Here's a statement from Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger (who is also a noted First Amendment scholar):

President Lee C. Bollinger's Statement on Freedom of Speech October 6, 2006, 4:30 p.m.

Columbia University has always been, and will always be, a place where students and faculty engage directly with important public issues. We are justifiably proud of the traditions here of intellectual inquiry and vigorous debate. The disruption on Wednesday night that resulted in the termination of an event organized by the Columbia College Republicans in Lerner Hall represents, in my judgment, one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur in a university such as ours.

Of course, the University is thoroughly investigating the incident, and it is critically important not to prejudge the outcome of that inquiry with respect to individuals. But, as we made clear in our University statements on both Wednesday night and Thursday, we must speak out to deplore a disruption that threatens the central principle to which we are institutionally dedicated, namely to respect the rights of others to express their views.

This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.

It is unacceptable to seek to deprive another person of his or her right of expression through actions such as taking a stage and interrupting the speech. We rightly have a visceral rejection of this behavior, because we all sense how easy it is to slide from our collective commitment to the hard work of intellectual confrontation to the easy path of physical brutishness. When the latter happens, we know instinctively we are all threatened.

We have extensive University policies governing the actions of members of this community with respect to free speech and the conduct of campus events. Administrators began identifying those involved in the incident as it transpired and continue to investigate specific violations of University policies to ensure full accountability by those found to be responsible.

University personnel are also evaluating event management practices that are specifically intended to help event organizers, participants and protestors maintain a safe environment in which to engage in meaningful and sometimes contentious debate across the spectrum of academic and political issues. These are some of the many steps we intend to take in the weeks ahead to address this matter in our community.

Let me reaffirm: In a society committed to free speech, there will inevitably be times when speakers use words that anger, provoke, and even cause pain. Then, more than ever, we are called on to maintain our courage to confront bad words with better words. That is the hallmark of a university and of our democratic society. It is also one of our central safeguards against the impulses of intolerance that always threaten to engulf our commitment to proper respect for every person.

I'm pleased to see this response, and I hope it will be followed up with suitable action against the thugs.

Thanks to commenter Micah for the pointer to the statement.

Power Line has video and details. Here's an excerpt from the L.A. Times (no link because the Times site pointers seem busted):

Jim Gilchrist, the Aliso Viejo accountant who co-founded the Minuteman Project, was forced offstage seconds into his speech at Columbia University on Wednesday night by students who said his anti-illegal immigration message was not welcome in New York.

Gilchrist, who was invited by the Columbia University College Republicans, was unharmed but was unable to continue speaking as planned and was forced to leave the stage after an altercation with students....

The Columbia melee began after two students rushed from behind the stage toward Gilchrist and unrolled a banner that read in Spanish, English and Arabic, "No One Is Illegal."

Seeing the two, others in the audience ran toward the stage, including about two dozen who managed to get onto the 3-foot-high platform, past security guards and ropes, where Gilchrist was only a few words into his speech.

The lectern was knocked over and Gilchrist fell back, smashing his reading glasses....

No one was arrested. The incident was videotaped and shown on TV newscasts....

Oh, and here's a lovely quote from one of the "protest" participants, Columbia junior Ryan Fukumori (a board member of the Columbia Asian American Alliance and treasurer of the Columbia International Socialist Organization:

These are racist individuals heading a project that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border .... They have no right to be able to speak here.

A puzzle from Yefim Somin (yes relation to the coconspirator) -- name three countries whose names are based on the points of the compass, but whose English names do not have the point of the compass as a word in the country name. (East Timor and North Korea, for instance, wouldn't work.)

What's this with homes or services "for the aging"? We're all aging, at precisely the same speed -- one year every year. (Or if you calculate aging as a fraction of your current age, the young are aging faster than the old.) The only ones who aren't aging are dead.

reports Solove, J., concurring.

Reader Michael Lorton poses this puzzle: What do Naples (Italy), Novgorod (Russia), and Chiang Mai (Thailand) have in common?

Most of the legal discussion that I've seen of the Foley case has focused on whether he could be on the hook for attempting to physically seduce the pages. Might it be a crime, though, for him to try to get the page to masturbate? (It's not clear from the material that I've seen whether he was in fact trying to do that, but I suppose it's possible.)

