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Later this morning, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decisions in the key marriage equality cases. After yesterday’s performance by the Court, we can no longer be surprised by historically bad jurisprudence.

The voting rights ruling it issued yesterday, Shelby County v. Holder, is one of the very worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. Leaving aside the practical effects of the Court’s holding, which are likely to be awful (Texas has already won the race for “first state to enact a change to its voting laws that wouldn’t have been approved by the federal government if the Voting Rights Act could still be enforced”), the opinion is a travesty as a matter of basic legal reasoning.

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Given his own description of his behavior, there is little doubt Snowden is guilty of the crimes with which the government has now charged him: theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. (As was reported this weekend, Snowden has left Hong Kong and is seeking asylum in another country via Russia.)

Writing in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald argues that there is something perverse about charging Snowden with what, under federal law, is a violation of the Espionage Act:

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Clapper was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No, sir … not wittingly.”

Now this is what an ordinary person would call a “lie.”  Ordinary people also believe that perjury is lying under oath.  But lawyers are not ordinary people, and, as a technical legal matter, the situation is more complicated.

If the question of whether Clapper committed perjury is understood to mean, “Would the government (if it were inclined to prosecute Clapper, which it won’t) be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clapper’s response violated the federal perjury statutes?” the answer is, “Maybe, maybe not.”

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As the Boston Globe reported:

Almost 1 million people in metropolitan Boston remained under siege Friday as police conducted a massive manhunt for one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

The region felt as if it had been gripped by martial law: Police armed with rifles patrolled deserted streets in Boston, Watertown, Cambridge, Waltham, Newton, Belmont, and Brookline, and residents hunkered inside, under authorities’ unprecedented order.

…

Authorities shut down all MBTA service, halting subways, trains, and buses. City and town halls were closed. Public works canceled trash pickup, keeping garbage trucks off streets. Courthouses kept their doors closed.

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First, contrary to the widespread belief that the Court plays a key role in fighting what has been called the culture wars, the cases now before the court are excellent examples of how, in regard to culture war issues, the Court almost invariably reflects, rather than creates, social change.

This claim is heresy to the ears of aging law professors, who grew up in a world in which it was taken for granted, for example, that (relatively) liberal federal courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, played a major part in advancing various civil rights agendas from shortly after World War II until the Reagan revolution.

But that belief has been largely discredited. As political scientist Gerald Rosenberg demonstrated more than 20 years ago now, even the most famous and controversial Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, have had only limited impact on the American political process.  For example, on the one hand, legal segregation was as a practical matter ended in the United States by legislation, not court decisions. On the other, in many parts of the country, schools today are as segregated as they were prior to the Brown decision.

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Most observers expect the court to declare those provisions unconstitutional, even though they were extended by the Senate by a unanimous vote less than seven years ago, while facing only token opposition in the House. All in all, 488 of 521 members of Congress voted to renew the pre-clearance provisions.

The enthusiasm with which the court’s righter wing appears to be greeting constitutional attacks on provisions adopted and renewed by overwhelming legislative majorities could make a cynic suspect that “conservative” criticisms of judicial review can often be reduced to the axiom, “the democratic process should be respected, unless it produces a result we really don’t like.”  (Reportedly, during this morning’s oral argument, the increasingly egregious Justice Scalia likened congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”)

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The extent of this myth is highlighted by a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which indicates that nearly half of all employed college graduates have jobs that require less than a four-year college education. Despite such sobering statistics, the higher-education complex remains remarkably successful at ensuring that American taxpayers fund the acquisition of educational credentials that, in many cases, leave the people who obtain them worse off than they were before they enrolled.

Far from being “priceless,” as the promoters of ever-more spending on higher education would have Americans believe, both undergraduate and post-graduate education is turning out to be a catastrophic investment for many young and not-so-young adults.

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“New England School of Law, Summer Program, Galway, Ireland – teaching stipend: $15,000.”

