The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Monsanto Monday, in a major challenge to the biotech giant’s dominant market share over soybeans. Justice Elena Kagan held in a narrow ruling that farmer Victor “Hugh” Bowman violated Monsanto’s patent over its pervasive herbicide-resistant soybeans when it utilized the common practice of saving seeds from a first growing season and replanting them for a second, without paying Monsanto for the use of its technology every year. Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” seeds are used to grow about 90 percent of the nation’s soybean crop, and food safety experts say the vigorous patent enforcement has led to skyrocketing seed prices and less innovation by smaller firms.

The ruling is the latest by the particularly business-friendly Roberts Court to side with a major corporation over an individual or small business. (Another decision issued today sided with an individual suing a local towing company.) Unlike many of the court’s recent corporate-friendly rulings, however, this case was decided narrowly and unanimously, with Justice Kagan noting, “Our holding today is limited — addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product. We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse.”

News broke on Monday that the Department of Justice secretly sought phone records of reporters at the Associated Press, likely as part of an investigation into several national security related leaks.

Last year, the Associated Press reported that an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot had been foiled, thanks to a timely intervention on the part of the United States. The plan, according to the AP’s March 2012 story, involved an upgrade of the “underwear bomb” used in the failed Christmas Day 2009 bomb plot that was meant to take down a passenger airplane in Detroit, MI.

Why that drew the attention of the Justice Department, however, is that the CIA was the one who foiled the plot, which the AP report made clear:

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

AP learned of the plot a week before publishing, but “agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately” due to national security concerns. But, by reporting the CIA’s involvement in foiling the plot, they put AQAP on notice that the CIA had a window into their activities. The AP’s reporting also led to other stories involving an operative in place within AQAP, and details of the operations he was involved in. That operative, it was feared, would be exposed and targeted by AQAP as retribution for siding with the United States.

John Brennan, who is now the head of the CIA, said at his confirmation hearing that the release of information to AP was an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.” That the Department of Justice would be pursuing information on these leaks is also not new, given Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment of federal prosecutors to look into the disclosures last year. What is surprising is the large amount of information the Justice Department seems to have acquired in its pursuit:

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The Associated Press released its letter to Holder denouncing the invasion of their records without their consent, calling it an “unprecedented step” and “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

In a statement on the case, the U.S. Attorney’s D.C. office claimed that “because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the free flow of information and the public interest” in carrying out those laws. Despite that, this investigation appears unusually broad. And the full extent of the Department of Justice investigation, and whether other news outlets were targeted in the course of their inquiries, remains unclear.

In response to the news that Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government bestowed a doctrate upon disgraced former Heritage staffer Jason Richwine, 24 student groups at the elite university released a strongly worded letter condemning the decision to approve Richwine’s dissertation:

We are deeply concerned with the academic integrity and the reputation of Harvard Kennedy School and the University as a whole. It has been recently made public by the Washington Post and the New York Times that in 2009 the Kennedy School accepted a dissertation written by Jason Richwine which claims that “Immigrants living in the US today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives” (Richwine Dissertation, 26). Richwine goes on to state that “the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against” (Richwine Dissertation, 66) and argues for an immigration policy based on IQ. Central to his claim is the idea that certain groups are genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than others. In his troubling worldview Asians are generally at the top, with whites in the middle, Hispanics follow, and African Americans at the bottom (Richwine Dissetation, 74). To justify his assertions he cites largely discredited sources such as J. Philippe Rushton whose work enshrines the idea that there are geneticallyrooted differences in cognitive ability between racial groups.

We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation.

In his own statement on the Richwine incident, Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood defended the academic process’ ability to weed out bad ideas, and noted that “the views and conclusions of any graduate of this school are theirs alone, and do not represent the views of Harvard or the Kennedy School.” The statement also notes that Richwine’s dissertation was “reviewed by a committee of scholars” and it does not question the school’s decision to accept it.

(HT: Scott Jaschik)

In one of the blockbuster cases of this term, the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the mechanism for ensuring diversity at colleges and universities, reasoning that the need for affirmative action has run its course. But if the high court itself is any indication, racial diversity hasn’t changed much at all. Over the course of the court’s 2012-2013 term, just one black lawyer argued before the court. The Associated Press reports:

In roughly 75 hours of arguments at the Supreme Court since October, only one African-American lawyer appeared before the justices, and for just over 11 minutes.