Masturbating isn't a crime, fortunately, whatever the age of the person's who's masturbating; but getting a minor to masturbate for you might be, depending on the jurisdiction and on the minor's age. People v. Imler., 9 Cal. App. 4th 1178 (Cal. App. 1992), for instance, held that Cal. Penal Code § 288()a), "Any person who willfully and lewdly commits any lewd or lascivious act, ... upon or with the body, or any part or member thereof, of a child who is under the age of 14 years, with the intent of arousing, appealing to, or gratifying the lust, passions, or sexual desires of that person or the child, is guilty of a felony," outlawed a person's telephoning a child and ordering him (through threats of harm to the child's parents) to masturbate while the child is on the phone:

It matters not that Imler could not touch his victim. "The touching necessary to violate Penal Code section 288 may be done by the child victim on its own person providing such touching was at the instigation of a person who had the required specific intent." The accused does not have to commit the lewd act. The defendant's intent may be inferred from his conduct which was to order the victim to commit a lewd act upon himself.

(The logic of the case would extend to persuasion without the use of threats as well.) Likewise, People v. Poplaski, 616 N.Y.S.2d 434 (N.Y. Dist. Ct. 1994), held that N.Y. Penal Law § 260.10(1), which prohibits "knowingly act[ing] in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old," made punishable the defendant's phone conversations in which he directed 12-to-15-year-olds to masturbate.

My sense is that such a theory is a longshot, even if Foley was trying to get a minor to masturbate during their electronic conversation; among other things, I'm not sure that all similar statutes would be read this way, and I'm not sure that many states have such statutes that reach up to the level of the older minors who seem to have been involved in the Foley case. (I should note that some states ban using a child in a "sexual performance," which conceivably could include getting the child to masturbate in front of one person, but the Florida statute, for instance, is limited to visual performances rather than acts which someone merely hears, or is told about.) And, more importantly, it's hard to figure all this out without knowing more about exactly what Foley said, and exactly where the minors were at the time.

dammit! We're the People's Front of Judea's Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Wankers.

OK, that's not that close an analogy, but I still couldn't help thinking of it.

The New York Times writes about the recent school shootings:

It is not clear what led [the shooter] to seek out a quiet country school in Lancaster County, Pa., but it is possible he chose it because he knew that it belonged to a trusting, insular community, where there would be no one to stop him from entering with a shotgun, a rifle and an automatic pistol.

What does this mean? If I'm not stopped from entering a school while heavily armed, is it likely because the community is "trusting" or "insular"? Would a more cynical community have said "Hey, wait a sec, you're carrying three guns into the school! We don't trust you!" Would a more worldly community have said "We're not like those hicks down the road -- we know that guns can actually kill people, and strangers who go heavily armed into a school are likely up to no good?"

My sense is that the only thing that could have stopped this murderer is someone else who's armed -- whether an armed security guard (something that even many non-trusting, non-insular schools don't have), an armed teacher, or someone else who had the requisite firepower (and willpower). Better yet would have been someone else who's armed but who's not in uniform, since even an armed but uniformed school guard could easily be surprised by the killer, who could murder him and then go inside with impunity. One can debate the merits of allowing teachers to be armed. But if one is going to talk about why there was "no one to stop [the killer] from entering with a shotgun, a rifle and an automatic pistol," that's the debate we should be having -- stressing the community's being "trusting" and "insular" as a possible cause seems to me a red herring.

The New York Times writes about the recent school shootings:

It is not clear what led [the shooter] to seek out a quiet country school in Lancaster County, Pa., but it is possible he chose it because he knew that it belonged to a trusting, insular community, where there would be no one to stop him from entering with a shotgun, a rifle and an automatic pistol....

There are no simple solutions to this conflict. It is neither possible nor tolerable to secure every school or guard every child. Nor is it possible or politically tolerable to keep tabs on every gun. But in these killings we see an open society threatened by the ubiquity of its weapons, in which one kind of freedom is allowed to trump all others. Most gun owners are respectable, law-abiding citizens. But that is no reason to acquit the guns.

Just what is the editorial board proposing that we do? Apparently it's that we shouldn't "acquit the guns," but what does that mean? Are they urging gun registration of some guns (since they claim that they're not supporting "keep[ing] tabs on every gun")? That surely would do nothing about such school shootings. Are they implicitly urging handgun bans? Even if such bans succeeded in preventing a material number of would-be murderers from getting handguns, which I doubt, this very incident reminds us that shotguns and rifles can be at least as lethal (in fact, are in many respects more lethal, and just as usable if you're not worried about easy and convenient concealability, and are willing to carry the long gun open, to conceal it in a suitcase, or to saw it off).