Another part of the form reveals that the same school reimbursed Roberts for his airfare, meals and lodging for at least the two-week period during which the course -- on the history of the Supreme Court -- was held.  Roberts co-taught the course, which met seven times for two-hour periods, with a law professor, Richard Lazarus.

Roberts and Lazarus taught the same course on the scenic island of Malta last summer, and will do so again amid the charming old world architecture of Prague this July.  (Lazarus did not respond to my request for information regarding what he was being paid to teach the course or how responsibility for teaching and grading it was divided between himself and the chief justice).

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I would like to propose the following rule for journalists: When presented with a feel-good story on a sports-related subject, you should presume the story is fabricated, unless persuaded by clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

This is just one of the many lessons to be extracted from the increasingly bizarre story of Manti Te’o, the star football player whose heart-rending narrative about the simultaneous death of his grandmother and his girlfriend turned out to have been invented out of whole cyber-cloth.

(Another lesson is that administrators at Notre Dame are far more likely to weep over the imaginary death of a nonexistent girl than they are to shed tears for a real girl who actually committed suicide, after allegedly being sexually assaulted by one of Teo’s teammates.)

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Bork had become accidentally like a martyr, and he cashed in, quite literally, on his supposed victim status, writing a couple of best-selling books decrying the moral degeneracy of contemporary America, and living large on what has been referred to indelicately as wingnut welfare.

This narrative was always a bunch of nonsense, and although de mortuis nil nisi bonum is a maxim of our profession, the memory of the deceased will not be spared here.

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For instance, I just Googled “black on black crime,” and the very first link that came up  was to a blog post by an African-American writer, discussing the relative lack of attention the writer claimed the African-American community pays to crimes committed by black people against other black people.

This is an example of how, in America, a white person who commits a crime is merely a criminal, while a black person who commits a crime is a black criminal.  In other words, being black in America tends to make one a member of what sociologists call a “marked category.”

The easiest way to explain what that means is to contrast it with its opposite: If I ask you to picture a police officer, what does this person look like?  I’m pretty confident that, whatever other characteristics the person may have, he is a man – just as if I ask you to picture a kindergarten teacher, you almost certainly will conjure up an image of a woman. We don’t usually notice the gender of male police officers because we expect police officers to be men: In this context, maleness is an unmarked category.

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In each of these cases, we are passing on the costs of our behavior to future generations, in a way that is both economically inefficient and deeply unfair. For example, it would be much cheaper in the long run to take serious steps to cut back on carbon emissions now, but in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “we are all dead.”

So we continue to live ecologically destructive lives because most of the consequences of our irresponsible behavior will be visited on our descendants, who at present have little or no say in the matter.

Similarly, when we vote ourselves tax cuts today we are in effect voting for tax increases -- and/or spending cuts -- for our children. Combining tax cuts with increased spending is the social equivalent of running up a multi-trillion dollar credit card balance and then mailing the payment notices to the future.

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I’m a law dean, and I’m proud. And I think it’s time to stop the nonsense. After two years of almost relentless attacks on law schools, a bit of perspective would be nice.

For at least two years, the popular press, bloggers and a few sensationalist law professors have turned American law schools into the new investment banks. We entice bright young students into our academic clutches. Succubus-like, when we’ve taken what we want from them, we return them to the mean and barren streets to fend for themselves.

Taking  potshots at unnamed critics is fun.

The hysteria has masked some important realities and created an environment in which some of the brightest potential lawyers are, largely irrationally, forgoing the possibility of a rich, rewarding and, yes, profitable, career.

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Traditionally, the most prestigious job a law school graduate can get straight out of school is a federal judicial clerkship. Holders of these one-year positions are usually much sought-after by big law firms and other desirable employers, and the competition among law students for federal clerkships is ferocious.

Even at elite law schools, only students at or near the top of class have a reasonable shot at a federal clerkship. In addition, now many young lawyers with sterling resumes have begun applying for clerkships. The result is that any federal judge will be deluged with hundreds of highly qualified candidates for an open position.