The numbers were marginally better for Hispanic lawyers. Four of them argued for a total of 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Women were better represented, accounting for just over 17 percent of the arguments before the justices.

In an era when three women, a Hispanic and an African-American sit on the court and white men constitute a bare majority of the nine justices, the court is more diverse than the lawyers who argue before it.

The arguments that took place from October to April were presented overwhelmingly by white men. Women and minority lawyers whose clients’ cases were heard by the court were far more likely to represent governments or be part of public-interest law firms than in private practice, where paychecks are much larger.

As the article points out, women and minorities have made very limited headway in climbing the ranks at large private law firms, where recent surveys show that 93 percent of partners remain white, and nearly 80 percent are men. But when it comes to Supreme Court litigators, many of these lawyers come from government jobs at the Department of Justice, whose Supreme Court litigation divisions are also largely dominated by white men. Diversity is also even lower than it has been because the high court is accepting less social justice cases in which minority lawyers are well represented. The one African American who did argue before the high court was Debo Adegbile, a former NAACP Legal Defense lawyer who disputed the challenge to the Voting Rights Act.

Limited diversity at the highest levels of the legal profession is a persistent problem that extends outside the courtroom. But inside the courtroom, diversity plays a separate and important role in representing the experiences of Americans, most of whom will never set foot inside the high court, and thus will never see an argument so long as cameras are prohibited in the courtroom. Like the contributions of diverse justices, who have weighed in on social justice cases with important perspectives on discrimination, a diverse lawyer’s contributions are just as substantive as they are symbolic. As Justice Byron White said in a tribute to the late Thurgood Marshall, he “would tell us things that we knew and would rather forget; and he told us much that we did not know due to limits in our experience.”

 

Jason Richwine, the former Heritage Foundation staffer who wrote a PhD dissertation claiming that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren,” told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York that such quasi-eugenic ideas have fascinated him for a long time. Indeed, Richwine identified Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, as a “childhood hero.” Murray’s Bell Curve posits that black people are less intelligent than whites, and that this disparity is due, at least in part, to genetics.

As York’s piece explains, Murray played a crucial role in shaping Richwine’s dissertation:

I began by asking about his interest in the topic of race and IQ. How had that started? He had read Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” when he was a student at American University in Washington, Richwine said, and was fascinated by the author’s approach to a complex topic. . . . While Richwine was at Harvard, Murray visited Cambridge and Richwine told him about his research project. The result was a two-year fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where Murray has long been a scholar. The fellowship gave Richwine the opportunity to finish his doctoral work while also getting a start in the world of Washington think tanks. “It was wonderful,” Richwine recalled. “Few grad students get that kind of support and get to work with their childhood hero.” Indeed, Richwine’s dissertation acknowledgements make special note of Murray. “The substance of my work was positively influenced by many people, but no one was more influential than Charles Murray, whose detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism have made the final draft vastly superior to the first,” Richwine wrote. “I could not have asked for a better primary advisor.”

In addition to paving the road Richwine traveled in his scholarship, Murray more recently suggested that “benevolent sexism” may be “healthy” and “grounded in the nature of Homo sapiens.” During the most recent GOP presidential primaries, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) cited Murray’s work to defend Santorum’s views on “the dangers of contraception.” Shortly after news broke that Richwine was no longer employed by Heritage, Murray suggested that Richwine’s former employer did not stick up for him in part because Heritage President Jim DeMint does not possess testicles:

Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) May 10, 2013

Richwine left Heritage shortly after news of his views on race broke. Charles Murray, by contrast, is still employed by AEI.

Katherine O’Connor is an art student at Carnegie Mellon University who allegedly decided to dress as the pope and march in a campus parade — or, at least, dress as the pope from the waist up. Police charged her with public nudity because she allegedly wore nothing at all below the belt.

As Eugene Volokh points out, there’s nothing unconstitutional about arresting someone this kind of childish stunt. If O’Connor actually displayed her genitals in public, police may arrest her for public nudity. Yet, in a statement expressing satisfaction with O’Connor’s arrest, Catholic Bishop David Zubik of the Pittsburgh Diocese endorsed far greater restrictions on free speech:

“As I have said over these last few weeks, this is an opportunity for all of us to be reminded that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not constitute a freedom to dismiss or disrespect the beauty of anyone’s race, the sacredness of anyone’s religious belief or the uniqueness of anyone’s nationality.”

