The Supreme Court's most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of 'judicial activism' - of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.
If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.
The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.
One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.
Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or radical political meetings, abortion clinics or AIDS doctors.
A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.
It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.
Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.
Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.
An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.
Too often, animal-rights supporters seem to care about animals to the exclusion of people.
If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.
Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.
Ballot formats should be standardized nationally rather than left to the often bad judgment of local officials.
It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.
If we are going to have self-driving cars, the technical specifications should be quite precise.
A key reason that elections are run so badly is that in most states, political partisans are in charge.
The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.