In response, the government has created an online application site for judicial clerks, featuring strict rules about when candidates can apply and when clerkship offers can be made. William Martinez, a federal judge in Denver, is currently using the site to solicit applications for a standard year-long clerkship in his chambers.

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More painfully and problematically, progressives have watched the president they elected conduct a foreign policy that, in its embrace of the phony “war on terror” and its accompanying contempt for basic principles of civil liberty, has often been hard to distinguish from the immoral and destructive policies of the president who preceded him.

None of this is to deny that Obama’s reelection is a major victory for progressives – if only because the alternative was so much worse. But, now that he has completed his last electoral campaign, President Obama has a chance to do something very significant for progressive politics in America. Indeed, on this particular issue we progressives don’t need Obama to do anything at all -- because he can advance an important cause by simply doing nothing.

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This is illustrated nicely by a speech  former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave this weekend at the Values Voter Summit. Santorum understands that the key emotion that fuels the Republican base is resentment -- and in particular resentment at having their beliefs mocked by the biased Mainstream Media, and the decadent Hollywood blasphemers, and the all smarty-pants professors high up in their ivory towers, etc.:

"We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country.  We will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.  So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side."

Santorum is of course being sardonic: He’s not really arguing that intelligence disqualifies people from being political conservatives.  Rather, he’s stoking the resentment of the people who make up the GOP base. He’s doing so while drawing implicitly on two classic anti-intellectual arguments, which have been much favored by conservative intellectuals over the past couple of centuries.

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Now if I were inclined toward a conspiratorial view of the world, I would speculate that the very outlandishness of these claims is itself part of a conspiracy to obscure what really happened on 9/11. This meta-conspiracy theory would go something like this: Over the past 11 years, it has slowly but inexorably become clear that the CIA uncovered key details of the 9/11 plot several months in advance, and tried on numerous occasions to get the Bush administration to take action to stop it.

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Suitably translated into Latin, this might as well be our new national motto. In America today, crime pays, at least if you’re high up enough in the social hierarchy to take advantage of the fact that we’re increasingly willing to accept that laws are for little people.

What’s happened in the worlds of high finance and high politics can be analogized to what allegedly happened in the world of competitive cycling during the Lance Armstrong era. According to Armstrong’s former teammate and later rival Tyler Hamilton, all the top riders, including Armstrong and Hamilton, were using banned performance-enhancing drugs when Armstrong was winning seven Tour de France races.

According to Hamilton, they were doing so for two reasons: It was impossible to compete at the highest levels without cheating, and because the enforcement regime to catch cheaters was so easy to elude (Armstrong, who continues to deny using PEDs, points out that he has passed hundreds of drug tests).

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“Homosexuality” and “obesity” are both diseases invented around the turn of the previous century. Prior to that time, being sexually attracted to someone of the same gender or having a larger than average body were, to the extent they were thought of as social problems, considered moral rather than medical issues: That is, they were seen as manifestations of morally problematic appetites, rather than disease states.

The same medical establishment that pathologized same-sex sexual attraction and larger bodies also offered up cures for these newly discovered diseases. Those who deviated from social norms were assured that, with the help of medical science, homosexuals and the obese could become “normal,” that is, heterosexual and thin.

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Posnanski, a sportswriter who has authored many justly admired pieces, particularly about baseball, was handed what turned into a once in a lifetime opportunity last year, when he was invited by Joe Paterno to spend the fall in State College, Penn., so that the author could have daily access to the subject of his biography. (Posnanski gives no sign of understanding that Paterno did him this service so that the subject would also have daily access to the biographer.)

This became an extraordinary journalistic and literary opportunity in the first week of November, when the Jerry Sandusky scandal became public knowledge. To say that Posnanski botches that opportunity is akin to saying that the Titanic’s maiden voyage might have gone more smoothly.

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