As a matter of First Amendment law, this is completely wrong. The First Amendment’s protections of controversial or even offensive speech are so great that they protected the right of self-described Nazis to march through a community with a large number of holocaust survivors while displaying swastikas. This was undoubtedly a much greater affront to “the sacredness of anyone’s religious belief” than an exhibitionist art project involving a single college student. Indeed, the First Amendment protects distressing or unpopular speech for a very simple reason: that’s the only kind of speech that needs protection. The other kind doesn’t typically get censored.

Extreme examples involving Nazis aside, the rule Bishop Zubik suggests is so dismissive of free speech that it would likely preclude any meaningful discussion of religion at all. The statement “I do not believe Jesus is the son of God,” for example, dismisses “the sacredness” of a core tenant of Christianity, but it is also what distinguishes non-Christian faiths from Christianity. It would neither be constitutional nor desirable to live in a country where such basic statements of disagreement with a faith are not allowed.

In fairness, Zubik is a religious leader and not a constitutional scholar, so he can be forgiven for not understanding the intricacies of First Amendment law. But his statement is part of a larger pattern of claims by American Catholic bishops that are incompatible with a diverse society where people of multiple faiths coexist. When the Obama Administration announced new rules requiring most employers to include birth control in their employer-provided health plans, the top attorney for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told USA Today that the Bishops would not be satisfied with merely exempting Catholic employers from the new rule. Rather, the administration must “remov[e] the provision from the health care law altogether” to placate the bishops. The bishops’ position is that all Americans, whether Catholic or not, must live under the legal regime chosen by the Catholic Church’s leadership, at least with respect to birth control.

Among other things, this puts them at odds with most Catholics. 82 percent of U.S. Catholics say that birth control is “morally acceptable” — only 15 percent agree with the bishops’ position. Similarly exit polls from 2012 suggest that efforts to turn Catholic voters away from President Obama did not succeed. Obama beat Romney among Catholics.

On Mother’s Day, the mothers of four Newtown victims warned of the danger guns pose to children. Meanwhile, at least five families saw a child injured — or in some tragic cases killed — when a child obtained and accidentally discharged a loaded firearm in the week leading up to the holiday.

• On Monday a 4-year-old boy shot himself in the hand after removing a gun from his father’s safe in Indianapolis, IN. Thankfully, the boy was taken to the hospital and his injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
• Monday evening a 3-year-old boy in Florida accidentally shot and killed himself with a handgun police believe he found in a backpack belonging to his uncle, who slept in the same bedroom of the apartment also shared with the boy’s parents. The uncle has been charged with culpable negligence, a 3rd degree felony.
• A 7-year-old Texas boy was accidentally shot in the lower back by his 5-year-old brother while taking a bath on Tuesday. The injuries were described by police as “non-life threatening” and no charges were filed against the parents for negligence as of Wednesday morning.
• A 2-year-old Texas boy tragically died after accidentally shooting himself in head Wednesday. The boy found a handgun in a bedroom while his father was in the walk-in closet.
• A 5-year-old boy is reported to be in critical condition after his 8-year-old friend accidentally shot him in the head with a .22 caliber rifle the night before Mother’s Day. Two adults and a teenager were in the home at the time of the shooting.

All of these tragic incidents likely could have been prevented if the children did not have access to the weapons, but 40 percent of households with kids under age 18 do not lock up their guns and almost half of U.S. states lack laws punishing individuals who allow children unsupervised access to firearms.

Guns kill twice as many children and young people as cancer, five times as many as heart disease, and 15 times more than infection each year in the United States according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

Late in the day Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Jason Richwine, the co-author of their widely criticized immigration report, was no longer employed by the conservative think tank. Shortly after the immigration report was released, the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews reported that Richwine’s PhD dissertation claimed that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.”

