Unless the people I’m talking to are lawyers or professional historians, I’ve discovered that mentioning the words “bill of attainder” receives, at best, blank looks and, at worst, an ...

The House's vote last week to impose a confiscatory tax on bonuses earned by employees at bailed-out financial institutions led many readers to write us arguing that, or asking if, the legislation ...

Peck (1810), and that “[t]he term ‘bill of attainder’ in the National Constitution is generical, and embraces bills of both classes,” Drehman v. Stifle (1869).

See, e.g., Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. DHS (D.C. Cir. 2018) (assuming the Bill of Attainder Clause protects corporations but emphasizing the differences between corporations and "living, ...

A bill of attainder, however, as defined by so respectable a body as the Supreme Court of the United States, “Is a legislative act which inflicts punishment without judicial trial.” (Cummings ...

The very phrase “bill of attainder” seems like some quaint archaism that we cannot help suspect really has very little to say about our lives today. But this is a mistake.

The Bill of Attainder Clause was part of the Framer’s plan to limit and refine what they saw as the unacceptable English abuse of the law of treason. As Justice Samuel Chase noted in Calder v.

If Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege are a threat to the Constitution, as his critics now claim, what are we to make of the unprecedented bill of attainder against Mr. Trump now ...