Greetings, fellow participants in SEALS '07!

If you have found this blog while I am giving my talk on federal preemption, I will not be offended if you scroll down and read my past blog posts, as I fancy myself more a writer than a speaker anyway.

I will let you know when it is time to look up and applaud.

Thanks for visiting!

Parents' rights in Blairite Britain:

Parents cleared of abuse want children back
By Ben Leapman, Home Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/07/2007

A couple whose two baby daughters were taken away by social services have been told that they will never see their children again, despite being cleared of abuse allegations....

And in Nixon-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush America:

DCF Vs. Parents: Unfair Tactics?
Judge's Rebuke Of Agency Worker Renews
Concerns About Child Welfare Cases
By COLIN POITRAS Courant Staff Writer
July 16, 2007

Three years after a Superior Court judge chastised the Department of Children and Families for deliberately distorting facts in a child abuse and neglect case, concerns about the agency's fairness toward parents persist....

Harriet Miers a no-show; vulnerable to contempt charges.

You know, I've never been a Harriet Miers fan, but you've got to admit, she's having a rough decade.

My regard for her would go way up if she were to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and if she were to begin her statement (thick magnolia-mouth drawl): "Well, Senators, it's not exactly the hearing I had in mind -- but thanks just the same."

Today's dose of Greenhouse Gas is entitled "On Wrong Side of 5 to 4, Liberals Talk Tactics."

Political activists within the liberal camp came up with a plan quickly enough: to “take back the court,” in the words of Norman Lear, a founder of People for the American Way, which sent 400,000 e-mail messages last week as part of a campaign to make the court a central issue in the 2008 Senate and presidential elections.

That would be just great, provided conservatives do the same thing. As a help, Ms. Greenhouse reminds us of the heady era when plans such as construing the Equal Protection Clause to require socialism filled the most elite law reviews:

As the defensive effort became all-consuming, the energy and vision that had animated liberal legal scholarship shriveled to the point that it has been decades since anyone has returned to the ideas that came close to fruition on the Supreme Court of the 1960s: enshrining equal education as a fundamental right or making the alleviation of poverty a constitutional imperative sound like left-over fantasies from a bygone age.

"Equal education as a fundamental right" -- any bids on what that would do to private education and home schooling, esp. with Cass Sunstein now arguing that secular authorities may have authority to ban "sex discrimination" in religious institutions? (ht: NRO Phi Beta Cons blog)

And speaking of Prof. Sunstein, Ms. Greenhouse shows herself more easily surprised that one suspects she really is:

The tension is apparent even in those liberals who sing the praises of judicial “minimalism,” as Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School does. In a provocative posting this spring on The New Republic’s Web site, he deplored “the absence of anything like a heroic vision on the court’s left,” a surprising complaint given his well-known advocacy of judges deciding cases as narrowly as possible.

That CS should advocate minimalism when the Court is (supposedly) conservative, while also advocating "a heroic vision on the court's left" -- big surprise there, yeah. My heart's still going pitti-pat, I'm so surprised.