Archive | June, 2009

the Obama administration’s white paper on financial regulation reform. (I posted a version of this over at Opinio Juris, but I wanted to put a revised version of it up here, as I plan to do a series of posts commenting on various parts of the Treasury Department’s new report. In some ways, this is […]

if and when China decides to stop exporting the “glut of global savings”? The Walmart Effect was the claim (accepted pretty broadly as having a decent empirical basis, even given the disputes) that Walmart, by lowering prices at the downmarket end of things, added significantly to American spending power and standard of living. And particularly […]

Lyle Denniston thinks it might be. I raised this issue (although before cert was granted in the Briscoe case) in a post yesterday morning.

This witty article in Slate, How McDonald’s Conquered France, has sold me on Mike Steinberger’s new book, Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, from which the article is drawn. Were you aware, for example, that “by 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald’s, […]

in a Q & A with the L.A. Times: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work? The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know […]

So holds the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in United States v. Tagg: “Unlike the handguns in Heller, pipe bombs are not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” (There’s more, so if you’re interested, check out pp. 10-14 of the opinion.) The general analysis strikes me as right, for reasons […]

I’ve often heard people defending various K-12 speech restrictions by citing Morse v. Frederick (the BONG HiTS 4 JESUS case). Many of these people think Morse is wrong, but argue that it’s binding precedent. But as to many of these arguments (see some in this thread), Morse is often not very relevant, much less binding. […]

[UPDATE: The statement I criticize below has now been corrected by Alan Potash.] That’s the view of Alan Potash, the ADL’s regional director for Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. Pretty appalling, it seems to me — simply false as a statement of current free speech law (which it sounds like it is), and deeply misguided as […]

It appears confirmation of Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB will be held up because Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) is concerned about Sunstein’s embrace of certain animal rights arguments. The Hill reports: Chambliss worries that Sunstein

It appears so (at least insofar as not having two Senators is a “nightmare” and the U.S. Supreme Court declines to enter the fray). [OOPS. I see now that Eugene beat me to this.]

unanimously in Franken’s favor. Thanks to Barton Jacka for the pointer.

The T-shirt — judging by the appendix to the complaint — seems to be this one: And as I read the school district’s argument (p. 13), the district admits this, arguing that the then-7th-grader’s T-shirt violated a school dress code banning any “suggestion of tobacco, drug or alcohol use, sexual promiscuity, profanity, vulgarity, or other […]

From Wood v. State (Tex. Ct. App. June 18): During the punishment phase of appellant

I’ve heard some people argue that the Ninth Circuit’s holding (in Nordyke v. King) that the Second Amendment is incorporated against the states was “dictum” — and thus not really legally binding, even on district courts in the Ninth Circuit and other panels of the Ninth Circuit — because the court went on to hold […]

Jack Balkin ponders what may account for the Roberts Court’s “sudden minimalist turn.” It’s an interesting post, but I reject Balkin’s premise. There’s nothing “sudden” about the Roberts Court’s minimalism. Rather, a conservative minimalism has been the defining characteristic of the Roberts Court and, as a general matter, of the two newest justices. In this […]