ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

• Mary Price, Vice President and General Counsel, Families Against Mandatory Minimums,commented on what to do after the Supreme Court's sentencing guidelines decision in Kimbrough v. United States.
• Sahr MuhammedAlly, Senior Counsel with the Law & Security Program at Human Rights First, who is blogging from Guantanamo Bay, wrote two articles on the hearings to determine whether Salim Ahmed Hamdan is an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
• Geoffrey R. Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago examined the emphasis that the Founders placed on separation of church and state.
• Cecillia Wang, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrant's Rights Project, explored the potential implications of a narrow victory in the Guantanamo Bay detainee cases Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. U.S.  ACS has also made available materials relating to detention issues.
• Ana Avendano, Associate General Counsel and Director of the Immigrant Worker Program at the AFL-CIO, commented on the effects of "no-match" letters issued by the Social Security Administration on union organizing efforts.

Resources:

• Video excerpts from a recent ACS discussion panel on the Supreme Court case Riegel v. Medtronic, which concerned whether state tort claims are preempted by approval of a medical device by the FDA.
• A new report from the Justice Policy Institute found that nation-wide racial disparities in drug sentencing are independent of crime rates and result in ten times more African Americans being imprisoned for drug offenses than whites.
• A breakdown of two recent Congressional Research Service reports on FISA and coverage of legislation about publishing CRS reports online.
• A new report from the Center for American Progress on the Labor Department's alleged abuse of its regulatory authority over labor unions.
• News that New Jersey will soon be the first state in 40 years to eliminate the death penalty.