Additional Analysis on the Hobby Lobby case

Happy Friday.

If you were interested in the Hobby Lobby post from yesterday, here is some additional analysis from a person who isn't a dummy.

In non-legal news, it's time to clean your outdoor grill. Here's how.

Income and Child Custody

Think family court work is easy? Think again. 

I'll put it up against any field of law, any day of the week. It's tough work. Very fact specific and lots of judgment calls. Not much in the way of "bright line" rules.

Sasha Volokh to Speak in Greenville Tomorrow

If you're in Greenville, SC tomorrow (and you're a law-dork), you should go check out Sasha Volokh, who will be speaking at the local Federalist Society Chapter. The event will be at Womble Carlyle's office in Greenville. Sasha is smart as a whip. You should definitely get to hear him speak if you can.

He'll be discussing Minneci v. Pollard and constitutional torts.

Drug Dogs and the Fourth Amendment

Orin Kerr over at Volokh has an interesting post about a pending cert petition on the limits of using drug dogs before implicating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Under Illinois v. Caballes, the use of the dog around a car is not a “search” and therefore outside the Fourth Amendment. The question is, does the Caballes rule apply when the dog is brought to the front door of a home rather than a car? A divided Florida Supreme Court ruled in Jardines v. State that Caballes does not apply and that probable cause is required to bring the dog up to the home for a sniff.

My guess is that the Court will draw a distinction between your home and your car, and say that the two rules do not "conflict". You certainly can't have a ruling that allows drug dogs to go house-to-house without some other  indication of illegal activity. Your car isn't your house, and when you're traveling down the road, there's less expectation of privacy than in your home. In any event, if you're a law-geek or someone who does drugs, you may want to read the whole article.