When pro-gun-control forces urge restriction on guns in response to certain kinds of crimes — for instance, crimes where the criminal is trying to evade detection and capture — then it's at least credible that those controls would be limited to (say) handguns, or illegal carrying of handguns, or some such. But the only gun control that would stop people who are willing to commit multiple murder, and who don't worry about getting caught, would be (1) a total ban on guns, (2) confiscation of the likely more than 200 million guns in private American hands, and then (3) diligent action to control the black market in guns that would inevitably result. So when such multiple murders are seen as occasions for calls to gun control, however disclaimer-laden ("Nor is it possible or politically tolerable to keep tabs on every gun"), people who care about gun rights and self-defense naturally worry that the gun controllers' true goal is broad indeed.

I agree that murder and crime more broadly is a very serious problem, and that gun homicides and (to a lesser extent) other gun crimes are a very serious aspect of that problem. Likewise, for instance, alcohol-related death and crime is a very serious problem.

The question is what exactly should be done about it. Should we ban guns and alcohol? Try to seriously diminish access to them? Try to regulate them in ways that don't seriously diminish access, at least to law-abiding citizens? If we have in mind a particular manifestation of the problem (e.g., school shootings, or drunk-driving deaths, or whatever else), what policy proposals would diminish that aspect of the problem, without unduly exacerbating other problems? Hard questions, and important ones. But simply talking about "not acquit[ting]" the vodka bottle or the shotgun — an inanimate object that one would have thought wouldn't be subject either to acquittal or to conviction — hardly advances the analysis.

California Court of Appeal Justice William Bedsworth reports:

[A] New Jersey jury awarded a local college student $179,001 because the manufacturer of a “loft bed” failed to warn users of the bed that if they fell out of it, they could hurt themselves....

I am presently staring -— incredulously -— at the opinion of the poor three-judge panel that had to confront this verdict. I tell you, people don’t have any idea how hard appellate work is. Imagine having to explain all the things wrong with giving someone $179,001 because no one warned him against falling out of bed.

To begin with, the plaintiff was a college student.... If this is the level of cerebration accepted by New Jersey high schools, it hardly seems surprising that poor Princeton has to go begging to the other states for students....

Tragically, “There were no warning labels on the bed, and it had never ‘cross[ed his] mind’ or ‘occurred to’ plaintiff that he could fall or that the bed was dangerous in any way. He testified that had he seen a warning, he would have been ‘aware of the hazard that was present’ and slept closer to the wall, as he had done after the accident.” Honest. Says so right in the opinion.

And he had an expert, George Widas, who testified that industry standards in the bed-making industry require that the manufacturer affix a warning “that says make sure that you protect yourself from this fall hazard.” According to Widas, the warning label should have had “black letters on an orange background” and included a warning that both identified the hazard and explained how to avoid it.

So the label should have said -- in Day-Glo green letters on a phosphorescent-pink background -— “THIS IS A BED. USE ONLY WHILE AWAKE.” Or perhaps “IF YOUR IQ IS NOT THIS TALL, YOU CANNOT RIDE ON THIS BED.” Or how about an arrow pointing downward, with the legend “FALLING IN THIS DIRECTION COULD BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. FALL ONLY UPWARD OR TO THE SIDE.” ...

To their everlasting credit, the appellate panel did not just say, “What, are you crazy?” They spent 20 pages explaining the case and delineating the legal basis for their reversal of their trial court colleague. After an extremely patient and erudite explication of New Jersey law, they concluded, “The risks are so obvious here that we fail to see ... what a warning could have advised in addition to the obvious.” Judgment reversed.

Note that the claim that the bed was defectively designed because it lacked a guardrail had been dismissed earlier, and the failure-to-warn claim is all that remained. The opinion is here; thanks to How Appealing for the pointer.

in McQueary v. Stumbo (E.D. Ky. Sept. 26, 2006) (Caldwell, J.). The challenged provision, 2006 Kentucky Laws Ch. 50, sec. 5, read:

A person is guilty of interference with a funeral when he or she at any time on any day: ...

(b) Congregates, pickets, patrols, demonstrates, or enters on that portion of a public right-of-way or private property that is within three hundred (300) feet of an event specified in paragraph (a) of this subsection; or

(c) Without authorization from the family of the deceased or person conducting the service, during a funeral, wake, memorial service, or burial:

1. Sings, chants, whistles, shouts, yells, or uses a bullhorn, auto horn, sound amplification equipment or other sounds or images observable to or within earshot of participants in the funeral, wake, memorial service, or burial; or

2. Distributes literature or any other item.

The court held that, though this provision should be analyzed under the law governing content-neutral speech restrictions, and though the court "that the state has an interest in protecting funeral attendees from unwanted communications that are so obtrusive that they are impractical to avoid," the law is unconstitutional, partly because the 300-foot buffer zone is too large. I think that's largely right, for reasons described here.