Heritage’s decision to hire Richwine was not a momentary lapse in judgement that was quickly rectified. To the contrary, Richwine was employed by the Heritage foundation for more than three years before reports of his quasi-eugenic views forced him to leave. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident. Although evidence has not yet emerged suggesting that Richwine’s racist views are common among Heritage employees, here are seven examples of radical, offensive or just downright weird beliefs held by current Heritage staffers:

• Children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to starve. When news of Richwine’s racist dissertation broke, Heritage initially attempted to rehabilitate its immigration report by claiming that Richwine’s co-author, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector, took the lead in designing the study’s methodology and Richwine merely “provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector.” Rector, however, is hardly a picture of moderation. Among other things, Rector co-authored a 2012 report arguing that we should “prohibit food stamp payments to illegal immigrant families.” Notably, because all nearly all children born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, one impact of Rector’s proposal would be starving American children in order to spite their parents.
• Gay people and sexually active unmarried women should be banned from teaching. In 2010, Heritage President Jim DeMint told a rally at a South Carolina church that “if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”
• The Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement.” Defending Justice Scalia’s statement that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky endorses Scalia’s view and writes that “the only thing certain about talking honestly about the current benefits and burdens of Section 5 (or voting against its renewal) is the very type of venomous attacks and false claims of racism and Jim Crow to which Scalia has been subjected.” Spakovsky’s disregard for the Voting Rights Act is not surprising, as he is one of the nation’s top proponents of voter suppression laws. Indeed, a panel of Virginia judges recently refused to reappoint Spakovsky to an election board in Fairfax, Virginia in the wake of allegations that he used his seat on the board to crusade against voting rights.
• Todd Akin can save America from an “economic abyss.” At a time when former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) found himself friendless due to his “legitimate rape” comment, DeMint tried to throw Akin a lifeline in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In a joint statement with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), DeMint said that they “support Todd Akin and hope freedom-loving Americans in Missouri and around the country will join us so we can save our country from fiscal collapse.” As a bonus, Heritage published a column by Akin in 2011 where the former congressman claimed that “the constitutionality of much entitlement spending is debatable.”
• Poor people aren’t really poor if they own refrigerators. In 2011, Rector and Heritage Policy Analyst Rachel Sheffield published a report arguing that “Congress should reorient the massive welfare state to promote self-sufficient prosperity rather than expanded dependence” in part because most impoverished households own appliances and do not send their kids to bed hungry. Among the report’s claims are that nearly all poor people have “kitchens equipped with an oven, stove, and refrigerator,” that “[n]early three-fourths have a car or truck” and that “70 percent have a VCR.” Of course, as Matt Yglesias points out, many of the common household amenities Rector and Sheffield dismiss as luxuries are actually signs of thrift — “[b]uying food at the grocery store and saving it thanks to the miracles of modern refrigeration is sound household budgeting.” Similarly, poor people in parts of the country without adequate public transportation would find it very difficult to hold a job if they did not have a car or truck. As Melissa Boteach and Donna Cooper explain, a particularly well-equipped poor household could sell all of their household appliances and electronics and still only wind up with two and a half months rent.
• Accused terrorists shouldn’t have legal representation and their lawyers should be punished. According to at least one former Bush Administration official, the “vast majority” of the 742 original Guantanamo Bay detainees were innocent of terrorism, which only emphasizes the importance of providing these detainees with due process and adequate legal representation. Yet, in a 2007 radio interview, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson made a thinly veiled attempt to punish lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees by encouraging their law firms’ corporate clients to drop them. Stimson listed the names of over a dozen firms with attorneys representing detainees, and then said “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” Within a month, Stimson resigned from the Bush Administration (he also apologized for his comments and claimed they did not reflect his “core beliefs”). Yet, while Stimson’s comments were too disgraceful for him to remain in Bush’s Defense Department, they were not too disgraceful for the Heritage Foundation. Stimson is now a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage.
• A J.J. Abrams TV show should guide America’s defense policy. The plot of J.J. Abrams’ show “Revolution” focuses around a new weapon technology that disables electronic devices and returns the world to the pre-industrial era. Most TV viewers understand that this show is science fiction. Heritage thinks it is a warning about the future. According to Heritage, the future world depicted in this show, “is not as unlikely as it might appear.” Heritage national security Research Fellow Baker Spring warns that America’s enemies could detonate “a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth” triggering an “electromagnetic pulse” (EMP) that would disable American technology. Another Heritage paper calls for a “National EMP Awareness Day.” In reality, of course, the idea of an EMP attack belongs in science fiction. Among other things, if someone who wished us harm possessed both a nuclear warhead and the technology required to detonate such a weapon in US airspace, there are plenty of other much more destructive things they could do — such as setting off the nuke in the middle of Manhattan.