that was argued last October. That decision, the first major constitutional challenge to racial preferences since 2003, is expected by June 28.

With four ardent conservative opponents of racial preferences likely to be joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy–who has never upheld a racial preference–the Court seems likely to strike down the Texas program but not likely to outlaw racial preferences entirely. The Court also seems likely to reverse the federal appeals court decision in Michigan and uphold the state’s 2006 initiative banning racial preferences in state programs. (The issue there is not whether it’s unconstitutional for universities to use racial preferences excessively, but whether it’s unconstitutional for voters to prohibit them entirely.)

The big question, however, is whether the Court will rule so narrowly that its decisions will have little impact outside Texas and Michigan, or will, for the first time, impose serious restrictions on the very large racial preferences that are routine at almost all of the nation’s selective universities. Will these cases mean a dramatic overhaul, and shrinkage, of race-based affirmative action as we know it?

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Marijuana Policy and Presidential Leadership: How to Avoid a Federal-State Train Wreck

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The Brookings Institution

Stuart Taylor, Jr. examines how the federal government and the eighteen states (plus the District of Columbia) that have partially legalized medical or recreational marijuana or both since 1996 can be true to their respective laws, and can agree on how to enforce them wisely while avoiding federal-state clashes that would increase confusion and harm communities and consumers. Continue reading the article here.

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Legal Feeding Frenzy

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The American Spectator

It’s not news that countless bogus lawsuits are filed in this country every year. What’s less well known is that because of obscure procedural rules, even the most self-evidently absurd lawsuits typically cost blameless defendants plenty of money, time, and anguish before any judge even considers whether to throw them out. Take the angry man who sued a Washington, D.C. cleaner for $67 million in 2007 for allegedly losing a pair of his pants. The damage claim was obviously absurd. In a sensible system the judge would have tossed it out without dragging the cleaner into court or forcing him […]

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More ACA Lawsuits: The ‘Contraceptive Mandate’ Versus Religious Freedom (Analysis)

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Kaiser Health News

The Supreme Court famously upheld most of the Affordable Care Act in June. But in a year or two we may see another riveting Supreme Court drama growing out of the health law, this one driven by the passionate objections of many religious employers to the so-called contraceptive mandate. An Obama Administration regulation requiring that many employers — including religious employers — provide insurance without copays or deductibles that covers a wide range of contraceptives, including sterilization, as part of women’s preventive health care. Religious groups decry it as an extreme attack on their freedom. Already, more than 40 lawsuits have […]

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Justices To Weigh Contraceptive Mandate Against Religious Freedom Claims

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Kaiser Health News

The Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court partially upheld in 2012 when it issued one of the most important decisions in decades, has spawned more litigation — topped by two consolidated cases that could become the justices’ biggest ruling on religious liberty in years. The oral arguments regarding the law’s contraception coverage mandate, slated for March 25, will be a rematch between two lawyers who squared off in the first health law challenge — Obama administration Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement. Continue reading the column here.

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Analysis: Health Exchanges And The Litigation Landscape

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Kaiser Health News

If you think that the Affordable Care Act has surmounted all of the major legal attacks its opponents could come up with, think again. Critics of the federal health law have only begun to fight, although most of their battles are decidedly uphill. The pending challenges to the law, and related regulations, range from the Goldwater Institute’s claim that it gives the Independent Payment Advisory Board unconstitutionally broad powers over Medicare services and payments, to the more than 35 lawsuits by religious employers attacking a Department of Health and Human Services rule that requires them to provide their employees with […]

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Why the Court Wants to Try Again

by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr

The Washington Post

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument next week in Fisher v. University of Texas, the high court’s first case on the use of race in higher education admissions since its 2003 decisions in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Why did the court decide to revisit this issue after less than a decade? Much of the speculation on this question centers on the shift in the court’s alignment; since Justice Samuel Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, the court is less sympathetic to racial preferences. But another factor is perhaps as important: Grutter and Gratz laid out a strategy for containing affirmative action that clearly, objectively failed.

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Johnson and Taylor: Penn State, Duke and Integrity

by KC Johnson & Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Wall Street Journal

In recent years, two prominent American universities have experienced catastrophic leadership failures that exposed young people in their charge to horrible abuse. The failures grew out of a lack of courage to resist the demands of powerful special interests. As Penn State tries to reform its campus culture, what can it teach Duke?

You probably know about Penn State, where top administrators, according to a recent report by former FBI head Louis Freeh, concealed critical facts about years of child molestation committed by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, all in an effort to protect the image of its football program. After the scandal became public, trustees fired the university’s president and its longtime football coach; two senior administrators left their jobs. The trustees then commissioned a multimillion-dollar investigation headed by Mr. Freeh, and they have promised to implement most of his 119 recommended reforms.

You may not have known, or remember, the leadership scandal at Duke, which became manifest in 2006 but led to no punishment or even censure of any kind for any of the professors and administrators who behaved disgracefully, including President Richard Brodhead.

We refer to the rapidly disproven allegation of a savage gang rape hurled at three Duke lacrosse players, with dozens more accused of complicity, by an African-American stripper whom they had hired to perform at a team party. Scores of professors formed themselves into what can most kindly be called a rush-to-judgment mob, adding their denunciations of the falsely accused lacrosse players (three were indicted) to the damage already done by a rogue district attorney, Mike Nifong.

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Stuart Taylor: ‘Most Amazing Supreme Court Theater I’ve Ever Seen’

by Stuart Taylor, Jr and Jackie Judd

Kaiser Health News

JACKIE JUDD: Good day and welcome to Health Reform and the Court. I’m Jackie Judd. The historic decision from the Supreme Court today leaves the health overhaul law largely intact. The individual mandate is declared constitutional. The court also ruled that states cannot be financially penalized if they choose not to expand Medicaid to millions of the uninsured. Those are the headlines, here with the details is our legal analyst Stuart Taylor who was in the courtroom when the decision was announced. What was it like?

STUART TAYLOR: It was the most amazing Supreme Court theater I’ve ever seen for 50-some minutes. Roberts the chief justice went on for 20 minutes. When you’re three minutes in, you think “Oh my gosh, they’re going to strike down the mandate.” When you’re eight minutes in, you think “Oh no! They’re going uphold it.” And they do uphold it. They uphold it under the taxing power.

JACKIE JUDD: And he, of course, is the deciding vote.

STUART TAYLOR: He is the deciding vote on everything, pretty much. Then, when he starts in on the Medicaid expansion, he starts in, “Oh, they’re striking it down. By 7-2.” And indeed they were. But the footnote is, all this means is the law cannot force the states to join this new expansion by threatening them with the loss of all their existing Medicaid funds if they don’t.

JACKIE JUDD: Let’s start first with the mandate. As I said, it was a 5-4 vote with Roberts breaking the tie. How did they reach that conclusion?

STUART TAYLOR: Well, there were two sources of federal power that the government claims sustained the mandate. The first is the power to regulate interstate commerce, and 90 percent of the public discussion has been about that issue: Can in the name of regulating interstate commerce, can you force people to buy an unwanted commercial product?